IDLE_DIRECTIVE

Let's start with the good bits: I like the overall vibe and style, as well as the core mechanic of arranging different components in a limited grid,

And while there are little flaws in the presentation and lack of some QoL features, there is one thing I will not forgive: Arbitrary timers.
The game will constantly force them upon you, where you do nothing but stupidly wait. 3 minutes, 15 minutes, 6 hours. Yes, 6 hours, or 360 minutes, where you can be swimming in resources and still do nothing else than leaving the game open for 6 hours.

Or, you know, you could buy an upgrade that gives you 1h of offline progress, like in those Freemium mobile games everybody loves so much. Or you could spend a bunch of prestige points to shave a whole 10 % off of it! WOW! Many value! Great fast!

So yeah: I don't know what the thought process was, but I have yet to see someone thinking a large timer constitutes enjoyable or engaging gameplay. It rather feels like a very cheap and easy way to pad out the available content; And make no mistake, the content is rather limited.

You'll have a bunch of nonsensical icons on a map, of which 95% are the same thing, just with a different artwork associated with it, and a different distribution of the two resources available. Same goes for the fractions, just that they sell slightly different items.

Other than that there is no lore, no dialogue, and nothing happening. You could spend half an hour collecting resources and another 15 minutes of w a i t i n g to repair some random reactor, and the reward is... nothing. Well, you get another point to spend in prestige, but literally nothing else happens. Cool.

And the icons on the map are rather... creative. A pile is represented by a triangle; Okay, I guess. A ruin by a button; Probably supposed to be a building? But why is a wreckage a pill? Why the carcass a weird cage? A crater a mario-pipe? Well, as I said, those are nit-picks.

So yeah, I am still going to give it a chance and play for a while, but if there's no big turn-around, I don't expect this review to change.

Fun for like an hour than becomes really unfun as you unlock the map and prestige. just a slow slog of not much happening. the upgraded parts you get from the map poins offer little change and the one thing that seems like it can have an effect are the prestige skill thought i cant unerstand why the prestige points barely come in, it seems like you would just finish the game without prestiging a single time thus never using the game changing perks. i dont have the patience for the game and if this is the 1.0 of the game and not an early access i doubt it is likely to to change alot so i dont think im finishing it which is why im giving it a negative review

This game ran out of content within a few hours. I stuck it out for longer because there were a lot of initial positive reviews, but I don't think it was worth it. I did a prestige and got a bunch of prestige upgrades and they let me collect resources faster and move faster. But it doesn't really matter, because I've spent the last 5 hours just waiting for a 6 hour timer to count down.

There's also a surprising amount of jank for such a small game. There are some fields that you can type into where it seems like the typing doesn't update anything, you have to type and then use the up/down buttons to cause the game to register the new value. Or my auto-explore is stuck because it is trying to go to a certain ruin but it is using the wrong coordinate, and it is now just waiting at that coordinate. Or how it warns you if you try to recycle an in-use component but not if you try to delete it.

But the biggest issue is that there's just not much to do. There aren't that many parts or tiers to them, and you pretty quickly have a good enough bot that you can easily collect enough resources to just spend all of your time repairing things aka waiting for timers that can't be sped up. I only have two gameplay-changing prestige perks left: one is a final augment that gives you free augment points (why?), and the other is the replicator which sounds interesting but feels ultimately meaningless since I'm swimming in parts.

It's sad because there are good bones to this, but it feels like little content was added and then these timers were added to pad out the game time.