I was curious about the game and wanted to try it before buying, since I have no idea who the devs are and I find it too pricey.
So I went and tried before I buyed.
Beforehand, I know it's an alpha, and I think this game (much like not-so-similar games like RimWorld) has great potential.
No problem in jumping to
summary to ~~evade~~ my wall of text - I'll probably state what has already been stated somehow.
The latest alpha is way too buggy and the AI is
way too dumb to be playable without being annoyed.
I'd confirm that people should wait a long while before buying this, because it's yet too buggy and has little content.
The random events (invasions and derelicts - remembers me the awesomeness of FTL) and overall building and basic day-to-day base operation (people moving around, etc) shows the potential that the game has.
Alpha issues (reasons to not play the current version):
1. Your space guys will not care for they survival at all, and will die in the most stupid situations. Oxygen Recyclers blew up and your base has no oxygen? They will just run around instead of going for the airlock to get suits, so they can actually do something in 8 minutes of oxygen. Like building another recycler, which takes less than a minute. And since you can't influence them, you are forced to watch lots of stupidy.
Seriously, I saw 6 people die because ONE corridor (the 'connection' between my base and an enemy ship) had no oxygen, but in the room they were, there was an airlock. All they needed to do was to get to the airlock, get a suit, and get back on my base through its airlock.
Even though I find it acceptable because it's an alpha, I played many alphas and never saw such suicidal AI. Hope it gets a lot of work.
2. The help notifications are annoying and some are bugged, and no way to disable them.
3. The decay of equipment is way too fast. With 5 technicians I couldn't keep a little 9-member base properly up. Makes it not fun in the long run.
4. Combat is messed up.
5. Mood system, like the decay, is way too unbalanced (balance, in an alpha!? madness!). I think sad people work less, and they get deeply sad too easy, and takes a loong while to get back to neutral.
6. Keybindings annoy me personally, since I have to move my hand
only to press backspace to cancel and action, which I always end up pressing ESC anyways, which pops up the pause menu. In some menus you must press "X" to go back or close something, and I'm pretty sure everyone press ESC in those moments. (Yes, I'm boring like this, but even DF doesn't annoy me)
Good points (currently and to the future):
1. As debvon posted above (your post made me go listen to it, which I did lots of times, and then I decided to try out the game), the OST IS amazing, specially for people who like spacey stuff.
2. Invaders "dock" their ship in your base, creating more rooms (as posted above by Sergius), which is funny and in the future could create a variety of tactics to dealing with invaders (sealing your doors and destroying their oxygen recyclers, or simply making a hole in their hull).
3. FTL-like random events, currently involving people pissed off with your base-design, pirates talking weird stuff, desperate travelers that won't accept no as an answer, peaceful travellers looking for a place to settle and maybe one or two others. This can be expanded for much awesomeness.
4. Graphics are neat and bases looks cool inside. (I like 2D isometric exatcly like they did
). If they add "diagonal" walls and floors and wallpaper/hull/flooring customization it would look great outside, too. The characters could look a lot better, and so their animations, though.
5. Personality traits, thoughts and relationships (friends/enemies). Even though it might not be implemented or working yet, it already shows the devs' concern about the 'personal' part of characters and making you actually want to care about them (don't do that in this alpha). Therefore Fun and
Fun things could happen in the future since, like in DF, friends of someone who died will get sad and have a bad thought appear in their Spaceface (a.k.a Thoughts Screen).
I think that's what I have to say about it..
Summary:
+1 has great potential, could become very fun, engaging and good looking.
+1 wait before buying, the current state is not worth the price (neither guarantees it will ever be worth it).
And I'm a bit concerned since it seems to be written in lua and I only used lua for very simplistic stuff, but I'm not experienced in it anyway.