When I saw this game show up on my youtube a few weeks ago, I knew this was going to be either an incredible opportunity for a developer to make a systems intensive game, unhindered by graphics and twitchy gameplay; or a gimmicky shallow button pusher that was going to overstay its welcome. Unfortunately, this game is the latter.
When starting Deck & Conn, you will run through a few tutorials that will introduce you to a few mechanics: start up your ship, jump sectors, fight enemies. It all seems a bit... basic, but you are promised being able to manage your crew and being sent on patrols in a dynamic campaign, and even being able to control bigger ships, so hey, not off to a bad start. The problem is that most of it, intentionally or not, is a lie.
At the time of writing, the game appears to just keep repeating the same first patrol over, and over and over. You can upgrade your ship, but in two patrols I've received enough renown to completely max out a ship and have enough left over to max it out twice over. Crew management is limited to picking your initial crew, because you can't replace them, and your choice of officer barely matters as to how that station will operate. Systems have... [i]weird quirks[/i], that definitely feel like developer oversights: for example, if you mistarget something with your turrets, you can't break lock unless you press the "fire" button and, without finishing the turn, then break the lock. You can't manually unload torpedo tubes, the game will decide when it does it for you. If you board a ship, the default option will be to scuttle it, but if you select a party to board it, you can't go back to "scuttle" unless you undock, and re-dock again. This all sounds very petty, but considering there's very few interactions in the game, and systems management is like, 75% all there is to it, it's like if in mario 64 you couldn't turn right after jumping unless you paused and unpaused the game.
Besides its quirkiness, however, the game is just not very fun to play. You're sent on a patrol, boot up your ship, undock, and spend like 2 hours warping between quadrants of a patrol area. Plot course, "execute", charge FTL, plot course, "execute", jump, "execute". Over, and over, and over again. You load supplies before a mission, yet you can't track your supplies anywhere; you are told to spend at least a week on patrol, yet you can't track how much time you're considered to be in one (On my first patrol I spent 12 days out, yet the game counted a hair under 8 which got me the mother of all reprimands), and add to this that you can't really save mid-patrol, so you'll keep going around unsure when you can head back to port.
In the rare case that you do come across an enemy vessel, combat is mildly fun on the opening stages, while you're creeping on an unaware target, and then it becomes a slugging match where very few things matter: you can put your reactor on "emergency" power with no ill effects, having a firing solution matters only for like 2-3 turns while it gets resolved by methods unknown and then never again will go down, you can target the opponent's hull, weapons or engines, but that hardly ever matters, and once the enemy surrenders, you can effectively choose to sacrifice one of your officers to return it to port, or scuttle it. If there's an allied ship around, it will keep shooting to the surrendering ship, unburdening you of this choice. No speed, no maneuvering, no ranges, no sensor interplay, no heat management, no effects of damage on subsystems, *nothing*.
And that's it. There's no star trek-like minor decisions to be taken, no events during a patrol, not even the mildly in-depth system simulation you would expect from this. I'm hesitant to say that all of this has been by-design, since the developer has not acknowledged yet what might/could be a bug, they have pushed out a patch that we have had no notes for, and while the game is opaque enough that I might be just missing some nuance on how these systems work since I've been exposed to very repetitive and limited interactions, this, so far, looks like a game that completely runs out of things to show you around the 1 hour mark, but you'll have to play it for 6 before you do realize that this is the case.
Finally, this game is by the same infamous developer as Objects in Space, which is a game that, very similarly, promised a very in-depth, systems intensive spaceship simulation that turned out to be much more shallow than it showed, had a bunch of weird quirks, and was abandoned mid early access. So despite me absolutely loving the concept of it, I very much have to recommend against buying this in its current state. This honestly just looks like a prototype you would show a publisher and not a released game, and I hope I haven't just been swindled out of my money by a developer trying to make a quick buck with a demo build.
