Honestly, this game is a convoluted mess,. It has a very polished look, but the developers went out of their way to make it feel as clunky and slow as possible. Movement is mind-numbingly slow and awkward, though, to the dev's credit this was partially intentional to make if have a more newtonian feel. The problem is that making something garbage on purpose doesn't mean the end result isn't garbage. To their credit, the modular ship design is actually pretty neat, but that's the only part of the game that is. IF you are just after newtonian physics simulation, you may enjoy this game. If you are interested more in the economics aspects.... pick a different game. Your carefully crafted logistics chain will always feel like crap because it's bogged down by the slow and clunky handling of EVERYTHING. There's a lot of helpers for orientating the whole of your ship/station, but a complete lack of helpers for interactive parts on your ship/station like visualizing the range of turrets, mining lasers, construction towers , ect compared to other turrets and towers, so while you can tell if you're in range to mine something you get no visualization of the areas covered by turrets during construction.
Honestly, it feels like they had a really good idea for this modular station constrution setup filled with realistic systems... and then they wanted it to be even more realistic so they added in the clunky newtonian movement and handling but they didn't actually consider anything beyond that, like how it's never going to feel realistic because the awkward handling means that players aren't going to actually want to fly the stations because doing so feels like crap,. They DID at least realize this outcome which is why the tutorial straight up tells you won't be using pilot mode very much because it's just easier to use tactical mode and set nav points and use autopilot. What we're left with is this slow clunky movement system that was added for realisms with the stated intent that you never use it, and then autopilot still feels slow and clunky because the ships ARE using the terrible handling, you just have the joy of watching the game awkwardly maneuver your ships for you and as a result the game still feels slow and clunky, just with less input.
On the lighter end of complaints would be things like the tutorial being structured pretty poorly, mostly on the second and third entries. It's filled with roughly the same level of oversights and seemingly pointless tidbits. On the second entry there's an abandoned ship you can claim. It doesn't actually address said ship until you fly near it, telling you it'd make a good hauler after you claim it. The problem is it isn't worked into the tutorial at all. By the time you claim it you've probably already completed the portion of the tutorial where you claim the station and have moved your resource ship to basically next to your builder since the tutorial explicitly tells you to do so,. meaning that you already know how to claim things and have no need need for a hauler ship,. Unless the tutorial thinks you don't know that a smaller ship an be used to ferry goods, this portion of the tutorial serves no purpose. It's a reoccurring theme with the game: Ideas that are fine by themselves but implemented poorly with no consideration for how the individual parts interact with each other,
This last bit is highly speculative, and should be taken with a grain of salt,,, well I mean it's a review to begin with, so even more of a grain of salt than the rest of the review I guess. I'll preface this with me not really being against using generative AI for development. There's that note at the bottom about the game using AI at the bottom. That's a huge red flag for some, but I'm a bit more accepting of it... when its implemented well. The problem with AI content arises in that generated content tends not to mesh well with other bits. That is to say, it comes up with good singular ideas, but has problems integrating those separate ideas into a single flowing concept. I... would be very curious to know exactly what aspects were aided by AI in development. Generating textures for, say, modular station parts is an area where AI would thrive, because a human is curating the placement of those textures on a 3D mesh and each material is a separate thing and the player rarely scrutinizes piece-by-piece.; Then there's the grey area for things like voice generation where you an get a surprisingly realistic sound, but there's always little tells even assuming the clip is curated well enough to eliminate pronunciation and punctuation errors. The campaign opening VO fits into this category, and sounds less convincing than some youtube clickbait shorts, though they did make sure that no pronunciation or punctuation errors were present. The last category is things like coding with an AI, using text generation to finalize ideas, or trying to generate an artist CG,. The AI gets the general idea, but over multiple generations the AI is unable to maintain a coherent style or overarching goal. Like, say asking a text generation AI for help structuring a tutorial to cover usage of a ferry ship, but it ends up leaving it awkwardly unintegrated into the actual tutorial. You might tell it to code an audio menu and it gives you code that accidentally leaves a glaringly obvious sound effect playing even when the master volume is turned down, despite a human coder likely catching this error instantly upon testing the feature. (That's a thing, by the way. You an silene the master volume in the main menu, but the game will still play a glaringly obvious ambient sound effect track unless you silence the game through your OS's settings). I get the distinct impression that AI played a much bigger role in development than it should have. There's a lot of good ideas in this game, they're just poorly integrated with the rest of the game and often times in glaringly obvious manners, Again, I'm not against using AI in development, but this game seems to be a very good example of less-than-subtle AI input. Either way, as you may have guessed I definitely don't recommend this game for anyone who isn't gets a kick out of clunky space flight and does not have a problem with some really obvious AI-generated content.
