SpaceCraft

This game has huge potential to be very fun. Unfortunately, the devs are trying to force a factory game to be a multiplayer experience. Everything is locked behind terrible idle-game-level timers and long crafting times. You are limited to only two bases when there are multiple resources to automate the extraction of. So many things costs in-game money to do, even repairing your own ship on your own base. The game wants you to explore the universe but locks it behind an awful "FTL shield" mechanic, which you think you could reduce the impact of with the shield component, but no, that is a different type of shield. You are expected to recruit people to your Corpo, but the in-game quests literally want you to make your own, so no one is incentivized to join others. The devs did add a single-player version of the game that reduces the timers, but that kind of defeats being able to show off your cool ship designs because the progress doesn't carry over to your multiplayer self. The game also doesn't run very well, and I have decent components.

79 hours in, it has potential but there are SOOOO many QOL changes that need to be made to make this game marginally worth your time. 1 - make the option to use any storage in your base to craft things. Not just that lame 500 pound starting storage. 2 - The gatekeeping on the selling limit is just idiotic. Seriously, fire whoever came up with that one. 3 - I am fine with progressively higher areas opening up new options in the space station...but don't make me go to ONE specific station for the lab. Stop wasting my time with that nonsense. The second station and EVERY station after it should have one. 4 - Extremely boring planets, like insanely so. Go here, gather the limited resources on this planet and then there is nothing else. 5 - The flying is just poorly executed, arcade like and not fun in the least. 6 - The stupidly long manufacturer times if you do not do it manually, example - nuts and bolts 6 seconds if I do it manually but 6 MINUTES for the machine to do it. Fire whoever set that up too. I will add to this later but that is enough for this moment. (6 just added 7-8-26)

** The Short Version: Just Don't. The game should not yet have been released to Early Access, it's not ready in the slightest. ** The Long Version: Let's start with the most important, Game Stability: My system is not a potato; it's a high-end gaming PC. This game is plagued by memory leaks, frame drops, and stutters (even with graphics on the lowest) and, the worst of all, complete video driver crashes (in full-screen mode) that are so bad that they'll crash the video card and instantly shut down the PC (not nicely). That is not a once-in-a-while thing, happens to me every 30-45 mins. If played in a window, AND you turn graphics down to minimum, you can reduce the video card crashes and lower the frame drops, but even on my system, they still do not ever go away. Side note: It's never even come to mind to lower the settings because I've already run every other game on max, until some of my friends saw posts online saying other people were having the same issues and that slightly helped them too. Again, this game should NOT have been released. It's clear they just wanted a quick cash grab. Now about the game itself: 1st off, I'm not going to talk about balancing beyond this: Most of the game isn't even ready. They didn't bother to wait for combat system to be put into the game before forcing this into early access. Balancing the game in this stage of the game is a work in progress, and yea, they have a LOT of work to do... This game is listed as an MMO? It's a complete fail in that regard. Their Idea of an MMO is to try to force you into a 'Corpo', all the while promoting solo play by minimizing chat so you cant see it, and not allowing any kind of interaction between players outside of the 'trade hub' or a 'corpo'. I started this game with 2 other friends, literally could not do anything with them. We tried to make a corpo, but the requirements and 'upkeep' is really freaking stupid, make it impossible for a couple of friends to just play together. Other players in the game are often just 'in the way' BECAUSE: again, no way to interact between players, also the tiny moon sized 'planets' get mined out ahead of you so you can't get any of the more rare resources. Exploration: Is more annoying that anything else. Planets are mostly just barren waistlands, plagued with bugs like resources not even showing up until you log out and back in (sometimes works, not always). All it is, is discover what recourse a planet has, then done. Also, once you hit exploration rank 5, you no longer get anything for it, no xp, nothing beyond: 'this planet has iron, etc'. Also, The limitations of how far you can fly before blowing up your ship and losing half of everything you have (including the base kit I had just gotten) without knowing why it happened (because nothing is explained) is one of the stupidest things I've seen in any game yet. I can understand them wanting to add in 'gas' for your ship, but don't do it in a way that strands people. Red Drum Simulator Game: I saw in other comments that a lot of people don't like the 'grind', but I've been gaming for longer than most of those people have been alive, and the grind is fine. HOWEVER: Once you get back from the various mining runs, and that will be half the game, the other half of the game is watching the big red drum spin for hours and hours.. and hours... You're not allowed to walk away from it to smelt your resources. In my 130 hours of play at this point, half of it is just in watching the red drum spin, I've gotten in several movies while waiting for it. They have a 'micro-furnace', but that is useless because of the tiny inventory and horrible UI interface. They could fix it by simply my letting you queue up the resources so you can go play the game, but no, half this game is all about watching the red drum spin.... Base building: Is a joke. The imposed limitations of this choke out any possibility of the game ever becoming decent. Limited to only 2 bases in the whole galaxy, each with a size limit of how large you're allowed to build that base, and it's not big. You literally can't do much in the game. I understand that their idea is the MMO thing, but again, that MMO thing is a complete fail. I saw a review that talked about this game's bases being 'an affront to all automation games', that comment is so so very true. It's clear their goal is to force everyone into mega-corpo's, but 1) not everyone wants to play that way, and 2) even if people do join a corpo AND can manage to afford the upkeep costs, the corpo itself is limited in bases too. Fact is, the galaxy and the game is just too small and limited for an 'MMO'. Even in the new offline mode, there are high imposed limits in what your allowed to do or build in the game. Ship building: Again, limitations and stats that are not explained. Building blocks in the game a predetermined sizes, nothing in between these, limited ways in moving them around or (not) twisting them. The biggest issues not just myself, but also my friends all have is, in order to progress in the game, you need certain modules, but if you put those modules into your ship you have problems and constantly overheat all the time. The 'fix' would be to build a better ship, but you can't since it's all locked behind progress trees and really really bad base limitations. ALL of my 130 hours, was just to try to get a ship that could fly around semi-decently. It's a joke as is. Flying the ship: The game is always trying to auto-level you, and it's really annoying, and quite jarring at times. It will spin you around without any input and sometimes could make you dizzy. It can make you disoriented when trying to figure out which direction to go, since it spins you around on it's own. It's as though they seems to think players can't handle space or ship controls on their own. It's the worst when exiting or floating at a planet boarder. Also, there is no 'radar' or compass of any kind, so you don't know which way plants are, and after being spun around without your own input, can have you going in circles for a while trying to figure out which way is what. Ship Controls: Mouse control only, and it really sucks. I have to lift my mouse off my desk 6-7 times just to do a 90 Degree turn. It's reallying ####ing stupid. Unlike No Man's Sky who did a fantastic job at mouse control, this is like a game out of the 1980's, absolutly stupid. Even the 1980's supported joysticks or game controllers, and those that didn't had better mouse controls than this. Other issues: The progression system is ####'d, it's horrible. I see other reviews for how quickly you can get progress locked, and that is so so true. Between the progression system, the game limitations, and the penalties, I almost had to delete my toon a couple times. They need to work on that big time. That should NEVER be a thing. ** Conclusion: There are far more issues than what I could put into words here, some because it's 'Early Access', but others are just because of REALLY bad design from the ground up. Unless they make some really freaking big drastic changes, this game will fail. I don't post many reviews, This is in hoping they do a No Man's Sky thing and turn it around to make it good.

Ugh trying to find things is horrible. I get the feeling the curve is purposely steep and unrealistic. Not a fan.

So for right now, until things approve, I cannot feel personally comfortable recommending this game. While this game does have the potential to become a lot better than it is, there is just too much right now that shadows that possibility. - Automation is bare bones. Base automation buildings are a LOT SLOWER than the player. Meaning, you craft faster by hand than your base can do by a drastic margin. (I'm not counting that tiny micro furnace, while it is fast, it's not automated and it's inventory size is exceptionally tiny) Smelters, Assemblers, Factories. They are just too damn slow. When you think Automation, you think a process that is going to streamline things both in an efficient manner AND faster than you can do yourself. That is not currently the case in this game. Your time invested will not be respected. - Base Building (we are ignoring the scrapyard part because unless your Tech 4, you won't have access to one anyway) When you dismantle a base. you get a random part and scrap. You effectively have to sink more time and resources to make a new base. Why is this a problem? you know tech points you need to progress in the tech tree right? Well guess what ... it's NOT linear. Your base will get you around 200 or so tech points in the first day of leaving it automate. But afterwards you get a drastic cut in tech points earned which forces you to destroy that base and make a new one to reset that counter. So if you do the math ... you can see why that's a massive issue. If we dismantle a base we built, which we have to do to circumvent this problem, we should get a 100% return on what we put into it. We don't. - Progress So you currently have 'skills' to invest time in. Science, Exploration, Tech, If you get to rank 5 Science, it does not tally in any additional science points you go to the laboratory to earn. It just stays 0/1800. So if you were a lil over to GET to rank 5, any excess is lost to the void. Exploration, a hard req for progressing, is slow and tedious. Planets get 20. Small Grav gets 5, Big Grav gets 15. (for right now its just the same process over an over. Very boring) - Player Progress Server Transfers and previous patches. Those who lost progress transferring servers, never got that progress reimbursed when they 'fixxed it' On top of that, the currency players invested into their tech trees, didn't get a reimbursement when the devs lowered the cost. - Marketing Outside of the Shipyard where you can sell to the game (which you have to wait a few days for them to get the money back which stalls you) You have to be in a corp to use the player market terminal. Not only is it poorly implemented. It has no headroom. Players will undercut like a mofo which not only hinders sales but often makes the time posting the resources (with a fee) but at times makes that entirely negligible. Desperately needs a supply vs demand feature. Look for Elite Dangerous as a prime example when it comes to monetary logistics. - Requests Corp requests are just bad. Not only do they require an exuberant amount of resources for the basic contracts, the rewards are not that much to be wow'd by. - Corps Corps just don't get much of a front row seat in visibility as one would prefer. Recruiting for corps is a massive time sink and a pain. Right now the only way to do so is post in the discord and wait for validation, or on the steam discussions page (Which we all know how rewarding that can be, right?) What would HELP the process, is allow a corp page in-game that displayed every corp, alongside their member count AND a chosen advertisement post. So when people hit that P button they can actually 'shop around' so to speak. Right now the only external corp presence you have his the leaderboards and even that only shows a limited amount. Give people some much needed QoL On top of that, while this can be a two-edged sword deal, I feel players should have a minor punishment for leaving a corp. Make them have a timeframe they need to wait before they can enlist in another corp, or even a fee to pay. Otherwise you can have people just come and go with little to no consequence which when you're working on a corp and sinking time into it, having them freely just bounce around hurts everyone. Why this bothers me? this isn't the first game like this. It has had plenty of previous ones to learn from. Yet has implemented the bare bones. Sure it's early access, but that's not an excuse for not respecting a players time. If you expect people to sink every hour of their time every day to make any respectable headway, that's a game killer. Their are TONS of other issues players currently have expressed with this game but I'm personally not going into the effort to write all of it down here. I do like the game, but I hate just as much. If things start progressing in a positive manner then I may change or amend this review, but for now players are better playing something else and leaving this one in the oven for a bit. If your game feels like Amazon simulator in space with no pay, no breaks, and no PTO. You should just hand it over to someone else who can take the development seriously.

For any new player who cant play a space game to save their life, the limited bases is a lie, you get multiple bases, and some planets combine the resource nodes. You can also pick up and move elsewhere once you get enough resources. Also the ship is very modifiable to get faster/more cargo/etc. So yes they start you with a basic ship but its up to you to plan your routes and get your stuff going! How to get more bases, build and run your factories every time its printing stuff it adds to your skill to unlock more stuff, just like any other game! Also if your looking for a space game that is dry bone basic without the lag but has functionality this game does that, and it has a lot of interesting elements that will fill the time most space games fail to bring. For example I go into an asteroid field and just like star wars asteroids are striking me causing damage, need to get shields to withstand it. The sound track is also decent! i will admit, not a game for those that want everything given to them. Takes some work!

Updated 05 07 2026 Game content has potential if you are into no mans sky, as at time of this update the content is like 'NMS the early days' with somehow an even longer ramp in to the game assuming every player is a noob. Connection to servers can be an issue. Depsite some good functional content right now I would advise not spending $$$ yet. They charge a decent price for something that looks and quacks like a No Man's Sky. If you have never played NMS then go buy and play that game instead. right now this game has limited content, the planets have very little to work with. This game requires much more content to be worth the $$$ and if it aims only to be a NMS clone then game remains not recommended. circle back to this one later.