7.5 / 10.
Graphics are good, sound and music are decent and don't grow tiresome.
This game is good, but it's short -- I beat the game at 3.5 hours with all but one achievement ("Store 50 dark matter" which I think would probably take about another couple hours of play tops). I also played about 20 minutes of endless at the time of writing. I liked it and had fun with it. If you like incremental games, I'd recommend trying the demo. The full game is a direct continuation and expansion.
It feels maybe a little undercooked. The mechanics are a little simple. I would have liked there to be more of a reason to make certain connections instead of others. Instead, you just maximize the number of connections. The modifiers for the homework kind of change the strategy a little, but as far as I can tell the limitations about overlapping, and the way the math works out you should just create as many connections for every planet as you can. It's just easier to find more planets and add them to the network than it is to try to min-max an 8 planet network.
I would have liked there to be more to the destroyer and pirates in the game. I would have liked there to be more explanation and more consequences to what's going on. They got introduced in one run, and I immediately bought the auto destroyer tech the next rebirth. I never had to think about them again.
I'm not quite sure why Science is used as the resource for finding planets. It seemed more natural to me that new planets should be revealed simply over time rather than costing anything. Especially because once the opposition is revealed, it's clear that finding more planets is the way to start the challenge clocks ticking. And if the alien planets do scale over time, they could scale beyond the player and force them to rebirth. I don't think that's bad. You are a little subject to RNG with the planets placed -- I got a few runs with an inordinate number of dead cores and black holes -- but the story concept here is that you have to keep starting over to survive. So why wouldn't the player start over more?
The pacing is a little uneven. I felt like I just flew through the early stages of this game. Getting 3 dark matter (or more!) just seems excessive with such a short tech tree. 1 or 2 maximum would have been much more my speed. The game seemed to introduce pirates and aliens at the same time -- literally 5 minutes apart for me -- which was also just too fast. Also, I think there are two kinds of aliens, but I got to the last mission before I figured that out.
Before that, once you get to the boss, the game suddenly gets incredibly grindy. Just getting enough Science to research level 10 capital ships was, completely by itself, about an hour of play on a single level. And it wasn't particularly active play, either. I would just explore a planet, connect it to the trade network, and then wait for the mills to generate enough production to build the upgraded structures. Just very slow scaling up to being able to afford the tech I needed to win.
The game keeps telling you that if you don't move fast that the defenses of the aliens will be too great, but I can't actually tell that that has happened. For most of the game, I instantly wiped out alien planets.
There is some lack of feedback in the game, and some lack of instruction. I'm still not at all sure how the influence mechanic or tourism mechanics work. Once I beat the boss, which gates those mechanics, I had 8 or 10 dark matter so I could easily just finish the whole tree. They're introduced so late, and you only use them in basically one mission. It took me awhile to realize that when influence isn't high enough -- which is completely down to RNG, because even though I had 50 planets, the "blood" boss planet doesn't care about influence, and then I had 2 alien planets way out at the galactic rim by themselves surrounded by alien planets I *had* captured... but that had no tourism themselves. I had to buy the Tourism upgrade about 20 or 30 times. It wasn't difficult or challenging. It was just tedious because I was just waiting for the 200 or 300 Terascience it took to expand the tourism bubbles that far. And, yeah, I could have just sent in the capital ships, but it kind of felt like I wasn't supposed to do that. Honestly I'm surprised I could still buy capital ships. Genuinely, I'm surprised that the end game didn't introduce a new planet type with a new tourism structure that you had to build. That's what I was expecting.
Oh, also, it wasn't explained how the infinity button on the lower left panel works. For those that need to know, if the infinity is "on" then all sites will autobuy mills, labs, and trade connections. If the infinity button is off, then all autobuyers are disabled. Once I found this button, I never toggled an autobuyer any other way again. It's useful to turn this off if you suddenly need production to emergency construct destroyers or capital ships. That's about it. Otherwise, just leave it always on.
I did find a handful of minor things I consider bugs or design issues. Overall they're small, but I definitely noticed them. They kind of make the game feel a bit less polished.
1. On rare occasions, planets can spawn where network connections already exist. This can make it really difficult to click on the planet. I mean, you're going to want to delete the trade connection anyways, but doing that is sometimes just a little awkward. Especially if you're really zoomed out, it's an alien planet, you didn't have enough productivity to send a large enough fleet of capital ships, and you're scrabbling to select the planet again.
2. Pirate attacks get this big red warning sign when they hit a connection. Hostile alien planets... are just red dots. They're easy to lose, especially when they spawn inside your network.
3. The autobuy is both a little too good, and a little incomplete. Like it doesn't autobuy science and it doesn't autobuy sensors. But it will autobuy trade connection upgrades (thank god), mills, and labs. The weird part is that there are pop-ups for trade connections, mills, and labs that you can click on, but science upgrades and sensor upgrades both require you to open a window and do something there. It's odd. The thing that had some QoL features to it also has the autobuyer. While science and sensors never do. Honestly, I think the autobuyer should be something on the tech tree. And if it actually is something on the tech tree, then I didn't see it because you get too many upgrades between runs.
4. Sensors, destroyers, and capital ships *never* start a run unlocked, and it's annoying. Yes, it's true that the story is that we're in a new universe. But the story is also that I'm remembering the stuff I need. It's a little irritating to be always reactive about it.
5. Holy cow, you need to change the "delete" network connection button. You put an X icon in the upper right of a pop-up window that you have to click twice to delete. No! I can't tell you how many time I deleted a connection on accident.
6. If the number of trade connections exceeds 100 -- which I think it must at the end of the game given the costs involved -- then in the information panel shows something like 72/++ for upgraded and total trade connections. You can't tell how close the thing is to finishing a total network upgrade. Which is important because if you reveal an alien planet next, you don't want to be resource starved if you need to build an emergency capital fleet. (That's assuming the alien defenses actually improve over time, I never witnessed this.) Just expand that window to be the same size as the rest. It's a little bit to show the totals in most cases. I need to know how much longer I'm going to be waiting.
I know I sound harsh here, but I did like this game. It was fun! If you like incrementals, give it a try.
I am genuinely looking forward to more from Short Scale! It's a good first outing!
Edit: Spelling, clarity.
