Recent reviews by Redhand_Jedi

This is a great game. However, do not be fooled in thinking this is your typical city builder. It is a complex, difficult, and challenging game with a steep learning curve of game mechanics that will require you to either learn them through painful experimentation or research online. Playing the game and learning the hard way what the game mechanics are is not exactly intuitive so that is why I call it "painful experimentation." Your settlement will be humming along doing well and then go crashing into the ground. Now, you can almost always recover as long as you have a few "fertile couples." But let me tell you, it is hard. Very hard. Especially when you fall from a population high of 1000 individuals or more. Most of the time, you should restart. But you are left wondering exactly what went wrong? You provided everything thing the settlement needed, everything they demanded, every technology along the way up to that point... Your settlement is ALWAYS walking a knife's edge of survival or obliteration. YOU MUST LEARN THE GAME MECHANICS! So again, painful experimentation which is hard to learn or research. Now, the game includes some actually fairly helpful tutorials but they appear "unhelpful" at face value. Actually, you should take them to heart. Now, the second option, research. You can learn the game mechanics online through game guides, Steam discussion, discord, reddit, etc. The info is out there but it is not well coalesce in one location. And when you find it, you have to sift through all the people crying about how hard the game is and how they can't cope.

So let me help you out, the most important aspect and game mechanic for you to understand and that helped me the most in this game is to MANAGE YOUR POPULATION. This actually means to grow SLOW. When the game tells you to manage your population they are telling you the same thing. The game provides you two different dwellings for this very purpose. One to grow your population (house) and one to keep your population from growing any further (shelter). The importance of growing slow is so you can more easily manage your food and water production in the beginning, especially the spikes! One of the reasons why people fail is that they will be humming along and then a drought comes along plus a disease, plus a raider attack, plus another calamity, etc, etc. and they are not ready for the dip and spikes in their water and food production. And once one domino falls, your settlement will crash. Another reason you want to manage your population and grow SLOW, is that you want adequate radiation protection for your settlement. It is so very easy to outgrow your settlement's need for radiation protection and it APPEARS as though you can get buy without. YOU CAN'T. If you check your charts, you will see that your settlement's infertility is increasing and this is another reason why people often fail though it is not readily apparent. Sure, you can speed through and get to Season 150+ or something and 1000+ individuals but then all of a sudden your infertility is 80+% of your population and your settlement growth (children) are no longer meeting your workforce requirements. Soon, the settlement starts to go crashing down. Now tools, you need tools but you can get buy with those much better than you can without radiation protection. But if you manage your POPULATION correctly, you should have time to meet your settlement's radiation protection and tool needs at the same time. (To be clear, this means you should be running a half dozen scrap yards and a dozen or more recyclers in the beginning. One of your most important technologies will be the refinery. Once you research it, I think I had a ratio of 3:1 of scrapyards to refineries. I would also build my primary settlement and then build two , three, sometimes four different satellite communities to meet my scrap, forestry, and farming needs).

TLDR: This game is not your typical city builder. It is a challenging game. You must manage your population and grow SLOWLY meeting your community's radiation protection needs or your population will crash burn. Radiation is a sneaky killer in RL and the game! Your infertility will creep up until your population crashes leaving you wondering why unless you catch it. Also, growing slowly will allow you to more easily manage and stockpile food and water to buffer against the numerous calamities and crises the games through at you (droughts and disease primarily).

If you pick this game up, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. My recommendation is grab the game, play the tutorials, play the scenarios, and then give the "actual game" a shot. Perhaps on Easy first. But trust me, be prepared when you try Normal :)

Great game! Fun and easy to play. Additionally, it is fun to see the development and evolution of games and engine technology through the years. And for someone who lived through a majority of it (I am not old, dang it!), it is equally great to see!! I definitely recommend this game for you. I plan to check out the sequel to this one in the next Steam sale :)

Best game dev I have played or seen yet. Easy to play, fun to master.

This is a fun game and definitely worth a purchase. For me, it reminds me of the old school "Smash TV" and the more recent Vampire Survivors. I enjoyed my time playing it. A simple game but one that offers plenty of challenge and content.

Absolute joy to play either with friends in a group or alone online. Still a hit years later after the COVID surge. If you have never played it, you need to play it to say you have done so and enjoy it. No matter which role you have to play, crew or imp and no matter the map, and no matter the mode, you will have fun.

Enjoy the game.

This is absolutely a fantastic game deserving a 100% complete playthrough. It is casual but fun with a good, easy to follow story but only if you want to "find" it. It is the gameplay that is the true gem of this game as well as the artwork and style of the game. For me, sometimes it was just fun to fish and make money to upgrade my ship once I found a shipyard able to upgrade my ship.

Do yourself a favor and play this game.

This is an enjoyable and fun 4X turn-based game. I like the premise and found the event crises with the decisions associated with them sometimes challenging to choose because of dwindling resources and the politics of the game. I played the game on Hard difficulty and enjoyed the challenge. It isn't Stellaris but it is similar and not as complex making the game more streamlined and faster-paced.

I recommend this game and for those that play it, have fun and enjoy the story, premise, and streamlined gameplay.

16DEC2023 edit;
Unfortunately I must change my recommendation and review of this product from favorable to UNFAVORABLE due to a game breaking bug. As you progress in the game and march across the Pegasus galaxy, your save games will take LONGER and LONGER to load. I am talking about 3-4 hours at a time and I finally reach over 12 hours long!! I am rocking a 3 year old computer with a RTX 3080 Nvidia card with a 11th gen Intel chip here so it isn't my hardware either. They are aware of the bug and no fix has come either. I had really enjoyed my time in the game with over a hundred hours in their little universe but this bug kills the experience. There are too many good games out there for you to enjoy to spend time on this one for it to kill your game late in the experience. Skip this one and find a good time elsewhere.

Great game, great fun. The game had me when I had a large unit of cavalry charging an enemy line of infantry. I couched my lance and dived in at the enemy, rushing along side by side with my fellow knights! The crash of steel, screams of both horses and men, and then yells of victory was intoxicating. Not to mention that as you turn your horse around to have another go, you see riderless horses running away or standing around now. Bodies starting to pile up, banners sticking up in the ground or tossed to the side. Wow, just wow. You miss this level of POV when you are playing games such Crusader Kings II or Warhammer 3 (though both are great in their own way).

Several mods can tweak the game to your own playstyle. I recommend you check out Steam Workshop and Nexusmods to find the few that will make your game unique to you. This is a game you should absolutely checkout and give it a try. You should love it.

This game is worth playing. I enjoyed FTL and if you are looking to rekindle the same experience but with another renewed passionate developer and team, well this is the game for you. It has a more developed story (for better or worse) and a huge galaxy to explore which they continue to expand. I tracked this game from the first demo which hooked me. It is relatively cheap and so I recommend you pick it up and give it a shot. I think you will be pleased you gave it a shot.

I enjoy the game. The counselors fighting back and forth is fun. However, losing your space assets to them is flat out deflating, discouraging, and I think not the direction the game needs to go. Once you "graduate" to the space mining and space combat, counselors should no longer be part of the equation IMO. They should remain part of the Earth fight only; the first part of the game. Eventually, they should be part of the fight to defeat and infiltrate the factions on Earth while your space forces shut them down in the solar system.

There needs to be some way to limit a factions agents, perhaps limit them to fewer agents as the game progresses through infiltration. Perhaps assassination and detention limits their recruiting of new agents right away (perhaps for a year?). I agree with some here that eventually through a combination of open combat and covert actions through your counselors, you need to either neutralize or defeat select factions. Basically, things on Earth need to come to a head between factions.

In space, combat with the Aliens is both scary, fun, and thrilling when you win or lose. Again, counselors should have no part here though. I am having to take a break right now because my hard earned fleet has lost a ship and station to counselors and I just about rage quit. It is hard enough building space assets as it is (plus defending them!) and losing them to a counselor is just crazy. Especially when you have marines on board. Again, get rid of counselors capturing space assets. I know I am not the only one saying it.

Regardless, I am overall enjoying the game and art. Zipping around the solar system is impressive. Currently, I think I am about mid-game with combating the Aliens around Earth and Mars. I have captured and destroyed several Alien ships. I am in the process of studying their "material" I think. I know I am not as far as others but I do have 40 hrs in-game so I think I am far enough through the game to offer at least a small opinion :).

Either way, thanks for the game. I eagerly wait future patches.

07DEC2024 Review: ~180hrs in game now

I came back to the game about a year later or so. I progressed much further in the game and down the technology tree. However, I do not understand why it is overly complicated. From reading guides and seeking help on the discussion forum, you need to be selective in what you research, when you research it, and why you are researching it. If you are the Resistance (Default starting faction), you need to be focusing on ship technologies and off-world mining for instance. At least initially you should. Once you are well on your way to kicking alien butt, well then you can focus on secondary objectives like combining the world under your one chosen country or colonizing every spec of cosmic dust or wiping out every other faction as much as the game allows you. Whatever floats your boat!

However, to focus on the 'correct' technologies for having the "right ships" to fight the Aliens, well good luck buddy. The game does a horrible job explaining how to do this though a few guides do better but barely. But it is a horrible game of cherry picking and so it is horribly complex. Take this engine but not this one, so make sure to research this but not this one, to save time here because if you take up too much time or slap around the Servant or Protectorate factions too much, well the Aliens will come in and wipe everything away and never let you have a chance to build back-up. I almost did or I am still trying (I am stubborn that way) but the game went from being fun to a game I see as one chasing away a lot of people due to too much complexity with a steep learning curve. There is a difference in having a game be challenging or difficult and one that you spend 80 hours playing only to realize you failed 60 hours ago because you started researching every technology in sequential order like a Civilization noob or because you wasted all your water propellant on a fleet of useless ships that you thought were cool until the Aliens showed up and showed you otherwise or having an united North and South America plus China with more Earth bound resources, mission control, armies, boost, and what not which is for nothing if you can't get off Earth since the Aliens are playing whack-a-mole with every space station you put up in the solar system or ship you build.

Ehh, I want to like the game. And I will likely keep trying because as noted, I am insanely stubborn, but this game is begging to push players away at Launch if it doesn't streamline several of its core systems such as its technology tree and/or give its players better direction.