So much about this game is objectively good, but the truth is that I do not like playing it. The game consistently runs smooth, the art ranges from competent to glorious eye-candy, the structure of the story (you're saving earth from a cataclysm you yourself caused!) has so much meat on the bone. The heavy space constraints on building and the sizes of the various building blocks make it pretty interesting to construct and update your space-city. The makers of the game clearly knew what they were doing. But the game is still somehow scuffed. One part of it is obfuscation. The game has a *lot* of techs to research, and the grand majority of them are absolutely useless piddleshit crap that will do nothing to help your game. Hidden in that pile of bland are a few core techs that actually have an meaningful impact, but good luck sifting through them on your first game. And if you do know what the core techs are, you can pretty much trivialize the game in the first couple of levels. Or it's the logistics. Moving things from sector to sector is an absolute pain even with the lategame building designed to do just that. Or it's the data overlay. How much food are you making? There are readings that are just irrelevant, like a 5-cycle average production when your core buildings operate on a ten-cycle rhythm. Or it's the data overlay combined with logistics! The game tells you you're making more than enough food to meet your needs, but suddenly oh wait your stocks are dry - far as I can tell, this is because the game logs all food producers as constantly active but one type of them *actually* have to wait for an input good to arrive on time, which it won't, because nothing ever arrives on time and the only means you have of inspecting inter-sector logistics is your own damn eyeballs, but that won't help because you the only thing you can tell is that some transports are moving somewhere. And all of this is coming in a story that has just... The most inconsistent tone and the most scuffed english-is-my-second-language mode of telling it. You'll be going through the fairly inert and lifeless tone where you mostly talk to AIs or their data readouts of what people want, treating survival of humanity like a corporate assignment, and you'll go - hmm, I don't like the way this makes me feel, but there's something somber and true about this. And then you'll get blasted by some Wololo sound sample in the score or some goofball event outcome and go - what am I supposed to do with my attention? Am I to treat this game as serious, as frivolous, as what? Things aren't helped by the fact that most everything is written in not-quite-english. Words and terms will be *kind of* appropriate for what they mean but not really, the grammar of things will be slightly off, etcetera. I'm never really sure if I'm just reading a mid translation for a simple term or if I'm missing some subtle context for what would be obvious in french or if what I'm seeing is some kind of idea of wordplay that doesn't land. I *want* to know what I'm reading, things seem interesting enough from what little I've gleaned, but every page in the book is covered in fucking cellophane. And then there's the big thing. A large part of it is due to what I'll call narrative event-based difficulty. If you played through a scenario before, you know exactly what is coming and can prepare for it with trivial ease. You'll know that things that allude to urgency or an ongoing issue actually do fuck all, and some things that are not mentioned at all are coming that need your attention more. Or, since so much of the game runs off event triggers, you can manipulate them to trivialize what would otherwise be a challenge. And honestly you kind of have to because the means of solving the issue any other way are just too annoying to deal with. As an example - there's a space storm that's coming for you, oh fuck! Except when it creeps up hinges entirely off when science ship events complete. You could manage the ships that would be lost in the storm - mining and cargo - by manually forbidding every resource out there or manually making sixty clicks to make sure they have no target and hide in your bossom. Or you could cheese it by dropping a science vessel on every planet in range, waiting until they all complete their respective narrative chains but only confirming their completion when you're ready to do them all in one fell swoop. "There is an electromagnetic storm in front of us" "Congratulations, the electromagnetic storm is behind us!" This narrative event-based difficulty suffuses the game and the choice you are constantly met with is between dealing with the challenges of the game as intended, which will be either tedious or death spiral your ship... Or you can cheese it and remove all difficulty, which will lead to hours of waiting your research to accumulate and doing fuck else. I played this game on the hardest difficulty setting and did not even once wonder how other players are dealing with the resource management challenges presented. I did, however, constantly look up event tables. This is not how I want to play a strategy game. If there was a middle option available on steam, that is what I would give here. Happy to give my money for these developers to do something new with it because they obviously can. Not happy to play what they actually have so far.
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