Spacebase DF-9

Frankly, avoid this game.

I bought into the Early Access alpha version of this game because at the time I looked forward to the initial concept of the game as advertised and had faith in Double Fine, developers notorious for several well-received cult classics including Psychonauts and Brutal Legend (controversial but in my opinion a very underrated game), to complete it on-schedule and more or less in a finished form of the advertised concept.

It seems apparent, that with the sudden push from 0.6 Alpha to 1.0 Release, that this will not be the case. From my experience, the game as-is is interesting but very buggy and sorely lacking in features. The base-building is somewhat simplistic, which, while partially due to the visual format of the game, is not enough to keep me interested in it. The AI for both friendly and enemy NPCs is very glitchy, hard to control and frankly suicidal at times. The user interface is clunky, incomplete and apparently designed for touchscreen support at the expense of UI size. The game has fullscreen support bugs, occasionally crashes without warning and lacks a tutorial.

Resource management is laughably simplistic, relying simply on the presence of basic station necessities (walls, furniture, life support, matter refineries, etc.) and NPCs in enough of a quantity to satisfy some invisible mysterious ratio (with the exception of oxygen/life support-based crew capacity, this is prominently displayed on the user interface, a very good thing).

The long-term gameplay suffers when you take into account that there's a very finite amount of natural resources (called matter in-game) with which to build infrastructure and feed NPCs, which means you generally have to rely on proper choice of starting location in order to ultimately dictate how long you'll be able to keep your base going and how much harassment from raiders you'll get. In my opinion there's something wrong with the game when raider attacks are a promising sign of long-term survival after a certain point.

If derelicts are part of your chosen starting location, then, yes, ostensibly I could see you breaking them down for matter for self-preservation, perhaps indefinitely, but I have yet to succeed at this, either due to a lack of experience or simply because it takes too long, I don't actually know personally because it's completely up to the AI-controlled crew NPCs to do this after the order's given.

NPC deaths (which happen often, due to only security officers being capable of self-defense if I recall correctly, and hardly capable at that) affect nearly the entire crew's morale directly and drastically and how useful they are in performing their tasks. This is apparently impossible to remedy (again, I may be mistaken).

Even beyond these problems there's just not all that much to do, just survive as long as possible and assign new/current NPCs to station tasks and watch them utterly fail to perform them. Or starve to death because they can't find their way to the cantina because they're depressed and oversleeping. Or open up an interior door into a hallway with an oxygen leak and asphyxiate. Or catch themselves on fire and avoid several nearby, conveniently placed fire extinguishers, relying on other NPCs to actually see that their compadres are on a painful path from the psych ward to the burn ward and put them out. This all creates a bit of a death spiral for the NPCs, which is an interesting but infuriating and uncontrollable part of Dwarf Fortress, a game which Spacebase: DF-9's apparently inspired by.

To Double Fine's benefit, survival was one of the game's main selling points. Sadly, in its current state and potential state when released in 1.0, this may be impossible, or indeed, utterly futile and pointless to attempt from the outset.

Hopefully the game will improve once "mod support" is implemented, but it shouldn't take mod support for basic implementation of features and bugfixes to occur.

It seems like the general consensus is that the game has been abandoned. I'd disagree with that verdict and give the developers the benefit of the doubt if it weren't so d**n obvious.

Double Fine, you know better than this. "Big Ambitions, Broken Dreams" indeed.

Originally written September 25, 2014 on Steam