Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander

It's not a bad game, it just feels very vapid when it comes to actual progression and gameplay. I got bored pretty quickly when I realized the game/campaign dissolved into 3 types of missions, and they're all shallow. You either go to a place to kill something, sell a specific item for a bonus payout, or explore the map. They don't even give good amounts of currency, instead you're far, far, better off by just investing in factories and mining ships and proceeding to mine & process copper and rare materials So, if the actual missions (because they lack variety) or their payout is not worth doing, then the only reason to do missions is because you can or to get reputation. I do think what they did with general reputation is smart; missions will eventually cap out in the reputation you can gain, so you're forced to move to a new system to get more reputation. Even then, I don't really feel like there's that many incentives for reputation, as some benefits you get like cheaper prices or more crew members to hire feels meaningless when I could just go to an asteroid field and mine for a minute or just go to another station (or even just random ships) on the map to hire crew from them. So, while I think forcing movement to progress general reputation is a smart decision, it fails to hold up when there's minimal incentives to even do so. When I talked about reputation, I called it general reputation, and that's because there's an alternate faction reputation. Unlike general reputation, there's no cap on faction reputation, where instead you get the most reputation by partaking in faction missions. These are just a variant of the normal combat missions; just go to a place and kill what the game tells you to. But the problem here is that I'm pretty sure you have even less incentives to even care about faction reputation, and why would I engage in a mission that would cost me my reputation with a different faction, as that would just probably make them hostile, hurting me anyways? Why would I actually care about a system that'll end up harming me if I start actively engaging with faction "content" instead of just passively earning faction reputation through basic missions when I don't even know the rewards and the game doesn't put in the effort to make any of them meaningfully distinct, characterized, likeable, etc? It feels like if you took an RPG and just hollowed it out; go to a place and do something or bring something not because its fun or because it'll benefit you or because it's interesting to explore or because there's an actual character instead of hollow text with nothing but binary behind it, but because it's just sitting there. When it comes to combat I honestly don't really have that much experience with it, so I think you should take my opinions with it with a bit of hesitancy. It just feels very one-sided; either my weapons and armor and shields will totally overpower the enemy/enemies and I'll come out with minor damage or I'll get absolutely steamrolled and just revert a save. It honestly just feels like a gear check more than anything, and I felt like I had no reason to specialize into different weapons when slapping on more weapons, shields, and expanding your heating pipelines to overclock is ALWAYS an answer. You have to kill your enemy before they kill you, because for every weapon or combat-related structure destroyed your ship gets weaker and more exposed which leads you down a death spiral where your ship only gets worse and worse until it's unable to anything except die. Maybe this issue is just something intended or you have to deal with because it'd realistically be too much to ask for to fundamentally change how combat works, as there's no actual, mechanical skill involved. You select a single ship to target, and then select a sequence of parts of the ship to target, and then you watch as all of your weapons dogpile to do that task. You can't select multiple parts of a ship to target at once, only a sequence. You can't select which guns hit which part, it's always all of them if it's in range. You can't select multiple ships so perhaps your left half of guns go to the left ship, the right half the right ship, etc; you only get to target one, which makes groups fights awfully painful, especially when you're outnumbered because the player just isn't given the ability to deal with it. Wow, I can position the rotation and distance of my ship to an enemy ship, but it won't really help when I'm constantly getting flanked and can't target the other ship flanking me or the enemy ship I'm trying to get a better position on is also constantly moving and is also constantly facing me so I can't target their thrusters without wiping out the whole ship (or getting wiped out because I'm not going for their weapons) anyways. Wow, I can manually steer and fire my ship, but that doesn't really solve being unable to divert portions of my weapons to other parts of the enemy ship or to other enemy ships. I neglected to mention ship building, and that's because it's the only system I actually like. It's simply just a victim of literally everything else the game has to offer. At it's best is in sandbox because you don't actually have to worry about it being a victim of being faced with scalability or trying to make your ship forward-compatible to later structures you can research in the campaign. Because yes, it does get annoying when your ship is too slow so you have to add thrusters but you're at your command point limit so you have to build more command building, however that sacrifices space if you build inwards which makes crew generally slower to traverse the ship or makes you have to reconsider other parts of the ship like your heating network and if you build outward you still have to consider how that changes your ships and as example adds more vulnerabilities now you need to slap armor on to defend when all you wanted to do was just add an extra thruster or switch from 2 small shields to 2 large shields. Again, in sandbox ship building becomes much less of the constraints of campaign mode, but I'm not a game player so I'm stuck with the campaign mode. The, as I've shown, pretty ♥♥♥♥ campaign mode. While there is a campaign mode 2.0 coming out somewhere in the future, I feel like the campaign should just be good at the start instead of literally being nothing. At the start of this review, I said I don't think this is a bad game. I lied. I do think this is a bad game. When most questions you can probe a game with come up short, it's probably an indicator that there's nothing there; if I ask why would I engage in combat, the answer would not be because combat is good or fun, but because you'll get things like money, reputation, resources, and whatnot that just feed into the system of you building your ship to then engage in the combat system engage, but not because that combat is actually fun or well-designed. As wide as a lake, as deep as a puddle, as stagnant as an empty pond.