Necro time! Just discovered the game after Nookrium played it and uploaded a video of it. Streamed the game much longer than I probably should have today and had ridiculous fun.
Since a lot must've changed since the last post and I have no idea what it was like, I'll try my best to describe the game.
Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/392080/Wayward_Terran_Frontier_Zero_Falls/-If I had to pick what games it most resembles, I'd say the game is some mix of Reassembly, Starsector, a sprinkling of Heat Signature, and some vague relation to FTL. The look/design of the ship and station interiors reminds me of Heat Signature and so does the hazard of getting suddenly blown out into space if you go out the wrong airlock or the room you're currently standing in suddenly finds itself missing a chunk.
-The ship combat controls are pretty much just like Starsector and take some getting used to but work great once you're comfortable with them.
-The game has predefined ship hull sizes/shapes, but you can design the interior of the ship however you want. I've spent a load of time having fun with this as it's kind of like a design puzzle. How do I fit all the subsystems, the corridors, and route plasma conduits to power it all within this given space? What's going to happen to this ship once holes are punched into it, are there redundancies? Am I likely to lose access to some parts of the ships? Tons of things to consider if you want to push a hull to its limits.
-The game is moddable with a a bunch of extra ships in the workshop. I think most Starsector ships have been added to this game as mods.
Ships for the most part don't function on a HP system. When you get shot, there's some degree of penetration and destruction of your hull and pixels will visibly get altered and destroyed on the hull, causing pretty spectacular-looking battle damage. This destruction isn't limited to the hull you see while piloting the ship, it also carries to the inside of the ship, which leads to my next point.
-You can walk around ships/stations and have to man consoles to do things like fly a ship. You have to deal with depressurization, gaping holes in corridors that will suck you out into space, fires, ship gunfire/explosions hitting you directly. You internal ship design will really matter in battle.
-You can board ships and stations, whether or not they want you to if you manage to line up your docking port with theirs at close enough range(pretty hard against a moving target in battle). Once on ships an stations, you can use guns to dispatch enemy crewmen or alien infestations.
-Ships are free and this lets you experiment and have as much dumb fun as you want. Your base is an old terraforming station which seems to have the ability to pump out any ship blueprint as long as it's within a certain cap and your character is one of many clones created for the sole purpose of doing a sassy AI's dirty work(the sassy AI is great and I'm not just saying that because he controls my cloning chamber). Dying/losing your ship is not a big deal and the AI will even encourage you to go kill yourself on multiple occasions. The respawn mechanics seem to be integrated into the story, which is a nice little touch.
Overall I find the game pretty enjoyable. I don't know how much content is in it at the moment, but the mechanics are going to keep me entertained for a while. If you like Starsector and want some more gameplay depth/complexity, you'll love this game.