Exark

If you've played the demo, you've already seen essentially everything. I bought it right away after enjoying the demo and thinking I'd get more out of the game, but found myself unsatisfied with the mechanical depth.

1.0 should be early access instead If this game was labeled as early access I would have been way more lenient with it, The game is not feature/content complete and feels underbaked, barely more content beyond what the demo offers, no story or explanation what is going on in this world and some ships are locked behind a "in development" banner I expected there to be more settlements after first (and only) boss, but the endless mode is just you getting spammed with enemies, without a break, making many buildings and crewmates useless. Can you call the "gatekeeper" even a boss? The boss is just a big ship with 3 bulletsponge turrets, instead of the usual 3 small ships. The are not even stages or different mechanics, just a dps/resource check before the end. But since the game is hiding its early access state i recommend playing the demo a few times (since this is pretty much the entire game minus the last boss, some missing graphics and difficulty sliders) and if you get not tired of it after a few runs you should buy it.

Good game but wont be recommending before following qol changes Star Atlas should be editable from the start menu instead of being its own thing. If i want to change it i have to click 4 buttons. Difficulty setting doesnt save between runs. to play a full difficulty run i have to click 20+ times per run.

Refreshing game in the roguelite/auto battler/inventory management genre. Enough that I see myself playing this for a good bit. The art and sound design is incredibly charming with a relatively mild learning curve to clear the game. It took me a few runs in the demo version to wrap my head around the core mechanics that when I delved into this I got to clear it first try. I have seen some typos and grammatical issues which hopefully is fixed in due time and haven't ran into a game breaking bug as of yet. Some QoL is sorely needed in parts of the game. My first point being a hotkey/keybind (and hotkey rebind) for the few buttons in terms of gameplay: decelerate time, accelerate time, return time to 1x, cancel, confirm. Otherwise, you are left with clicking a lot of buttons through every run and I can see that becoming annoying for people who want to do multiple runs of the game. (Note: Dev is actively taking feedback and has mentioned they have completed hotkeys for next update and may work on rebinds) Second bit of QoL I would like to see is ultrawide support. The game has the graphics option to run 21:9 but just slaps you in the eyes with the infamous vertical black bars on your edges. If you're on the fence about the game, try the demo to see if the gameplay is fun for you.

This game is begging for a positive review but it just doesn't deserve one. This has all of the makings of a fantastic "Backpack Battles" clone that operates on a PvE almost "Roguelike" aspect, but the entire idea falls apart in the execution. The biggest issue is that the game doesn't "ease" you into the game, but rather throws everything the game has to offer all at once. Alright, we'll call that a learning curve, sure. However, even as I'm trying to figure out if I want more Academic research or Workshop research, or hell, let's focus on Military or Commerce for whatever reason. The problem is that the game doesn't give you proper feedback of success or failure. You just breeze by until you fail with the same loadout you were just winning with and feeling like you've made all of the correct, "logical" choices that were made available to you. This game has a great idea, but fumbles so hard in the execution because it feels like the developers expect you to have the knowledge and build foresight of the actual developers themselves as you're just trying to get your feet wet. Hell, even the tutorial isn't clear on explaining on how to succeed, just "these are the mechanics and good luck!". Nothing in the game feels explained particularly well either - just text with game-specific language that expects you to understand it despite giving you nothing beyond a one-sentence message in a tutorial. I just ask the devs to go back and reconsider the onboarding process massively. I keep losing going into the fifth or sixth flight with no idea what I did right or I did wrong. I just bought buildings that made sense, linked up the synergies the best that I could, placed the "workers" on the best spots I thought possible, and yet I just end up losing and I have no idea why. I'm okay with accepting "skill issue", but again: nothing is explained well enough for me to figure out why that is.

Game is awesome. Only played it a bit so far, but it's scratching the itch that I've been hoping for from all the backpack battler type games. It's a unique spin on the idea, and it rewards you greatly for cleverness. Only complaint is it could use some optimization for when things get really broken. On the last battle, my game was LAGGING from all the triggers going on.

Idk, I did absolutely fine in the demo and it seemed pretty chill, many options to just try to build some cool synergies and stuff and you'll do fine, no, the game expects u to understand some kinda meta gaming tech to even get past the first map. Idk why games do this hard knowledge block within 30 minutes into the game but its a cheap and lazy way to artificially extend gameplay and force learning without providing game design to facilitate the learning process, roguelikes especially love this design philosophy but this isnt labeled as one and even roguelikes allow the player many mistakes thier first difficulty going into the game and being able to win. You could have easily just made an easy mode to cruise through for new players the first couple hours and you woulda probably been fine with an encyclopedia or in depth guide not a how to buy things guide?!? like a what all these arbitrary game specific traits and things signify and relate to one another and examples of good approaches to building and synergy.

Should be early access... feels under baked. Rules aren't all clear or obvious (eg some items/buildings expire). The in between-building fights are wash-and-repeat. Some sprites are still missing, or just repeated with hue-shifts. The harder difficulty options don't seem to have any reward (or maybe they do? It's not clear). On paper I love the base idea of the game, inventory management can be really great when you find a good combo. But in practice, it's rare to find that combo, and the game wears itself thin quickly. Should currently be $5. But I bet with a little more cooking and a few more updates this'll be a great game.