▼ Not recommended
11 hrs
Before I begin the review, I will say that I would give it a thumbs middle. It's a polished little idler and I can't say I didn't have fun, really. It just completes out the vast majority of discovery content quickly. Most of the upgrades are pure stat bonuses without significant options for gameplay change.
A weapon or two might unlock a status effect, but you never open say....more equipment slots or better ships. Or more crew. Or new planets beyond what you can see from the start. The chipset system is fine, I guess, kind of "pet" style from other games. The chipset system also felt like it had "correct" choices and obvious useless ones.
Changing equipment is largely pointless until you get to late game, minor statistical variance gives you slight edges, but I never felt I was outwitting an opponent. Only one boss necessitated it and even then it was just, "Oh, for this boss they just put one gun that's a hard counter to it. And apparently it's a hard counter to everything other than one different boss".
Was it worth $5? Oh, absolutely. Exactly that and no more. It ate up one Saturday, I experienced 90% of the content in one go, and I doubt many will play this for months because you can 100% cap your upgrades on crew (save for one person) *before you leave the tutorial zone*. Credits were an inconvenience instead of a need. My only interaction was realizing I was short and being irked I had to jet off to my inventory to sell half a stack of salvage to give me millions enough for the next hour and a half of play.
No real automation of any sort, I was still clicking the same boxes around bopping the level 90 bosses as I was clicking around fighting the level 1 starter fight. You can unlock people who go harvest materials and kill bad guys for you, but it can be somewhat slow going and requires either too much babysitting at the low end of durations or them doing everything for you and checking out at high end. Once you reach that point, you play with equipment loads for maybe 20 minutes until you find the "solution" to the big bosses and congratulations you've...uh. Well. Done it I guess.Edit: Turns out the only reason I even needed to change equipment was that my suspicions were correct and that the autorepair just...quit sometimes for bad programming reasons. It apparently has been fixed but knowing that the only real challenge existed because of a bug is hilarious to me. I have switched from a lean thumbs up to a lean thumbs down.
It is well polished, knows what it's about, and runs pretty clean. It offers pretty much nil value for people who have largely exhausted the genre. The bones of it don't feel like there's a lot of room for growth, either. Most of the systems are closed loops to completion already and what feels like it could be expanded on is not (to me) compelling enough to ever come back. It's worth $5, but mostly I wish I had just played Gaiadon, Xiuzhen, ITRTG, Farmers Against Potatoes, Magic Research, Melvor, Cookie Clicker...something else instead.
Conclusion: It makes the numbers go up dependably in a clean, clear, and polished fashion of small percentage progressions. So does a stopwatch.
▼ Not recommended
51 hrs
tldr: The babysitting required for this "idle" game is tedious with no new content after about an hour.
I liked the basic gathering and combat stuff. It's very reminiscent of rune scape in it's iconagraphy and skilling. The graphics, UI, and many elements are well done. Onboarding doesn't really get you familiar enough with the systems, which is bad in a systems based game. Ultimately what I don't like about it is a matter of balance. You work your way up to a boss fight, which costs materials to enter, materials to keep up your repairs/ammo and the drop rate for the upgrade item is 50%, 10 of which are needed to progress your gear to level 10. You need 80 of these to unlock the second tier for your basic parts. You'd need probably another 200 if you wanted to get all the variations for your weapons/scoops parts. Then you upgrade like normal for levels 11-19. Then, you guessed it, now you need a blue upgrade chip. Again 50% from a second boss that requires tickets and such to enter. The boss has health regen now, so go back and farm for a fire chip that can be used to burn away his healing drones (you can't interact with them otherwise at your level). I have 5 stars in the taskmaster with everything maxed out, but only level 2 for some of my crew members because gas is so rare, which means science barely gets used. Yes, just gamble for gas after you max out your taskmaster, but it shouldn't take that long just to get a basic resource.
All that to say, this juice isn't worth the squeeze. It ultimately isn't that fun or innovative enough.
edit after more playtime: Even with 100% drop rates for enemy cores it's not more fun. I briefly had some artificial joy when I figured out an exploit to get near infinite credits, but even that didn't make it fun for long. Looking at the message boards the drop rates were 12% in beta. This developer just doesn't get it. Even their suggestion of use a debuffing weapon to me is at a 25% chance per hit. It's obvious they didn't playtest this from a user perspective.
