OP impression special:
The Spatials
The Good: Impressive effort and already way more complete than Spacebase 9 ever will be with plenty of interesting sub systems and rewarding overall campaign progress. It also mixes some ideas from other games (4X comes to mind) and creates its own interpretation of the genre, which is rather refreshing.
The Bad: Still in early access, so its still missing plenty of sub systems, which currently break the actual game progress in a way that makes the game very unchallenging.
The combat is a bit wonky, uninspired and boring, which is fortunately not a huge focus atm.
The Outlook: This is looking damn good. It already has enough sub systems to allow for an engaging play session. If they manage to make the combat a bit more interesting (which I dont know whether they might plan that) and add the remaining sub systems (very good chance of that happening), this will easily rank among the better games in the genre.
Basic Gameplay:
The gameplay is basically divided into 2 parts - building and combat. Lets start with building:
The biggest hurdle currently is, that the game doesnt have any actual tutorial. There is a comprehensive ingame manual that explains the game mechanics, but reading through that is hardly a good first impression. In the beginning I was a bit lost and and failed to see the point of the game, since I missed many mechanics. For a basic understanding, you need to know the overall playing structure: Build your base - Finish missions - earn ressources - Build Planetary ressource mines, and repeat.
Another source of confusion is that the needs system of the units isnt fully implemented yet, meaning you have no actual urge to build anything since nothing happens if the units hover at 0 food or 0 sleep. It is clear that they havent implemented these features yet to allow for easy testing of other game features, which they currently want feedback for.
Once I understood that, I started tinkering around with what I can do in the game currently, and was surprised to see how much depth they are going for here. This is a small part of the tech tree and the equipment of one character:
That intrigued me, so I dug a bit into it and tried to figure out how the game is meant to be played and build some basic structures in my home base.
1. Living rooms, beds, decoration.
2. Kitchen, work preparation station
3. storage, storage containers
4. Metal works, work shop... wait. Why can I not build anything in the metal workshop? Hmmm, apparently I need aluminum. Where do I get that?
Then I figured out that the game is not only taking place in my base/my planet, but I can zoom out to the galaxy map and make missions and visit merchants on other planets. Those missions give you a set amount of ressources, and might enable you to mine that planet for a steady income of ressources. This means you either do a mission which gives you aluminum or you do a bounty, which will give you mining permits for that planet, which in turn could give you a steady income of aluminum. The caveat here is that bounties havent been implemented yet, which means that you can currently mine a planet with 2 clicks as they are considered yours to mine from the get go.
Once you have more ressources, you can unlock more options in the tech tree, which in turn allows you to build more objects, which in turn requires more ressources.
It all works surprisingly well, and I love the aspect of making missions on planets to build steady mine buildings, raising my overall income with plenty of building options. I cant judge the balancing on this since there is no real fail state atm without the unit needs.
Onto the combat:
The missing unit needs and the instant mining are a problem for the current gameplay progression, but these are omissions that are already being worked on. However,I have no clue whether the combat might see some improvements and that is so painfully simple that it drags down the overall impression of the game a bit even though you dont spend that much time with it currently. The only thing you do here is left clicking to move your units and keeping your left mouse button pressed to shoot. What you'll do the most is walking after fleeing enemies to kill them, which is rather boring. A simple change, like allowing to control multiple squads would improve this a lot since there really is no strategy to this part atm.
Unlike other Early Access games, this game already has a sizeable amount of content and features, but also unlike other Early Access games, its not really "enjoyable" to play yet, as there really is no progress with some crucial elements missing. As it is, its a cute sandbox, but a very, very, promising one.
Highly recommended with promising future potential, be aware that the game is still missing a lot atm though.
>----------< Highly Recommended >----------<
Outland
Secrets of Grindea
Cosmochoria
Sanctuary RPG
Cosmonautica
The Spatials
Boson X
>----------< Recommended >----------<
Absolute Drift
Refunktion
Roguelight
FreeHolder
Dr. Spacezoo or: How I learned to stop shooting and save the animals
>----------< Decent-ish >----------<
Kraden's Crypt
Antbassador
The Lion's Song
Greebroll
Bonfire
Super III Alpha
Beyond Gravity
Parallel Horizon
Atom Smasher
>----------< Bleh >----------<
Galactic Parcel Service