This game wants to be an educational game aimed at a young audience, but unfortunately it suffers several serious problems.
First, it's really boring. Your character moves slowly, running uses energy (which isn't limited, per say, but you have to constantly restock it via time consuming item hunting (and running around while looking for items will burn more than you gain). The actual learning portion is also really boring. Large, non-illustrated text dumps with a cumbersome UI, and a loading screen every time it transitions between the encyclopedia-lite and the game do not make for a compelling learning experience, and the quizzes require you to quit out of the mini-game so that you can look up the trivia to answer the quizzes. It's an open book test, but with 5 loading screens every time. (Or you can just guess your way through them, which carries no real penalty and no kid in creation is going to suffer through the slog of playing fair.) Finally, a lot of quests are just pixel hunts for small items across a small but hard to navigate map (more on that later), and the pixel hunts are buggy.
Which leads us to the second point: The game is terribly buggy. The game spawns a lot of quest items upfront, but you can't interact with them until you get the quest. Which is fine, [b]but[/b] [u]sometimes the trigger doesn't work[/u]. This leads to situations where you need to pick up an item, but the game hasn't properly switched it over to being an item you can get yet, so the only recourse is to save and exit. So far that seems to fix the problem, but good luck getting a kid young enough to appreciate the educational content here to understand the hows and whys of this.
Oh yeah, by the way, the saves are buggy too. The game has to call home to a server before it will save. I actually lost a lot of progress and can't complete the game because I can't save the game, but I can't complete a quest without doing the 'save and reload' trick. It could just be that their servers are crapping out this week, but I wouldn't gamble $10 bucks on actually being able to play this game.
Thirdly, the controls are awful. You move with the WSAD keys, but 'A' and 'D' turn, so instead you're better off using mouse to turn. It's not unmanageable, but my niece and nephew got so frustrated that neither wanted to actually be the one in control, so I basically had to play it for them and even then they got rather seasick from it. This is all largely because the camera is also controlled by the mouse, and it gets a bit wobbly when you're in an enclosed environment (which is most of them, since the maps are actually quite small but very windy). The bad controls really make the pixel hunting awkward, and added in with the whole "Can I even interact with the quest items" problem all the more obnoxious.
Fourthly, the target audience for this game is very young (probably about 9-10, but even then they're going to feel a bit insulted at the dumbed down presentation), but the interface and controls are not very child friendly, and the info dumps are basically just wikipedia text dumps (they even have links to wikipedia). There's little minigames where you can interact with stuff (setting things on fire was kind of fun), but the "facts" you get from them are scattered all over the place thanks to the bad UI, and it's just not something you're going to remember any facts from. (Mind, I couldn't access the back half of the game due to a bug so maybe the later minigames were better.)
And, completely subjective, I didn't like the story. The main character is obnoxious and creepy (he's here because he was stalking his superior's girlfriend and they wanted him to go far away), and in the two hours of gameplay I was able to see he didn't seem to have any redeeming qualities. The ship AI is okay, but so stuckup and bland that it's painful to read any of its lines. The humans are a bunch of idiots who are slowly dying of "space depression" aboard giant impractical space stations but there doesn't seem to be a good reason for why none of them are living on the planet. I know it's for kids, but maybe have the planet be a wasteland instead of lush forests if you want this sort of arc? Of course, I could only play for 2 hours so maybe there's more to it.
TL;DR: It's a very dry and boring kid's educational game that no kid is likely to enjoy, and bugs kept me from being able to see more than two hours of it. I like what they were going for, but the execution was terrible. I don't recommend it even on a sale.
