It's a good mix of X-COM style base building and missions with J-RPG style turn-based combat. The game pacing starts out pretty good, but then slows down in the late game. Luckily, the game gives you some opportunities to skip to next story events in late game which somewhat compensates that. I beat the game in around 25 hours on my first playthrough on the default (Commander) difficulty. I only lost one officer once in ground combat, so I would say that if you are familiar with the genre you might want to select higher difficulty levels. In my experience it was: First 40% of the game felt good, always something to do, something happening or waiting for you. Next 20% was OK. The following 30% was a bit slow and repetetive, but the last 10% was good and fun again. The ship combat is solid, different abilities, effects and modifiers gives opportunities to adjust and optimize for each encounter. This lasts until you build max tier ships which have enough ability slots to cover enough effects to get you through almost all encounters unchanged. While the ground combat follows the same style, it becomes less fun much faster. Less abilities, less control and dealing with cadets made me prefer to skip it when I didn't need it. The main downside of the game are the technical issues. The user interface is clunky, inconsistent and bit buggy (acknowledging an event sometimes stops fast-forward, sometimes doesn't; sending a fleet lets you disable fast forward, but returning doesn't; clicking on notification sometimes shows you the event location, sometimes doesn't; technology screen becomes overcrowded and unreadable towards the end; and many more). After 3-4 hours session the interface becomes laggy, clicks can take 1-2 seconds to react, screen freezes for 1-2 seconds on scene switching. The game reliably crashes after 6-7 hours session. It crashed every single day I played at least once. Because of that I do not recommend using the Ironman mode.
The game is a very solid and fun Tower Defense with some extra micro management. The campaign has 20 missions. There is also skirmish mode and a map editor. It took me 11 hours to beat the campaign on the default "challenge" difficulty (earning 80% of the achievements in the process). Around 30% of the missions required more than one attempt. After failing the last mission a couple of times I went back to unlock more perks and then barely made it. The game looks and sounds very nice. The story is OK. The Tower Defense mechanics are done well. Towers do what you would expect them to. You can adjust the game speed during the level to speed up the easy parts but handle the difficult parts in slow motion. Unit micro management is clunky and takes some getting used to. The units often don't do exactly what you want, sometimes you can't click in some places or buildings until you re-select the unit. All missions except one allow you to set the camera very high up and comfortable, but that one mission forces a lower angle which makes the controls significantly worse and annoying. During the 11 hours of playtime I encountered only a couple of bugs the most annoying of which is that on later missions the energy hubs sometimes think they use more energy than they actually do preventing you from making more buildings. This mostly happens when you build multiple things at the same time or upgrade/move the energy hub. The music sometimes breaks. The game crashed only once. Overall I enjoyed playing it, will probably play some more to get the remaining achievements. It's worth the price, especially on sale. If you're not sure check out the demo!
This is basically an interactive story, which you experience as it was designed. You cannot change the story, you can only affect the conversations slightly. The "game" is pretty short, and it would be very nice if the story was longer. The exploration options are very limited. Regardless, I still enjoyed the short experience. If you enjoy a good story and dialog, it is worth getting when it's on sale. If you want action and meaningful decisions, you probably won't like it.
