After finally being able to play the game, I agree with the others. Mediocre at best. 5/10 at most.
It starts with the clunky interface. The buttons don't react immediately, as if they have a delay, sometimes you can't even select them correctly. Difficult to explain. Let's just say: they click and feel "off". So it already started with a bad impression.
The enviroment (space) is totally boring and repetitive. Every sector looks kinda the same: some planets, some asteroids, some debris, maybe a sun, maybe a neutral spaceship to trade with, maybe an enemy. There is nothing exciting or different in any sector of the system.
Steering the spaceship feels like steering a whale. This could be realistic somehow, but it's just too damn sluggish. Also its speed is that of a slug. The speed is so slow that it feels like you are staying at the same location the whole time. Even when you have crossed multiple sectors. It feels like you are not getting anywhere. No feeling of progress. When I reached Titus Nova (the target planet of the game), I still had the feeling I was barely 10 meters away from the position I took off.
Orientation in space is awkward. You can follow the pointer (which points to Titus Nova) in your minimap, but it's a bad idea. Sometimes in front of you is only empty space (no asteroids, no debris, no planet) and you wonder if you are still flying in the right direction. Well... you are most likely not. Even when the pointer shows in this direction you are most likely flying into the wrong direction - and fly out of the map, out of any playable areas, maybe even against an invisible wall without noticing it. This will cause you steer around randomly left, right, up, down trying to figure out the real direction. This issue can only be solved one way (which is not explained in the game): you must manually set a waypoint in your map. Preferably some 2-3 sectors away from you. Then you can actually see the waypoint in 3d space and orientate yourself after that. And after reaching it, you must repeat that step again. This is essential to know, otherwise it will cause a lot of frustration.
Sometimes civilists on your ship revolt, start serial killing, the ship has a rat plague, or an alienvirus infects people. Then you must "send" one of your 6 crew members to fix the problem (just a timer which runs for a minute or two). The really annoying thing is, that these events happen every 2 minutes. Way too frequently. This is by far the most annoying thing in the whole game. Also these events make no sense most of the time. You fix it, and it's done. I think the crew member who fixed the problem doesn't even get a skill point for that (maybe I didn't look correctly here, but I didn't notice an improvement), which makes the events ultimately obsolete. They are just there to annoy you and nothing else.
Then you can build a city in your ship: you can build a health center, a police center etc. which should help you to remove these annoying events - except they don't seem to help much at all. I have built up to city level 3... don't know if they disappear if you have full fledged city. But to be honest this city building doesn't make any sense, because a giant spaceship would already have a medical center and a security station. We have seen this often enough in Star Trek, haven't we? I mean wtf... why bother the player with this shit?
These two things (random ship events and city building) feel like they were just placed in after the game was finished. They feel dissolved from the rest of the game and only justify their existence in regards to each other: the events justify that you must build a city, and the city is there to justify the events. This is bad game design. Very bad. In fact they didn't even exist in the beginning: When you look at the early screenshot in OP post, you see there is no menu section (numbers from 1-5) for a "city". And even though the random ship events might have existed already, they were less frequent (recalled that from watching a stream back then). Afterwards they must have increased them to a point it became unbearable. I don't know why they did that. Maybe they thought the game needs more content. Imo the game would have been better without this crap.
One of the pros of the game is, that you can get it over with quickly. Take the simplest difficulty, the preconfigured "combat ship" (important), 6 random people as your crew members, put the civilists on your ship on small rations, and fly straight ahead to the goal. You'll get through the game without any planet mining, quests, or city building. You'll just encounter 2-3 enemies, which you can kill because of the combat ship. This takes not more than 1 hour. Also this worked better than two other walkthroughs where I took the long-range-research-ship, was carefully circumventing enemies, searching for planets, did mining, and quests: it was all for nothing, because sometimes crew members crashed on planets, died because of some quest decisions, and ultimately led to losing the game.
Some of the positive things:
- Combat is okay. Nothing to talk about much though.
- The Mining minigame is okay.
- Music and sounds are also okay.
- Some replay value: you can slightly configure the ship. You can choose different routes to the goal. You can change the difficulty (more enemies). That being said, the overall game does not really get you hooked to try them out.
Finally... do you feel like Captain Kirk or Picard? Not really. While you are fixed to a chair in first person view, you cannot really enjoy being captain, enjoy the view, etc... because first, these stupid events on your ship annoy you every single minute, and second, there is nothing to enjoy in the view anyways, because everything looks the same.
As a kickstarter backer I have found many parallels to Bard's Tale 4, for example: Combat is okay on both. Music and Sounds are okay on both. Interface is questionable on both. Level design is uninspired and repetitive on both. Both have added pointless filler stuff, trying to make their games longer and more complex than they should be (well at least IntoTheStars can be done quick). Both have made annoying things a major factor in the game. Can't say I'm too happy about that.
, however it shows the depth and challenge of the game system.
