After a few hours with it I can safely say it's still a little busted and just not that fun. Yes you "manage" a crew and assign jobs to them in different sections (like the bridge or tractor beam) but you still have to *physically travel* to those rooms to assign crew. Which doesn't make a lot of sense since you can unassign them from rooms remotely. The chore of having to travel to each room is compounded by some of the automated tasks also requiring you to manually start them so you're basically just assigning the crew to hold E down for you. Movement feels floaty and functional much like the shooting. Sure, you can use an assault rifle for a faster rate of fire but you'll spend most of your time tapping your pistol with infinite ammo while you play alien bug janitor in the vents. The movement feels fine when you have a small footprint but traversal around your ship is a dull slog on larger ships. As soon as you get more than a few compartments, you spend minutes going back and forth between them to simply hold down E and watch a meter go up so X happens. Despite a neat idea, this feels like a game that spent its QA budget on tutorial cinematics (why aren't they just text logs?), repetitive VO, and broken lighting like the one, blindingly, bright white light in the crew quarters. The core idea of "build a ship, pillage random alien worlds (small zones) for resources, upgrade ship, and colonize far off planet" is cool but the end result here is too janky to enjoy.
