Stellar Odyssey

Hi everyone! This is probably my first review ever on Steam. I am seeing some misguided ones so I decided to try and help the devs a bit. Been part of this game from the very beginning, since the first alpha. And I can assure you the amount of love and work poured into this project is incalculable. For a really small team of barely two people constantly adding content and updates tirelessly...please just try it before turning your back on it. You won't find another idle game with this much soul! As I said, it's an idle game so you just hop in, tweak a couple of things and forget about it (or keep it in the background). There is A LOT of things to do, so don't tush it. Although it includes premium subscriptions and some cosmetic purchases you can play FOR FREE (as in 0 monis, gratis) entirely and as long as you want. This is not P2W at all unless you want to be #1 player of the universe (which, to be honest, does not feel like winning here). To the point some of the paid contents benefit the entire community as global bonuses! Really, they won't charge you for playing and there is no level cap or limitation or anything. Also, it has a great, friendly community. In case of doubt just join their Discord server and say hi (or say hi in the in-game chat). Anyway, just give it a chance for a week or so and then decide. And thank me later.

Screenshot here, leader of the squadron "System Slashers." P2W? Lol, I'm completely free-to-play and made the 9th squadron in the game with no outside help and taking names on the battlefield ;) It's been a couple days and about 300 star systems have been explored so far, so you guys might be a little late to the dance. There's only about 48,999,700 systems left to discover :) It's PVE, PVP, solo, team, battle, gather, craft, explore, pets, lab battlefield player-market with 0 taxes and a lot more updates coming. It's a PBBG (persistent browser based game) meant to be played incrementally, and 24 hours of actions while afk. Use https://steam.stellarodyssey.app/ to run the game in your web browser so you don't need to stay attached to steam all the time and sync up later (I do that which is why my playtime shows the way it does). Free so just try it and see if you're ready to leave Earth for the stars. Once you head out into space it's gonna be a while til you're back in civilization so be prepared. See you out there!

Ignore my hours, I play through the browser. Been playing the game for a long time now and it's my favourite idler. Lots of stuff to upgrade and manage, exploring is cool, and the dev is very active. This is a fresh-start server of the web version, and it has been a blast so far starting from scratch, There's going to be a lot of cool features unlocking over the next few months, and if you like idle space exploration, I'd say give it a shot, you might get addicted! People screaming about P2W don't really know what they're talking about. There's a subscription, skins that don't matter, and pay for convenience perks that are expensive for sure. Once you get rolling, you'll easily be able to make enough credits to trade for tokens. The closest thing to P2W are the lab slots, but even then it's only p2w in that it makes lab materials a bit faster for fuel or upgrades.

What can I say? I'm terrible at reviewing games. But I am enjoying this. Pay to win or not, My squadron is doing pretty well.

[h1]Don't Get Stranded[/h1] [i]Stellar Odyssey[/i] is an idle MMO RPG with a theme of space exploration. My problem with is not in the payment options (for QoL stuff and cosmetics), but in what it takes to get exploring. You start on one of several starter systems, most easily recognized with Earthling names for stars. There's only four skills to level up: Battling, Gathering, Crafting, and Exploration. To get to the Exploring part requires gaining resources through Battling and Gathering, and usually some Crafting. Battling is your standard monster fighting. You actually send out clones in exosuits to fight several races of alien creatures. Each enemy type drops a related body part and both whole ship parts and blueprints for them. Battling is also for squad fights and galaxy boss battles. Your ship has six equipment slots. Weapon and Shield affect Battling. Engine and Sensor are for Exploring. Laser and Probes are for Gathering. (Yeah, slightly confusing. Most count lasers as weapons, and sensors and probes could be switched with no problems.) Both ship equipment and their relevant blueprints will drop at whatever level its skill is, and come in various rarities. To get rid of unwanted equipment, you can either send it to the player market and try to sell it, or just scrap it for metal. You'll need the scraps to craft new equipment, anyway. Weirdly, blueprints also can be scrapped for metal. Crafting items always takes metal scraps, plus one resource and one monster drop. Blueprints have limited charges, one to three, at least to start. Humanity has thoroughly colonized the starter systems to the point of having instant and free fast-travel amongst them. But to get anywhere else takes fuel from warp capsules. You MUST craft warp capsules yourself ... or pay a pretty penny on the player market. Crafting each capsule takes 20 different resources, all collected in Gathering. And a lot of each, at least for the moment. You'll craft the capsules in a supply chain of three or tiers, in a Laboratory on your ship. The capsules are made of a shell and the fuel itself, but both the shell and fuel take several ingredients. Combine your metal into ingots, which then go into the capsule shell. There are only four different types of collection nodes possible in each system, but none of the starter systems have all four nodes. Therefore, you need to hop amongst a few of the starter systems before you can move on. Each node type has its own native aliens for those monster drops for crafting, anyway. (By the way, the galaxy map is a 7000 x 7000 Cartesian plane. Yeah, 49 million systems. No way it was hand-crafted. It's also impossible for a human being to fully check every single one for bugs and balancing.) One of the reasons for exploration is because the further the system is away from the starters, the more likely it is to have better quality resource gathering. But this is something of a crapshoot, and a system might not have ANY gathering nodes. So, you've finally completed your first warp capsule and are ready to start traveling. You pick a likely system, instantly jump there ... And find yourself [i]frigging frustratingly [b]STRANDED!!![/b][/i] This is because you've missed or can't see what gathering resources are available, and don't have the resources to make a new warp capsule, and don't have enough fuel to find your way to the network of starter systems. Worse, only those systems owned by Humanity have markets, so you are locked out of the player market or trading. Your only recourse is to set out an SOS and hope some kind player will help you out. The game dangles a feature that might save you from being stranded, the Voyager. For a fraction of the gains you'd get by going in your ship, you can send out some intrepid explorer or drone to investigate systems. However, this only works for UNDISCOVERED systems. And those are fast falling out of reach of a single warp capsule. It is far too easy to make the mistake of jumping your own ship instead of sending a Voyager because the system was already discovered. Not being able to easily recover from such a simple mistake will drive a lot of newbie players away. Before I found myself stranded, I had a nice rhythm going of gathering resources toward my first capsule, crafting and selling lesser ship equipment, then selling off excess resources, and beginning again. The player market worked well enough. You set the price for equipment or the per-item price for a resource, or you can take one of the existing buy/sell orders in whole or in part. A nifty Trade channel allows you to post your market offers. An NPC trader also offers resources. Guild action, in the form of squadrons (8-10 players to start) is also in the game. A portion of gains is taxed and given to the squad for use in building a space station to park in a non-starter system, or to donate to a squadmate. Stations give global benefits to squaddies and block the benefits of those in any other squad while they are in that system. There is now both squad battles and individual PvP battles in the game, but the individual PvP battles are for now just for bragging rights. Another thing to do in the game is Galaxy Boss battles. Every few hours the window to join opens, then the battle commences. The boss generally wipes most folks out at once, but there is a revive/respawn round timer. Everyone who joins in gains based on how much damage they did. I could never tell when/if my weakling newbie ship actually revived, but the logs told me I got some damage in. There are already some thriving chat channels with helpful players, including ones dedicated to help and trading. As for the accusations of pay to win in the handful of negative reviews ... that depends on your definition of "win." The optional subscriptions are cast as "keeping the lights on at dev HQ" and are not paywalls. Instead, they mainly provide some permanent customizations for your ship avatar and several QoL benefits while the subscription is active. This includes extending the offline window from one day to three, 10% bonus to most resources, auto-join for the galaxy boss fights, and reducing daily/weekly limits on using several features. Therefore, the paying players get a small edge in most things while the nonpayers are not directly blocked from anything. Want to get to the top of the boss battle leaderboards? Yeah, you'll need to pay. But you don't need to pay if you're content to hang back and be patient. You'll get everywhere, eventually. This calculus might change for you as the devs add planned features, such as squad-based dungeons and, sometime in 2027, some sort of personal empire. On the one hand, the game has some serious frustrations for new players, perhaps enough to take a pass on for now. On the other hand, the devs are active and responsive and might, in time, mitigate some of the problems I had with their game.

The best idle game I've played. There is so much going on to keep you and your gathering occupied it's great.

I guess you could call it P2W, there is a sub/premium that gives you roughly +10% of different stuff and you can buy currency that further increases percentage gains of a lot of things. So if you want to play the game to cempete then you will definitely be behind people who put money in it. If you want to just play a bit of an idle/incremental game with this setting it's pretty fun. I've bought a month of sub/premium with ingame money after just 2 days of playing (but it will be tougher to achieve for new players as the economy scales up)

A good idle game that reminds me of old space web games when i was a kid