Oasis Mission is "a game." It's not a bad game, but it's also not a good game. The latest version, 0.99.0 is the version I played, with 1.00 right around the corner, and that is concerning to me. What I played in the current state was... a game, but filled with a lot of flaws and devoid of balance.
I'll preface by stating that I started a game on... easy? It's not labelled as 'easy/medium/hard' but I took that from the context. The text flair for what could be "medium" actually made it seem difficult, so I'm not really sure it's an easy/medium/hard scale, or what the developer intends you to play (what's the "best" game experience, so to speak). I did not play on passive, which is also available as a difficulty option. And perhaps playing on 'easy' was my problem, but I honestly don't think so.
Shortly after the start of my base building, I was faced with an attack of a single scout unit from the enemy. This is a good move, because I wasn't ready for an attack, and the scout has no weapons, so it just shows up to your base, stares at you, and lets you blow it up. Okay, now I know how attacks work. The next wave, however, was a real ship with real weapons, but this is right when I realized... this game has little going for it. The light attack unit's behaviour is to go directly to the closest thing of yours it can reach, and attack it, with no reactionary moves. No joke, this thing went straight to a Wind Turbine and hammered on it while I safely blew it up. It never changed targets, it never moved to retreat, it just... accepted its death. The next wave was then two attack units, and they had the same behaviour: hyperfocus on the closest thing of yours, shoot it, and do nothing else. This time the Wind Turbine exploded (because I didn't repair it from the last attack, I didn't know how), and instead of then focusing their attention on my ships shooting at them, they went to the next closest thing of mine... another Wind Turbine. This is when I "ah-ha"ed! I just spammed my base with Wind Turbines. They're cheap and they give you power, so I need them anyway. So my base turned into a big mine field of Wind Turbines, producing 60 kW of power, enough to last me the entire game (not kidding).
This is really where the lack of balancing shines. Since the attacks are dumb, and they focus on the closest thing of yours to attack, my mine field of Wind Turbines just acted as a massive base shield. My units could out-range the enemy, and just hammered at them as soon as they showed up, while the enemy ships just focused on my intentionally placed Wind Turbine fodder. The fact that I'm producing 60 kW of power is also an issue, because part of the game are these 10-minute bonuses called "Pacts." There is a Pact that you can research that lets you sell 20% of what you're generating for $1 for each 10 MW sold, per power production tick. That's 12,000 MW being sold for $1,200 each production cycle. I literally lived off this Pact for the rest of the game, and I was making money hand-over-fist. Before I knew it, I had $80,000... then $150,000... and I blinked and had $300,000.
At this point, I could buy multiple trading routes with the in-game market, and I could set up deliveries of every good, and I was set, for life. Once I realized I broke the game this way, it was extremely trivial to literally *win* the game. I just built up more housing, more science buildings (you can't buy science), more ship part factories (you can't buy ship parts either), and away I went - I just built what the in-game missions instructed me to, and before you knew it, 4 hours passed and I had launched the requisite three orbital space ships. Game Over, User Wins.
Prior to becoming a financial mogul through the lack of in-game balance, I did come to realize that even on easy, the game was rather tedious. Silly enemy attack logic aside, you do have to mine resources from around the map, and relocate it to where your workers were, which meant building up new ships and giving them their life-time assignment of "you do mining, forever." You will end up with multiple bases of workers/factories, because resources are spread apart, and this is another gripe of mine: the Landing Pad building has a radius of which housing it serves, and there's no indication of this. I wasted so much time troubleshooting why my ships would not move engineers from the Landing Pad to my secondary base, only to finally succumb and build a second Landing Pad (which worked). Either, the Landing Pad needs to be a part of the logistics network (Why? Engineers are carried by a ship?) or it has a radius (not shown or told to the player). Either way, it was frustrating, along with a lot of other missing QoL (which is why I'm fearful of what 1.00 will actually have?).
[list]
[*]You cannot access the market list of resource prices without clicking the "choose a trade partner" button, which is obnoxious, because I'm not necessarily setting up a trade.
[*]The market list doesn't even show "Buy" or "Sell" as labels. The player is just supposed to assume that the lower price is the sell price and the higher price is the buy price, I guess.
[*]There's no transaction log or account balance for the market, to know how much you are purchasing/selling. The transactions just happen and you have to hope not to bankrupt yourself with your market orders.
[*]Placing warehouses and attempting to connect them is a chore. They can neither be too close together nor too far apart, because some weird connection building gets placed between them. This is especially frustrating when you're trying to connect a basic warehouse with a large warehouse which are different shapes: I do not know where the connection points are on the large warehouse, and your only option if you placed it incorrectly is to destroy the building and rebuild it - a complete waste of time and resources.
[*]You cannot save ship configurations: if I want to build a specific ship "type," I have to individually click each module I want on it.
[*]You have no idea when one of your ships or buildings is under attack or destroyed. The map isn't that large, really, so it's sort of easy to keep track, but I bet if I played the game "properly" (not abusing infinite money), I would have had far more ships, and it would have been much harder to notice when one was destroyed. I did lose a few unknowingly, so with a fleet three or four times the size, I bet many more would have vanished.
[*]Your ships waste their attack missiles like idiots. Ships have a range for their attack, and their missiles are forward facing. If your ship is not facing the enemy, they will launch their missiles in the wrong direction (in front of themselves, but the enemy is behind them), and the missile will turn to go toward the enemy, and then just explode part-way there, because, well, they don't have that much range... so stupid; turn first!
[*]The UI doesn't update in many areas in-game. If you're designing a ship and you unlock something with research, the research at the top does not decrease, so you think you have more points to spend when you do not. Your ships that transport goods will pick things up and you will see their 'cargo' bar increase, but you have no idea what they picked up unless you click off of them and back onto them. Etc.
[/list]
So, listen, Oasis Mission: it's a game. It's not a good game, it's not a bad game, it's just a game. It was fun for the few hours, but that fun will be subjective to the player - I abused an in-game mechanic for unlimited money, and found that "fun," but I bet if I played the game properly, I'd of been frustrated/annoyed. Too much ship micromanagement during combat, no way to defend your ships that are off mining, the hacking is ... I don't even know, confusing? Don't get me started...
There's good ideas here, but they're marred with bad QoL, terrible combat, and poor balance. I enjoyed myself, but, I'll never play it again. I beat it, after all...
