Interstellar Transport Company

Abandoned sadly

Gave this a chance after it had languished in my wishlist for years, on the hope that it would scratch that spreadsheet itch in some unique way in outer space despite being "abandoned". Turns out it's better described as "unfinished," with all the jank usually associated with something you can easily tell was Made in Unity, and nothing really new if you've played similar tycoon games. I had a lot of specific complaints written down, but they're about as tedious to describe as to experience, and mostly covered by other reviews already: The UI is sparse in information but still painful, the controls feel sluggish, there are no useful hotkeys beyond the usual WASD scroll & space pause, the AI is weak, the challenge disappears suddenly, the balance is goofy, and so on. I just want to add one thing... (update: sorry it was a bunch of things, feel free to skip) The supply/demand threshold thing is just weird. Goods are not bought. They can only be taken, for free, when they're "in supply", i.e. above some amount compared to consumption rate (enough to last a year IIRC). This means you can't buy relatively cheap food from one moon and give it to the famine-stricken moon next door; you can only haul it all the way from the one planet with a big surplus. This only works in the main scenario because Earth is set up to stay in surplus as far as I played. If something's scarce globally (er, galactically), you can't spread it around thinly like in every other trading sim I know of. Some of the price curves are weird too. When medicine drops below the threshold, it's suddenly the most precious thing in the solar system...until you supply one unit again, after which any surplus sells for absolutely nothing. So you have to micro-optimize parceling it out, or give up on making money off it entirely (I recommend the latter unless you're roleplaying Shkreli or something). Meanwhile, food never rises above a modest $350 or so, even when completely absent and people start starving. Subsidizing production facilities doesn't directly benefit the player since I guess this is a transport game, which is fair enough...except this incentivizes building factories separate from inputs for the sake of moving things back and forth. That just feels grody. Might as well be OpenTTD at that point, but at least then you're designing a track or something instead of menu-diving to assign a ship over and over. Better yet, just handle industry like Railroad Tycoon. It doesn't even work from a self-interested perspective, because your progress in the game is tied to humanity's spread across the stars, but the bottleneck for that is industry. So you can either make money or progress. Trade Empires tried to square the "invest in things you don't benefit from" and the "balance growth with profit" circles in 2001, except that was just marketplaces and not industries too, and ... whoops. Better stop myself here. Oh and it seems a lot of finished products are cheaper than their inputs. Why?! And interest rates for loans & bonds jump from 0.7% to around 20% with a big gap in between. What's that about? Okay one more thing: the sounds. There are few of them, and the ones that occur constantly are fewer. It's not so much a matter of quality as functionality. Actions that could benefit -- like pausing or changing speed -- are silent. But some sort of demonic shrieking announces pirate attacks happening anywhere, the volume of which is way out of proportion with me giving a ♥♥♥♥. Fortunately this event dies down once a few security stations get built and that aspect of the game becomes irrelevant. Another demonspawn lets you know when (not if) your cash goes red, usually at the start of each month, and it comes with a redundant TWO notifications to click off to boot. Fortunately this event also goes away once the AI inevitably craps itself a few years in and you're swimming in money. Anyway, it's a shame, because ITC is decent as a prototype. It drew me in for a while with that basic loop, hence the playtime, but it just ended up frustrating. If you're prone to that sort of thing then watch out. Pick up one of those train games to soothe the addiction instead.

I absolutely Love this game, However... The game has been abandoned. I understand this is a niche game and it didn't have enough buy in to keep making it. Devs I beg you to please release all the code for this and allow those who love it to try and re-breath fresh life into it. There is something about this game that makes me want to binge playing it for hours every few months until I reach a point where I feel that I have seen the whole game/reach a point where i see the game has no more content/see things I wish had been added into the game and then leave it again for months. I couldn't recommend anyone buy this game at $25 (if you could get for ~$10 this game would be worth experiencing) other than as inspiration of what could be. I will still come back and play this game and dream of what it could be, and hopefully one day I will be able to build off this game and create the spiritual successor to this game allowing other to experience the love for space and logistics as I do.

In a game where everything depends on your ability to know what's in demand on one planet, and what's being exported on another planet, it would sure be nice to be able to have two planets open at once.

Dead game

The UI doesn't easily give you the information to make decisions so it's a permanent clicking through menus to find out if something is profitable to do instead of accumulating the information for you. It's very tiresome. On top of it the game is dead. It is not getting any more attention by the developer and there is no modding community (or support for it in the game). Don't buy it.

Abandoned in early access... Yet another game on Steam that was just a money grab by the developers. Fun game, no doubt, but don't waste your $25 on it. Wait for a sale.

The concept is SO good! And the start is quite fun, but the game was abandoned half way.

This was a fine game, interesting enough to be played a bit, and had some good ideas. A bit of a chore at times. If I could give it a neutral review I would.

Generally fun, but not well optimized for larger maps. long loading times.