The early reviews for this game all look fairly decent. Although, a few reviews are knocking how complex the systems are and how cluttered the UI can be.
Is anyone else going to give this a try?
Was debating early today, but I haven't seen much information about the endgame or how a second time building a colony holds up. I will be picking this up but I'm going to wait for other players to put in the time and give their opinions before I take the plunge myself.
I read Kotaku's writeup of this and remembered Brad saying something about Sins of a Solar Empire being pretty good a while back. Down for new Paradox stuff and this snuck up on me. Hoping they do a QL.
I bought the game and I'm about two hours into it. There's a lot there. I love city builders. Banished, Planetbase, etc.
I watched enough video to know it was a game I'm interested in, but I'm not a person who watches Youtube videos to learn how to play a game. This game is rough and very unforgiving with it's tutorial. The tutorial feels like about 20 different people telling you how to play a game and I found myself building stuff I didn't quite need right away.
I restarted about 6 times before I got a base going that I felt comfortable with. There are some things I don't quite understand. You first land with a team of robots and your task is to set up a base for the humans when they come. My first biggest trial was trying to figure out how to connect electrical wires. The second biggest hurdle was trying to manage the base with the cables laid (If you run a long cable, you cannot build ontop of it, so you have to preplan).
I don't understand why games like these have "research" trees. You'd think if you went to Mars, you'd know how to build farms before you went there, but you do have to research things. Also another thing you do is start off in a grid and you have to scan areas to advance the size of your base. I found a resource I need to gather, but I get this message that says, "Resource is too far away from commander ship" which I haven't quite figured out how to get a second commander ship going, but I'll try and figure it out.
I haven't seen humans yet, which I enjoy. hopefully this will mean a longer gameplay. As for replayability? I'm not sure what people expect. It's a city builder, so there isn't really gameplay, just trying to do it better. I like this angle, but like I said, the tutorial is massively confusing. I'm not sure what I need to do yet to build a successful base that will welcome humans, but I look forward to figuring it out.
The music is good and does not get repetitive to me like some people say, but I like long strings of the same sound if it's pleasing to the ear.
This game is 40 bucks (for the entry game, I think you can get it with the DLC pass for 70). I'm not sure if this is a 70 dollar game or not, it all depends if you like this stuff, which I do.
I know this is not a "professional review" but I think this game may have something. I will keep at it. (BTW. When I say "I can't figure it out" i'm not looking for help, so please don't think i'm giving up, just haven't figured it out yet.)
i got it and i'm having an alright time with it, the first mystery made me not want to do that mystery ever again because it sucked so much. The games a little dry, as apposed to what the dev's said each game plays out basically the same regardless, people keep comparing it to cities skylines, but cities feels a lot better than this and i'm a little bummed out. otherwise i'll keep at it for a little while more, and hope i like it more.
I just finished my first successful "playthrough" (on a fairly low difficulty), or at least I think I did. This game has me boggled. First off, to the people comparing it to other games, this game is a space base builder akin to Planetbase and Aven Colony. In fact I'd say in many ways it falls right in between those two. It's more complex than Planetbase, but less than Aven Colony, but it also has less of a "survival feel" than Planet base (which is non-existant in Aven Colony). In the end though it shares a lot of the similar flaws. It's fairly linear and repetitive, it never takes things to the next level and it's riddled with underdeveloped ideas. All these games has this strange thing going for them where everything feels like a first draft, and this game in particular feels very much like it never had "new eyes" on it.
It's gonna take you a good few retries before you figure out how to make things work, as there's barely any useful information to be gleaned about anything. You're just thrown into the deep end with mechanics and choices thrown at you with barely any tooltips or information to help you out. Once you get going though there's a good flow to it. But then it just ends. Or well, I had what seemed like a main mission, which I had more than finished long before the time ran out. So I ended up having to wait for 10 days to hit the 100 day mark (which was the end), and then it just gave me a message basically saying "well done" and that's it. The game didn't end or anything though, but I wasn't given any new objectives. What's even stranger is that it's keeping score based on how quickly you do certain things etc, but there's no scoreboard, and I got no end of game summary. I dunno... All these games just feel like a chain of thought abandoned halfway through.
If anything, I think the thing that might make this one a bit more appealing than the others is that it has a fairly complex map/game generator. Planetbase basically only has different topographies to play with, and Aven Colony has fixed maps. This game on the other hand has a endless amount of resource distribution and hazard variables and it also has a multitude of different game parameters that will matter quite a lot in how you approach the game. I can already tell from pumping up the difficulty a bit that it's a big difference, so maybe at the highest difficulties this game has a totally different feel to it.
I can definitely see why people are bouncing off this game though, but I think maybe, just maybe there's something to it if you dive deep.
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