Outworld Station

Outworld Station is a chill, space factory builder where you explore and exploit a variety of planetoids, build massive factories in their orbit and take on aggressive aliens and environments. With both solo and multiplayer options, you can play your way. The Good: Outworld Station at its core is an automation game, and for the most part carries itself well. The learning curve to get started is shallow, as you can relatively quickly build out your first sprawling space station within a couple of hours of gameplay. Where Outworld stands out is in the requirements to branch out, visit new planets and set up various franchises across the solar system, creating complex supply chains across multiple planets and asteroids. Building your factory is kept relatively straightforward. Collect or manufacture a few basic resources, and you can quickly build, copy or delete buildings in a few clicks. Outworld uses a unique system that lets you determine the routes for your products and materials by selecting buildings and linking them. With your conveyor belts, or space tubes in this environment, being able to handle anything you throw at them, the pace becomes relaxed and allows you to slowly build up your various bases at your own pace. There are obstacles in the form of combat and environmental events, but these are merely distractions from the core gameplay and won’t really slow you down for long. You also get to build some massive ships. A ton of them. In fact, the goal of the game is to build a massive ark ship to save humanity. Setting up and managing your supply chain to consistently produce all the different ships for the fleet can be really rewarding. In particular, you need to manage not only resources but also the loading, offloading, and fueling of the vessels. The Bad: Though graphically Outworld Station holds its own, many of the buildings share similar looks and colours, occasionally making your larger-scale factories look less interesting than they could. Some options to recolour or apply different templates would greatly help differentiate the areas of your factory. There are quests in Outworld. Main quests lead you through a standard tutorial before transitioning to having you build more and more parts and ships. Given the ships you build don’t really do anything once completed except float around until you fulfill the quest, then speed off, it can be less than satisfying once you complete your orders. Smaller quests show up from time to which typically require you to manually shuffle parts to your hub, or seek out specific enemies and engage in combat, (more on that later). In general, the quests aren’t particularly that interesting and tend to just be tedious in nature. The Ugly: Combat is a thing, I guess, in Outworld Station. Various enemies are dotted around each map, and to get access to certain resources and research, you’ll eventually need to take on enemy ships, aliens and other hostile entities in pursuit of the ultimate factory. These encounters are dull, repetitive and don’t require any more strategy than circle strafing the enemies. In some instances, combat is just bad. For instance, in one region you’ll encounter a particular creature that sends out an electric pulse that will stun you for a few moments. On rare occasions you may encounter more than one, and if you haven’t upgraded your vessel, you could get stuck in a non-stop stun battle where you are unable to move or take any actions to break the stun. I once got trapped in this sequence for over 20 minutes until the game itself broke and slingshotted me across the map.

This game really surprised me. Context; I play a lot of games with building and logistics. TA, BAR, C&C, SC1-2, War2-3, Satisfactory, Factorio, Foundry, Riftbreaker, X series, Dyson Sphere, etc. What really surprised me was how much the game was almost a sandbox but had enough objectives, optional objects and events to make it feel like a kind of general story without feeling like you HAVE to build a specific way or hit specific milestones of units per min. You can build small tight bases and just let the system run (so long as you have proper defenses) make dinner come back and you have what you need to progress the objective or you can go to a new system setup mfg of the hot products and set logistics. I did both and it was really nice because you do get some punishment for not watching the base enough, power can go, a system can bottleneck, enemy/nature can knock out your base but nothing is destroyed you just have to repair it (for free, just 2second repair time per item). Sometimes you can knock out power and it's really tricky to get it back up but it's enough cost to go uuugggghhhh but not anything that makes you want to turn the game off. I'd say that if you like a bit more exciting you v nature this game won't hit that because the game is more casual with surviving, however, if you don't want something that if one thing goes wrong you might need to rebuild a whole base or have to reload a save this game is perfect for that.

Impecable.

I have played through this game twice now and thoroughly enjoyed it both times with plans to play through again. There are many paths that can be taken to get through the game and its nice to have those choices and not be forced into a single "optimal" path. For me this game was more about just the base building and enjoying the story so it was also nice to have the option to turn off enemy aggression and random events. Overall an excellent game and these folks are pretty responsive over on the discord for it so I like that too. Games like this for me are background sort of games, set them up and let them run, for someone more inclined to speed through it would not take the nearly 400 hours I have in it so far to complete it twice, so it really is just up to you, fast or slow, completionist or minimalist, however you want.

Très bon jeu d'automatisation. La première MAJ après la 1.0 améliore encore le jeu et va dans le bon sens

I recommend this game ONLY if you have time to waste. This game slows down significantly mid to late game. There just isn't enough resources to automate everything at the same time which means repurposing factories in the late game. There are a few hours where I am just waiting for ships to build, fuel, then arm. I recommend having a good book to read.