I find it quite unique that even the buildings and abilities that you can use are random during your playthrough (compared to other builders where you usually know exactly how long it will be until you can access a building). Somehow this game makes it work, so it is actually fun to deal with the randomness. I'd call the technical side of the game limited but polished. Its graphics are basic but clean (no graphical glitching). There is no voiceover at all. On the science side, I like how the game uses concepts from "hard sci-fi" properly, like O'Neill cylinders, water and atmosphere as a radiation shield, mirror arrays to warm areas of the planet, etc. It's pretty in line with stuff I hear the National Space Society's president talking about, of course with some deviations for some semblance of game balance. (If it didn't do that and went 100% NSS ideas, I'd assume the optimal playthrough would be to have the bulk of the population in orbital habitats rather than the on-planet cities.)
This game is an exploration game mainly, with combat as a feature but not the main focus. If you go into it with the mindset that you're trying to discover stuff and may have to fight, it is a lot of fun. It has a core loop of going out, exploring stuff, doing quests with the other characters (usually aliens), gathering materials (or enemy drops), then going back to upgrade your ship. The ship designer is also really good, needing you to balance out armour and cooling, as higher tier components will overheat on you if you pack them closely together. This loop is solid, and is engaging. It is slower paced, so you can expect multiple minutes of downtime between quests (usually less than 5 unless you made your ship really slow). If you are not great at combat, you can change the difficulty at any time in the options menu. I could see it being tough to kite enemies if you aren't used to this kind of arcade space sim combat. I didn't run into any technical issues on a whole playthrough of the story. Note however the ship does not feel good to me to play with controller, so I dropped to keyboard and mouse. I would recommend you check the box that keeps the game running in the background while you are viewing your quest log, since a lot of my playthrough was pointing my ship in a direction of a quest and reading what I should try to do while the ship was travelling. Nice game for slower explorers all in all.
The game does a good job of being in the middle ground between a free city optimization game and a "survival" game. As long as you keep a decent stock of resources, the disasters are impactful but not stressful even if you don't have the infrastructure to counter them. There are some UI design issues that make some items take more clicks than they should, and you may often cancel quest tips accidentally. There is a dialogue log however, so you can go there to check what you accidentally dismissed. It has the environmentalist tone to it, but contrary to the in-game dialogue (voiced adequately by real people), pollution is a resource and not a dark art that needs to be avoided. You can choose to expand destructively with cheap but harmful techs and then switch or upgrade later if the number of diasters starts getting annoying. (I tested this by maxing the ocean level rise and brought it back down, only needing to drop my population by about 5% during the recovery.) At max pollution, I had about 3 disasters going on simultaneously, but my city was actually still "profitable" during that time: you can make LOTS of errors at normal difficulty without a game over. I would recommend if you like a city builder that has some survival elements but don't like getting wiped and resetting.
I played the demo, and it has a nice premise as a city builder. The UI seems to need more clicks than it should, for example it should really have queues available from the start, or tell you exactly which upgrades you need if the quality of life items like queues is an upgrade for later.
It is overall a good city builder and explained the concepts pretty well to me for someone who hasn't played such a game in many months. It has a small set of gameplay elements (food, water, morale, and some disaster types). I experienced no technical flaws (no crashing or other game-breakers) through my entire playthrough, even though I'm picking up the game many years after its release with Windows 11 24H2 which didn't exist when the devs made the game. The overworld map UI has a bad layout with elements obscured by the notifications, but it functions. One problem I had is that there is a very limited amount of solutions to each problem. You'll notice at the higher difficulties that your colony layouts will end up the same. For example for two of the disaster types (that happen very often), you either have a specific building, or you lose that playthough. Anyone who likes a massive amount of building varieties will be disappointed here. Nice experience overall.
