TLDR: it's a city-building roguelike. Yeah. How do you make a city / colony builder and give it a roguelike twist? Periodic storms sweep the continent and wipe out everything. You can succeed or fail on any given city. Success gives you a way to earn things that will carry over into the next cycle. You'll spend most of your time in the city builder, but there's also a map. Using the map, you should plan your route - because it is a route - of city-founding to end up near a seal, which will grant a permanent extension to the wash-rinse-repeat cycle. If you get there too soon, you won't have what you need to fix the seal. Too late and the storm wipes your route and you start over. Different resource availability in different locations means that you can't always build the same buildings to earn a successful finish. People are a scarce resource, and like all resources must be managed well in quantity and type. You will often get hit with random events, which often require some scrambling to resolve. Graphics are nice. Music is unobtrusive. UI is packed with info and pretty intuitive. So far I love it. It's an ever-changing puzzle, and if that's your thing then you will too.
Disclaimer: This is one of my favorite titles of all time. So I'm biased. I think I still have a t-shirt somewhere. :) I'll start with the bad. The AI is weak, as noted elsewhere. Not unusual for a game of this vintage. Just consider some babysitting to be part of the challenge. :) Also the control system is not as optimized as you'll find in most games these days. It's not too bad, but there are a lot of buttons used when giving orders and such. The graphics are from the wild-west days of 3d-card competition. So, they're certainly dated by today's standards but rocked at the time. The game was notoriously picky about driver versions and you could scour the net to find patches to make it work for your system, or let GOG do their magic and just fix it for you. :) On to the game. Very atmospheric! Alternate timeline story about how the space race really was about finding this incredibly useful alien bio-metal throughout the solar system and getting the technological edge over your cold-war opponent. Combat takes place either in your spacesuit or a vehicle. If you find yourself without a vehicle you can call for a ride or snipe and steal an enemy's, but one or two missions are designed to play on foot. In most missions you'll direct the building of an RTS style base, from a first-person perspective. (This was the first game I'd seen do that and I loved it.) Of course you'll need to guard your resource collectors, set up automated defenses, etc. Some missions are search and destroy, some are escorts, some are basically tower defense, but there are some other more unusual ones there too. Sometimes you're trying to be stealthy and sometimes it's a furball. I love the variety of missions and environments, from the barren lunar landscape to overcast Venus to red Mars to foggy Titan, icy Europa and more. And if you're seeking more challenge, you can also play as the Russians. Enjoy!
