4/10 Sims/Don't Starve mix in Mars colonization setting.
TLDR: A huge project made by a single dev, currently at something like a pre-alpha stage. The messy tutorial leaves you struggling on your own with the game's cryptic/ugly UI. My recommendation to the dev would be to get paid playtesters and spend maybe another year working solely off their feedback. Or, for a start, exploit the mom/wife/sister first despite all their protests.
Good:
+ obviously a huge interesting game system here that's trying to combine Sims with crafting/survival genre. You gather resources, have a team of characters, each with their stats (like e.g. science or fitness) and needs (hunger, bladder etc). You create some items outside and some inside the habitation dome on the martian surface
+ character customization is insane and even seems to be an overkill for a game that's mostly about economy anyway
+ music is pretty good
So-so:
+/- tutorial, while there, does a rather poor job and leaves many of the mechanics unexplained. I stumbled on my own for a while, and at some point my character just ran out energy before I could build a bed. She was lying on the ground and wouldn't respond to commands. Also she apparently wasn't sleeping(?) because the energy wouldn't restore over time. I didn't know what to do after that and just quit. Or, I never understood why, upon entering the living dome, I'm still seeing just the dome's surface but not the inside of the dome even if I zoom in with a mouse wheel. All this stuff game devs must figure out from playtesting. Like, give the game to a friend, sit next to him and make notes where he has troubles. I did some software testing in my time, and it's one of those games on Steam where I don't even feel like a player but more like a tester of a project in mid-development. I had to double-check if this game is Early Access - yet it's a released game, wow...
Bad:
- detailed character models come with high hardware reqs. I was playing on UX480F Acer laptop from 2020, and could only play on low gfx settings. The terrain actually looks terrible, even if I try higher gfx settings, so it's probably not because of the gfx settings. It's like the character and the objects are just floating on a red sea surface. The moving lighting or textures on the ground are distracting
- UI gfx look poor and seem to be stubs. Buttons are mostly tiny (for a 1920x1080 screen), not even sure the game is scaling the UI correctly(?)
- no sound effects at all (?)
- huge installation size (20GB) - one of the reasons I couldn't review this game earlier when I got it from the dev as a curator. I simply didn't have that much space on my laptop. Tbh I thought this game is just broken since it would require so much space, given the poor banner it has on Steam
- poor banners on Steam, they seem to be stretched (the one with a dark blue-skinned couple). They are in stark contrast to the photorealistic screenshots. The main image just has the game's title and doesn't show what this game is about. I'd certainly scroll past that banner
A company I used to work for had success hiring playtesters on Upwork. I think it was just $10 per 2 hours of testing that people from poor countries were asking for. They even recorded gameplay videos, with voiceover comments. That was very helpful for the game designer to see where the common issues happened during onboarding. I guess, if the dev would hire 10 people like that, it would be the best $100 he ever spent. Good luck
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