Argh this is a tough one to review because, as someone else noted, there isn't a neutral button, you have to choose good or bad. I'm swaying very slightly into the bad camp sadly, mostly from missed potential, and a feeling of being sort of duped into continuing playing as it really felt like that potential was going to be met. Overall the game felt like a big long tutorial, I didn't die throughout, had the research completed quite early, and was able to buy everything from every shop. I honestly expected the game to open up into a more free form game after I'd got to the end of the story, but the credits rolled and that was it.
The writing is a bit rough in places, I don't mean the puns and jokes, I respect they are part of the theme and charm on purpose. It's all just a bit kids story book level of story telling, and a bit rushed feeling.
The voice acting isn't particularly great, it's not terrible, and I respect the work to actually put voice over in there, but it's a bit wooden in places, I think this may have more to do with the writing than the VA themselves in many places, hard to say.
It got real laggy near the end when I went into my ship, so could do with some optimisations there.
It needs some quality of life tweaks and bugs:
The ability to speed up the animations by holding a button would making moving aroujnd and the AI turn go faster.
The ability to see all room skill cooldowns and room skills in the hotbar.
The ability to click outside of the green movement area and it takes it as a command to move to the closest space to where you clicked meaning you don't have to pan back to the ship.
It isn't entirely clear where the perimeter of gas clouds are, so I'd accidentally get hit by them without meaning to.
The tractor beam takes ages to realise it's not working if something blocks it.
Multiple times I found I was hitting some mystery invisible objects.
The weapon distance calculation is not being initialised properly on weapon selection and is taking the previous weapons range for the UI.
Saving room layouts requires clicking the layout letter, which will change your layout, so you have to change it back to fix it.
It wasn't clear when I could hack another ship, I stopped using it after I was told I didn't have enough level to hack something, but I had no idea why.
There was some kind of bug with the sell menu not clearing the grid, and previously sold items stayed in there, if I took them back I went into negative money.
Once there were no enemies it took ages to move around searching for material.
My own drone shot me in the back.
Enemy ships shot each other in the back.
If I interrupted the tractor beam by working too quickly it could get stuck on.
I wanted to be able to zoom out more.
Considering the work to put many great systems into the game has been done, it's confusing to me why it isn't explored further as the hard work has been done. More research options, more buy and sell things, more upgrades, different crew, more drone types, different weapons, less basic dungeon elements.
Instead of so many minimal implementation parts, it'd have been nice to see less but more polished gameplay mechanics. My expectation when I came back to the store was to realise I'd got hold of an early access title, if it were listed as early access, it'd have got a positive review. Sadly this game doesn't quite reach the bar required for a full release, especially for the price tag.
Edit: Developers great responses tipped the scale to a positive review.
