I played a lot of city builder games (ie. Frostpunk, Surviving Mars, Caesar etc) and this one is the most dificult for me.
There is very little margin for making mistakes. If you make a mistake, very soon you'll have to restart the whole chapter.
Additionally, all the decisions you take from the very beginning of the game, will have an impact till the very end.
So, it's a great game but sometimes it's very frustrating. Couple of times I had to start the game from the begining.
It is a really interesting take on a city administrator genre, except your city is in space, and its falling apart, and you know, ALIENS! Overall really cool, but now i shudder every time i hear "Administrator"
...with a chair.
It is a challenging factory builder with a great story.
This game is hard, especially the hard mode and punishes every mistake immidiately. It is great. I had to restart chapters serveral times, because I messed up pretty hard. I loved it to become better and better with every restart.
If you like factory builders --> get the game
If you like a good story --> get the game
If you like reaaaaly challenging games --> get the game
If you like to learn from your mistakes --> get the game
If you like get punched in the face ;) --> get the game
To be honest I loved it, it is a great fit for me.
If you don't like the points above, don't buy the game, you will be disappointed. If you can live with the most points mentioned above, you should buy it, maybe on sale. If all bullet points apply, you should absoulutly buy it.
On con point at last is that the easy mode is waaaaaaay too easy, it's there that you can discover every tech, comet, planet and story line.
Not quite Sim City in space, and not quite Homeworld either. Certainly worth a play through if you've got the time- it was not a quick game, though to be fair I did linger far longer in each location than the game wanted me to.
I could nitpick about the science and engineering- you have to research how to melt ice, when you turn your engines on your ships lights turn off, and your one litle ship can strip an entire solar system of its resources in about a year. Not terribly realistic, but from a gameplay standpoint the decisions make sense- after all of you set up shop in Sol you'll miss the carefully crafted plot.
There are, however, a few things that took away from the game:
- Science ships: Its not always clear whether options are mutually exclusive or what the level or risk is. Also, most of the time 'leave and come back later' ought to be an option... but it ususally isn't. Once you start an encounter, your ship is comitted. Taken together this means inadvertently miss a lot of the optional plot, you ships will be stuck for days in an encounter you don't care about, and you'll lose your research teams in frustrating ways.
- Research and construction: There are some hidden dependencies which can cause you waste a lot of time building things you can't actually use. It seems like you 'personal AI' could at least warn you about that sort of thing.
- Performance: Those little stickyard transporters brought my (admittedly underpowered) laptop to its knees, and theres no way to turn them off. Which is odd, because the game gives you lots of settings dials to turn.
All that aside, I enjoyed it, and I would reccomend it to anyone who likes Homeworld and/or wants something resembling a Battlestar Galactica city builder.
Id get it. on Gog. I have it on Steam. Get it on Gog instead for the offline installers.
Just think of this as a space managment stats balance game. With space sci fi story.
Its punishly hard at times. Start over a lot is normal here. But its pretty straight forward.
You will probably enounter issues with "transporter" units between sectors stopping to deliver resorces. Or buildings needing to be either rebuilt or power toggled on off to fix a bug.
Overall Im not smart enough to beat this game in one go. So I play it once in a while whenver Im board.
The game does need decent amount of Ram and CPU and GPU to be set up. Otherwise could run into process conflicts between them and your Windows 10 or whatever OS.
