It's not a typical terraforming game, and I think that's why its gotten some negative reviews. It's meant to be played over and over again at increasing diffciuly levels and many different win conditions as you progress. Each game is ~2-3 hours. There is a lot of strategy in the choices you make. Each turn you get a random offering of cards that you use to build things with. If you don't get what you need then it can get risky but thats part of the strategy. As you win more scenariois you get better card offerings to help at the next levels. To win a game you have to satify the win condition before your population gets unhappy. And what people want apparently and unrealistically is more people. So every game requires prmary focus on growth in the form of water/nitrates - farms - housing. With those as my primary choices I have never lost a scenario.
Crash Crash Crash. Not so much in the beginning but about mid game it became unplayable. When not crashing I'd give it 3/5 stars. It's close to being a good game but falls short. You can not focus on base building due to the constant barage of attacks. But you need to focus on base building because the stupid buildings are near impossible to make work. Despite the frustration of getting the base in order, I was enjoying the game OK until the crashing started. I was not able to finish the campaign.
I enjoyed it quite a bit on one play through. I didn't finish because the end drags while waiting for slow adamantium and terraforming production, but I got it. There are some very frustration bugs. Resource distribution is a problem as resources go to the closest users first even if they are near full, while farther users get none. Zones however can help fix this. Train loops with more than 2 stations just don't work. Collection and Distribution centers don't work. Once I figured this out, painfully, I was able to make do with just roads and zones.
Its not a bad game, its not a good game. It's not buggy. It's slightly interesteing but quickly boring. The major problem is that 90% of your focus time is on micromanaging workers. For example to build a building like a forge you have to select and place it on the map. Then assign a worker to build it. Then assign workers to staff it. Thats 3 operations to get it going, it should only be 1. Some of the mechanics are tricky an dtakes a couple play throughd to really understand, at which point the game becomes boring. Its an RTS with no speed control. Pause is a total game freeze, you can't assign, build, scroll, review anything while paused. There is no strategy to combat, just build as many fighters as you can and send the mob off to attack.
Based on the string reviews I wanted to play this game. But I don't get it. No tutorial, no guide, no instruction, no background story. Just a steam engine that rolls a little, runs out of energy, and no way to get it going again.
If you are buying the whole game to play The Outer Worlds, ITS GREAT! If you are buying the $10 upgrade to release the level cap in the base game, don't. It doesn't work.
Just really fun. And in one play through I saw only one bug, a screen phantom cleared by quit and re-start.
I enjoyed this game. But.... It is somewhat buggy. I played about half way through the campaign, enjoyed my play time, but got bored. Some of the mechanics are really weird and hard to understand. The whole walker/blocker mechanic is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in a city builder. The fun part of any scenario is the beginning where you plan your layout. The end of every scenario is a lame x5 speed wait for slow things to get done all while you have to keep appeasing the gods and managing inventory overflow.
This is a very fun game but gets old quickly. At the novelty stage it is quite entertaining. It soon turns to grind since after "winning" a stage you get another stage with more of the same, etc etc etc. While there are a number of "win" options, very few are paractical in any reasonable time and "kill all" is usually what you end up with. At a low price its definitely worth a try.
It won't run on modern Windows 10 PC. For the frief time I got it to run, I could not fly the ship. The tutorial is horrible.
