izigame.me

Nope, sadly I'm part of the 9-hour club.
Here's the pros to start:
- Incredible Music, 11/10
- Fascinating and engaging storyline
- Great voice acting
- Smooth visuals, great attention to detail.
- Engaging. Easy to sink about 9 hours into until you hit the wall.
Which brings me to my real hangups about this game. There's four, all of which undermine the very foundation of the game and replace any engagement with frustration for me.
1. Resources and Labor.
You might imagine this as a city builder or a colony survival sim. It is not. Imagine, for a moment, the logistical realities of living in space. Oxygen is the big one (spoiler, there's no O2 mechanic here.) Food, which is present in the game, is as basic as building an insect farm and forgetting. Water, definitely not here unless you count the water I'm spraying on my crops. Seriously, are they drinking their own urine? Oh, that's another one, because the only waste here is industrial, so nobody in the final frontier is pooping, either. Entertainment, then? Well, there's a couple of monuments and an "Alternative Life Center," but we'll get to stability (aka happiness) later on.
What there is plenty of, though, is jobs to do. Like, way too many jobs for what I'm dealing with. Those familiar with colony sims will recall the basics of assigning certain numbers of workers to each task or building, and carefully managing your labor pool to cover your operational needs. This is management 101 in 21st century city builders. Guess what? Not here. Your only option to control labor demands is to shut down the entire building. So you had better be ready to have five workers for every small storage stockpile to watch over those 100 crates of carbon you picked up. This game tries to be Frostpunk in space, but even Frostpunk had a labor assignment and management system.

2. Clumsy Crew
AKA, the death spiral in space. Working your people too hard leads to labor shortages which you have no real control over, since you need the food or alloys the building makes, but you can't afford the 5 or 15 people needed to man it. Extra Hours leads to overworked which then leads into the Danger threshold. Each stage has an increased risk of accidents occurring (understandable, considering how volatile those boxes of iron can be if you don't have all 5 people in the stockpile. I'm not bitter.) When an accident happens, you hear an explosion and the computer announces it like a weather report. The accident will injure and kill a number of crew members, which go to the infirmary. Those injured workers not watching the iron boxes anymore means that someone else has to stop watching their boxes, which means more overwork, which means more accidents, which takes more workers out of the equation, etc etc ad nauseum.
Lets just say that I've watched perfectly stable sectors collapse into depopulation because of explosive food stockpiles.

3. Stability System
Every sector has a stability rating. You might think that this is something to do with obedience or government, but you'd be wrong. It's happiness. Let's just call it what it is. Here's where I finally threw in the towel and walked away.
You start at a stable base happiness, as with most games. Certain things add a positive score while others add a malus, or a negative score. While this could have been a very dynamic system (people having to eat insect protein to survive, not having good waste-removal and management, bad accommodations, bad entertainment, hopelessness, etc.) So far, the only thing that really impacts happiness is hull integrity (see below) and random, uncontrollable, permanent maluses added throughout the game.
*********** STORY SPOILERS! ***********
So lets get this straight. The earth is destroyed, everyone gets sad. This is understandable, as you were never meant to be the Earth's last hope of survival, that honor fell to your sister ship. Dead Earth Syndrome, -1 happiness. Here's where it gets weird. After this moon-shattering news, your valiant crew of 100-200 astronauts realize that they are the only hope left for all of humankind, they steel their resolve and ~ Just kidding, they just spiral into depression and madness. If you're in the solar system too long, preparing and building up the last remnant of the entire species, the game throws more maluses at you. This is to prod you on into the next chapter, ignoring the fact that running off into uncharted space without preparation is the most reckless plan available to the Earth's best and last hope.
Now you're out of that emotionally toxic solar system, hopefully they'll stop adding more negative points to your... oh, all those maluses are permanent. Oh, and here's a new one! -1 happiness because you left the solar system that was making everyone so sad. Okay, well we'll work on finding our sister shi- and it's been damaged and you're the literal last hope of the species. -1 happiness. That's fine, we'll unload these thousand cryopods, get our resources stocked, renovate our systems and prepare to go off into the great unknown. Oh, what's that? -1 happiness because you've been in the system too long.
Good luck, everyone goes on strike. The final hope of all humans everywhere goes on strike because they feel sad, leaving hull integrity to... well, we'll get that next.

4. Hull Integrity
This is the big one. This is the boogieman, and not a bad mechanic. It's a little strange, though, but not unreasonable. (For example, people working too hard somehow makes the hull less willing to stay put together.) This value is constantly dropping. You have no choice but to consciously focus on getting the resources to patch it up. Every VOHLE and IXION jump you make subtracts 100 points from the total score, representing parts that can never be repaired, so you're not going to be playing Starship Enterprise for very long. Again, perfectly reasonable. Here's where it gets unreasonable: Striking workers.
You need alloys to patch up the hull. You need workers in the EVA bays to make those repairs. If your candy-ass crew gets too far into their feels, they'll go on strike. This does 2 things: first, EVA stations run the risk of striking and being out of operation and leaving the station to literally fall apart. (Let that sink in... the bravest humans, safeguarding the survival of the species, will refuse to work and let everyone die because of the fact that they are our last hope.) Strikes ramp up the overworked hours in a sector, which leads to rampant accidents and every damaged building or overworked sector cause hull integrity to drop faster. So now this emotional breakdown kills everyone.
But I'm supposed to believe that I'm the one that lost their trust.


To wrap it up, I'll add a quick list of absolutely essential revisions that need to be made before I would consider this game worth a purchase. If these things aren't in the game, don't waste your 9.8 hours.
1. Unhappiness mitigation like laws, policies, extra food, religion, police, etc. (similar to Frostpunk)
2. Labor management system, including assigned crew, work hours, multiple shifts and the like.
3. Drop the DES maluses, period. They're so absurd in comparison to the task these people face.
4. More authentic space-based challenges, such as oxygen, water, waste, etc. Real off-world challenges.
5. Explorer mode, to play without being saddled with the linear storyline.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope this helped you find your next favorite game!