I played this a bit and this is mostly a shameless copy of Rimworld by a bigger budget professional studio. Now you think this might be great, but the problem is they're not copying everything and similar to Haemimont's previous "management/sim" game I played, Surviving Mars, it feels like a rushed out of the door release lacking content and in desperate need of big expansions.
The bad:
- fuck all weapon types, there's like 4 guns plus some crossbows and spears. Rimworld probably had more tribal weapons in 1.0, let alone guns, than this game does total.
- expeditions are a Frostpunk style CYOA/event kind of thing done solely through event choices in a pop-up window with no world map travel mechanic, you can't get ambushed, go to towns to trade, die from emergent gameplay stuff in random events or lack of supplies etc.
- no tunnel/underground mining (essentially no terrain deformation)
- no human enemies (and thus loot), only hostile wildlife
- in general you can see that this is a sanitized corporate product avoiding problematic themes like slavery, drugs, cannibalism, organ harvesting and the other rimworld memes
- of course the first in-game relationship that spontaneously formed between my colonists was a lesbian pairing, somehow I doubt it was just a random fluke of a dice roll
- no random generation/re-rolling of colonists when starting a game, you need to pick from the choices available in the pool.
The good:
- you can build houses with multiple floors and stairs and ladders, in general the structure building system is decent
- there are fortifications you can build like towers, walls and gates
- the building system is more friendly
- rain seems to piss off your colonists if they get wet from no roofs (rather than just no roof alone causing negative mood)
- you need to study (observe) species to identify them, learn of their traits and be able to plan them (in the case of plants).
- I enjoyed making a ton of space money by mass producing wine
- scenarios change how you can gain new colonists (none possible for military scenario, trader scenario menas you need to hire and pay them, stranded scenario is more like Rimwold where you find more survivors in events), also scenario win conditions are different.
