A game that tries several different genres, and does not succeed in doing any right.
You start out on a barren rock (why people would visit this place, I have no idea), with an absolutely awful tutorial system. Only the very basics that anyone who has ever played a management simulator game would know are explained. All of the other systems are left to your imagination, and there are no tooltips when you hover over icons and buttons. There are sometimes tooltips when you click on some of them, sometimes there is nothing at all. I still don't know what several buttons on the side menu in the colony sim area do. The worst thing about building your colony is that your buildings 'stand' up on platforms, and when you go to build you always need to measure one space back and up, or you end up building on top, or to the side, of the structure. It is awful and so annoying.
But yes, the main focus of this game seems to be building a space colony, managing the needs of your guys, and getting space tourists to come and visit. That is all well and good, but it is extremely simple and bland, and the money that you make from having people come and visit is extremely low. It takes one of your colonists nearly a minute to make two pizzas for you to sell in the cafeteria, and in the end, you get about 4 or 5 credits for it. A single floor plate for the basic corridor costs 2 credits, the kitchen floor is 5 credits, the stove to make the pizza costs 350 credits, the cafeteria floor costs 5 credits, and the two different objects to sell solid food, and liquid food, each cost around 350 credits. If you want to sell food to multiple tourists at a time, you need to have multiple of all of these.
Then there is the cost of getting the materials to make that pizza. You need to invade planets, and then for some reason, buy the rights to exploit the resources there. So, you land on the planet (more on this later), kill everything that moves, and then have to pay a hundred credits to get 1 of the vegetable resources, with only 1-4 being available on each planet. The cost goes up the more of them that you buy, and each one only gives you a single resource every 12 minutes. You can buy new colonists for 250 credits to assign to the embassy there, which if you assign three you can shorten the wait period to 2 minutes, for only 750 credits. Each system as you go along increases in level, so by the time you get to the fifth system, you need level 5 colonists to work in the embassy. After four solid hours of playing and doing these missions, I got my starting group of 5 colonists to level 6.
It seems as though a lot of aspects of this game as designed to waste your time. You waste time waiting for all of your trade goods to be made, waste time waiting for tourists to them come and buy them. If you want to do contracts for extra resources or items, you literally need to wait 5+ real life minutes to see if they succeed or not.
Then we get to the area where they tried to make a sort of real time strategy game within their colony management sim game. You can bring five of your colonists, with there being five different classes, each with their own special active abilities and passives. So far it sounds good, but they will do nothing without your instructions. You have to rapidly click around to move them, to have them shoot. If you stop clicking on the enemy so that you can go and use the doctors healing ability, or the strategists sniper shot, or the engineers grenades, all of your guys will just stop shooting or moving and just stand there taking hits to the face. The amount of money you get from just taking over the planets and killing things, is actually much better than anything in the colony; but it is terribly boring and unresponsive.
If they had perhaps made it turn based, with structures and rocks and trees as cover; even if it still has the same shallow depth as it does now in the RTS way it plays, I think it would have been much improved. As it stands you basically just use all your special abilities as fast as you can on the boss, spam click on him, run away, spam click, run away, use your special abilities, repeat until dead.
I would really, really like for this game to be better than it is, because I can see so much fun and potential here. For a ten year old game, it looks and sounds great. It just drops the ball in so many different ways, it is a real shame. I would not recommend this game.
