Astra Exodus

This game is getting dragged in reviews, and I don't understand why. It's a unique entry in the 4X Space Genre with M002 turn-based campaign map and a 2-D RTS combat layer in space and ground battles. I've produced and hour long video with more thoughts. I also have a few gripes and lots of tutorial-like details. If you give it a watch, but still give it a pass you'll have given the game more thought than any of these negative reviewers did. Seriously...posting a review for others to see without even an hour of play time before posting. Ridiculous. [url=https://youtu.be/zwb0PYWaIO8][/url]

With thousands of hours invested in Stellaris, I can honestly state that this game is both a fun and a refreshing take on the space 4X genre. Does it have some grammar issues? Sure. But, one should be willing to overlook something like this especially when you consider that the game is the product of a single Uruguayan developer/programmer. Of course, you'll need to spend more than 20 minutes to begin to properly experience what this title has to offer, so I would challenge you to do so. Thanks for the cool game, Dev.

I am very troubled by this game. I absolutely don't want to hurt an indie developer's pocket book, especially when they have good ideas and are still working on the game. At the same time the game is six months after launch. I've played it a good deal more than my Steam account shows due to a friend who can't return his copy. The Good: --A very MOO2 feel, with touches of MOO1. --The races are distinct. --Custom race making allows for a lot of options and potential replayability. --3/4 of the game has really good ideas, making improvements on MOO, such as the transport system, a little more depth in resources, fresher combat, albeit needing some work still, etc. --The game is stable (have crashed once before inside the first 200 turns). --The Dev is friendly and responsive. --The Dev has kept working on the game. The Bad: --About 1/4 of the game needs some serious QoL upgrades. UI will not win awards (some parts are ok but others just aren't), some tool tips and descriptions give no meaningful info (example, galactic events take place with no clear indication they are having any impact), research speed needs tweaking (can finish all the research easily before you are even allowed to win), sometimes your current research will be suddenly completed when you are trading for other researches, combat works but the timing is "off," etc. --There are several memory leaks, acute and chronic. Acutely, occasionally switching screens and other things will suddenly cause the game to respond at a snail's pace until the app is restarted. I'm sure it will crash if you don't. Chronically the game slows down more the longer you are in one session until you restart the app. --The auto save works but the limit on how many auto saves the game will keep is broken. It never gets rid of any so your save file will really build up. That appears to add to the game slow down. It responds faster again if you get rid of most of the saves. The Ugly --The game is half a year past official launch and still feels like an EA game. The Hope The Dev has kept working at the game and often fixes problems that are brought to their attention quickly. For as long as that continues the game will improve, perhaps remarkably. The Bottom Line If it ever reaches it's full potential it will be worth the money and better than any MOO type out there but it's still currently in an EA state. It's worth supporting if you want a chance to see the game finished but like all EA's, it's not there til it's there.

I'd like to be able to give this game a positive review, because it's great to see a developer who keeps at it after their game's initial reception is less than stellar. And I don't think the actual gameplay is as bad as reviews overall make it out to be; there's what could be a decent if somewhat content-light game here, with a few interestingly non-standard features, like mining and colony priority. But... 1) The bugs. Oh, the bugs. Like sometimes not being able to load my savegame, because the game just sticks on "Loading..." forever. Not being able to [i]save[/i] the game, because the save button is permanently grayed out. Having the End Turn button permanently break, and the key command for going to the next turn only work if I first go into the help video menu and close it again. Having help videos only play if I go into the menu, spam-click one for a while, close the menu again, wait for the video sounds to start playing even though the menu is now closed, and then re-open the menu and hope I didn't miss too much. Having the game freeze after a battle, or just randomly. Galaxy map navigation controls that sometimes don't work. 2) The AI. In Astra Exodus' defense, it's hardly the only 4x to break down when faced with a peaceful strategy, but in my game as a Charismatic species, I've successfully established a long-lasting peace with everyone and am far ahead and close to victory (if I can convince it to load my save...*sigh*), with the only warship I've had to build being one I produced in the late-game for fun, just to go monster-hunting. I've only had to give one gift, even, though I did hire a +diplomacy hero to help me out. In other games, even if the AI is eventually going to fail against friendliness, it'll resist a bit more at the start, and make me have to do some more wheeling and dealing to get into a winning position. 3) The messiness. Some of this is aesthetic, e.g. different graphics appearing side-by-side but having different art styles (stars and planets, for instance) and inconsistent pixel sizes, certain pieces of text distorting during zoom and scroll, empire and peculiarity icons becoming illegible when downscaled for display under planets on the galaxy map, and inconsistent fonts. But then on top of that, you have the interface, which has some weird quirks (like having to drag pops around on the planet screen by their heads because of the way the "Board" button is designed, or having to re-create a ship from scratch when modifying the design-- why can't it just copy over the existing stuff to a new design for me, instead of showing a pop-up message telling me to start over?) the numerous instances of poor grammar and awkward writing (which pretty much killed any interest I might have had in playing the campaign mode), the sketchy math where you're sometimes not sure whether a particular building or ship system is bugged or not because the combination of limited documentation and limited display in the UI doesn't give you enough information to know if it's doing what it's supposed to, or even [i]anything[/i], plus the definite bugs, and it all adds up in terms of the overall impression. I hope that, over time, this game continues to improve, and eventually makes it to a state where I can recommend it. As it is, there's not enough content or originality to balance out the flaws and price.

Reading the first reviews, i must say i was very much on my fence. I am an avid 4x gamer since Master of Orion in 1993 and my first interest is space 4x. When the latest patch was about to be released, i decided to give the game a go. I must say, i am not a fan of the artwork on galaxy level, it is subpar to similar games like Stars in Shadow. However, the more and more i play the game, the more i enjoy it. I think it's a decent 4x game with some nice new ideas. The game covers all the aspects one expect in such a game: space battles (also with a battle arena coming with the next patch), spying missions, diplomacy etc. ). The game has a few unique features: Ressource management: you cannot accumulate minerals, metals, organics and rares. This means that you have to make sure to produce enough materials when you want to produce a ship or a facility but not too much either. Population management: instead of the 3 working fields in Master of Orion 2, you have 5 type of jobs: Farmers, Miners, Workers, Traders and Scientists. This gives some good work to do at the planet level and you can really focus on the planets special features (see below). Planets: these are very different, some with lots of metals, some with lots of food etc. A lot of "specials" will have a big impact on the planets production: metallic oceans (more metal), native populations (more food), ancient robots (more workers) etc. Another special feature is reseach. It is randomised every time. For each of the nine tech trees, you can always choose only one tech out of three. This means that you have to find another race with a technology you want and exchange it. If you are at war with everyone, you may well fall behind. All in all, this is an interesting game and an impressive one considering it was done by just one guy. I have to say though that the beta testing was lacking and the game still suffers from some problematic bugs.

Lots of bugs or odd design choices. Tactical army combat just plain doesn't work; you can't give orders to your troops. To move fleets to the far left of the screen you have to zoom in and scroll left because the fleet window blocks the left side of the galaxy at full zoom out. Campaign just seems to be impossible even on easiest difficulty. Diplomacy seems bizarre; allies make ridiculous demands then alliance falls apart in 2 turns. Advancing turn mysteriously stops working until you click a bunch of unrelated screen elements. I zoomed all the way out in my first tactical ship combat then couldn't zoom back in. The tactical ship combat is pretty uninspiring in any event. Lots of English grammatical issues, even an auto-assigned ship name "Anus". Event notifications like ships arriving at a system annoyingly do not take you to the system. Might be playable if you don't mind working around these issues but I cannot recommend the game at this point.

I honestly didn't get very far into the game so am likely not the best reviewer, but I very much disliked my experience in the first few turns enough that I closed out. I was super excited to see an art style and seemingly similar design to Stars in Shadow, but was deeply disappointed. To start, it appears like your resources don't stockpile at all. I didn't play enough to test every resource, but it is very apparent for food. If you are generating surplus food for multiple turns but than go in the red for a turn, your population stops growing even though you had generated the food needed last turn. It's also apparent with construction, any production you don't use in the same turn is wasted, even if you que up multiple ships to be built. I can only assume the same is true for the other resources in the game given how the resource bar is set up. Which is a different enough thing that it should have been front and center of the tutorial, but instead all the tutorial covers is all the things that are the same as other 4X games rather than what is different. In addition to that, the UI and control is just really clunky. Such as zooming being the opposite of usual, you scroll up to zoom out, and how when you go to build a ship, you have to blindly guess what each chassis does. Made more difficult by the fact that they are named colorfully instead of things like "frigate" or "cruiser". What I mean by blindly is, I wanted to make a simple scout ship with engines and nothing else. To do this I wanted to use the cheapest ship possible cause, obviously. To figure out what ship was the cheapest, I had to go into each chassis, click build ship and than choose an engine and look at the production cost. If there was a better way to do this, it was not readily apparent as there is nothing that tells you anything about the chassis until you actually go to build the ship itself. All in all it just feels like a lot of design decisions about making the game unique for the sake of being unique rather than the sake of improving game play and that doesn't sit right with me. The one turn resources could be super interesting, if it was actually the focus, but instead it was just there to be different and much of the UI felt the same. Once again, I did not get very far into the game and may not have given it the farest of chances, but I want to enjoy a game the whole time, not only after soaking X amount of time into the game.

A charming, yet flawed indie 4x game that at the end of the day is a mixed bag. The Good: It has a feel and look of a 1990s 4X game. It clearly draws heavily from Master of Orion 2 The Bad: it has a feel and look of a 1990s 4X game. It clearly draws heavily from Master of Orion 2. I really don't like the term "MOO2 Clone" because it's often used as a pejorative, but I do think it's an appropriate comparison in this case. The art style, tech tree, custom race creation, planetary management, and ship design are incredibly similar to MOO2 with some very slight deviations. If you enjoy these aspects of MOO2, as I do, you'll feel right at home here. If you do not, well... Combat, unlike MOO2, is real time. I'm really not a fan of real time combat in 4X games as it very rarely works. A well done tactical combat system would have been preferable but I would have settled for a turn-based strategic combat system as in GalCiv 3. Combat in 4X games is typically bad, worse, or worst, as very few games pull it off well, and it unfortunately doesn't excel here. An ever-so-slightly better version of the combat in Pax Imperia: Imminent Domain is the best way to describe the combat here. The developer has put in a TON of hard work with bug fixes and QOL improvements, but there are some visual design decisions that still remain puzzling. I find myself fighting the UI constantly (very true to form of a 90s 4X game), and there's a need for more tooltips, especially when certain icons are not intuitive. The UI lacks a lot of things that 11-year old me could have shrugged off in 1996, but 35 year old me in 2020 has come to expect. So yeah, if you're looking for innovation and a 4X game that is going to move the genre forward, then look elsewhere. If you're looking for a charming love letter to classic 4X gaming and you enjoy the gameplay of games like MOO2 and Pax Imperia, then you'll likely enjoy it.

Учитывая, что издатель дно, разработчик ОДИН, игра очень даже ничего. Графику вы и так можете видеть по видео и скриншотам, кому не нравится - не берите. + 4х стратегия, пошаговая на глобальной карте, регулируемый реалтайм в боях. + цена средняя + будет дорабатываться и исправляться + есть все виды боёв (космические, наземные) + не клон МОО + дерево технологий и карты случайно генерируемые +- слабенький, но редактор дизайна кораблей, где можно установить или снять оружие, установить ему модификацию и т.п. + желание сделать еще один ход +- глобальные угрозы, которые так себе угрозы, больше похожи на случайные события в МОО2, но от них можно защититься наукой. - вырвиглазная цветовая палитра (будет исправлено) - мультяшная графика (для меня) - дерево технологий состоит из 3х технологий на выбор на каждом уровне, которых всего около 7. Выбрать можно только одну! При обмене технологиями с другой расой почему-то часто выбор на этом уровне закрывается. - нет русского языка, но есть моддинг. Вообще текстов много, сюжет в кампании ими изобилует, но они легки для понимания.

It pains me to give this a down vote. The most important thing, gameplay, is right there. It is a fun, well paced game with some excellent game design choices. Unfortunately, I really hate it when a beta version is offered as a full release. It is far too full of game-breaking bugs. Just not ready.