Furrygopher

Ultimately just dull, a survival sandbox without the lego aspect of Minecraft, your only concern is keeping your various power bars full which you do by mining environmental detritus. unfortunately what you need is so common that the management aspect simply turns into busy work, you land, get out your ship, scan, walk less than 50 meters, mine what you need then fly off again. The space environment is hugely insulting to any astronomer, stars are unreachable light sources on the skybox shining on a tight cluster of a few haphazard planets, I wish the systems did interact dynamically as every one of them I visited would have had a spectacular collision, Worse still is every square kilometer of space is packed with the asteroidal junk you need to mine to power your ship popping in as it crosses the draw distance The main selling point of this is the random generation and it's infinite possibilities, but that infinity is always constrained, visually you may be able to get an infinite number of animals or space freighters, but functionally and gameplay wise they are all identical to each other, just a wandering resource node carrying common materials, Planets tend to be differentiated only by whatever garish colour palette the RNG drew out of a hat and every station or building you encounter is drawn from an extremely limited pool, I only ever saw one station layout. All in all I'd say stay away, the devs clearly had huge hopes for their baby but they haven't delivered on them.

What is this games unique selling point? It's ship and fleet editor, far more powerful than any other similar game on the genre at the cost of high complexity, forgivable considering the niche that likes this is the games target audience. But where the let down comes is in the question- How is this unique selling point implemented? how does it reward me for skilled use of it? how does it punish me for poor use of it? Respectively the answers are badly, no reward and no or next to no punishment. Only total failure at ship design is punished by the game, insufficient powerlack of an engineNo shield etc these tend to leave your ship crippled or easily crippled, partial failure is easily overcome, build a second ship of the same class and outnumber your foes in battle. Success in designing a ship that can go toe to toe with three ships gives you the reward of not clicking 2 more times on the build order. Your empires economy rides roughshod over any reward or punishment the design system when it ought to be the other way round, empire management is not this games key feature. The ship and fleet design system rates an 8 on its own and I would have no qualms giving that if the system had a payback. The game is desperate for a mode featuring a simulated battle on a tactical level rather than strategic level akin to a Tabletop Warhammer match you and a friend or you against the AI with 1000 point fleets a pre-fight design period then the combat where design skill then ship deployment is rewarded with success.

There is a glimmer of a solid game, 3 months from now but it looks like the devs believed they could fix their gaggle of gamestopping bugs with a day 0 patch, the release of this game is basically down right theft on the publishers behalf, if released as an MMO the launch would have been reviewed as awful but for a essentially single player game to be released like this is a whole new category of bad that the English language lacks an appropriate word for.