The Spatials: Galactology

Fun for a while, but gets bogged down in shallow repetition, and has a clunky UI with no keyboard shortcuts. The lack of keyboard controls is a glaring issue; only combat and toggling pause has keyboard shortcuts, everything else is done with the mouse, which is sluggish compared to keyboard controls and gets progressively less tolerable with playing time, since the time lost on doing even the most basic actions like adjusting the game speed with the mouse adds up. Building in particular requires a lot of clicking to switch between walls, floors and object categories, and it also brings me to the next point of repetitiveness. Graduate officers require their own rooms, and later in the game, when robots take over the basic tasks and the rest of the crew graduates, building and assigning all the officer rooms and unassigning the old rooms with the clunky controls becomes a repetitive chore, which the game punishes delaying but offers no assistance in doing. There's little thought involved in making the same 3x3 rooms, and it became especially annoying because my economy was stalling and I couldn't afford to build too many rooms at once. The first dozen officer graduations felt like leaps towards progress, but at the end the graduation notifications had become an annoyance. The planet exploration is an another repetitive and eventually mindless part of the game; it gets old to clear out and loot the hostiles and build extractors and other structures after the umpteenth time and after the novelty of orbital bombardment has worn off, and the last update unfortunately expanded this tedious process to trade as well. It's just the same dull mini-game over and over again for every planet; occasionally encountering new races and higher-level enemies does not offset how dull it is. Making and tweaking a logistic, production and hospitality pipeline and dealing with strategy was interesting enough, but the game's UI just doesn't scale with the rest of the game, and it ends up feeling like trying to create complex graphics with MS Paint. The combat and exploration portions of the game outstay their welcome, and closely coupling trade to exploration in the last update killed my desire to continue playing. I'd only recommend this game to people specifically interested in the management genre, and I'm disappointed that it was released with problems that still feel like Early Access problems.

At this point of Galactology is good fun for 10-30 hour "session", after which endgame content starts to run out. But don't worry about that going to the game, you'll enjoy it before that happens. It's quite free from bugs and plays really well from begining to the moment you decide to quit. Updates come regularly and add nicely to the gameplay. Developer is active and communicative about plans for the game. So, Galactology is essentially a base builder with fun comic graphics. It's easy to get into and understand the mechanics, interface is first a little old fashioned feeling, but is actually very user friendly. Tutorial is a bit simple/annoying, but you can just ignore it if you have played these games before. Economics simulation is what you can expect, you always make profit, but you can optimise quite a fair amount. If you quickly build stuff that you just reasearched you run into shortages, also at early midgame you can easily run out of money, but pile up tons soon after. Unfortunately there isn't much use for money, so once it starts to pile you don't need to save it for anything. Planet exploration is all about harvesting materials from new planets. It's essential part to the game. It's part of the game mechanics that at this point doesn't offer much - you pop bulding's and leave, but isn't especially boring either and there is decent amount of visual variation. Materials are carried back to the base by your autopiloted ships. There is kind of fun aspect of invasions on planets you are harvesting from, so from time to time you have to go fight and liberate the planet guns blazing. Galactology might be the best light base builder at the moment. To be a gem it would need more humor (now it's just "funny" graphics), little bit improved economics system and some special thing to make it really "unique". It might might be able to pull it off if future updates keep coming. But as it is, it's already great. 4/5 stars. Review updated after release from EA.

To the uninitiated, do buy the game and support if you like automation, resource management and a tourist establishment management sim. To returning fans, you will find that the game has significantly more breadth (in terms of content) and depth (in terms of customisation). However, many of the core features are yet to be implemented (such as character progression and ship building) and there are definetely a few flaws. If you're a picky person and would like a polished game instead, wait till testings are over!

Great game. For those who are hesitant about buying an early acces game, I can tell you tat I've got 17 hours played and the game is totally functional, addictive and fun to play. Lots of options, I'm not even in the 40%. Still has some bugs, but overall, I recommend it 100%. Also, it's beautiful aesthetically.

This is one of those games where you wish you could leave a review without saying Yes or No to recommending it. Because I do feel like there is value to the game, but on the other hand the bugs and some of the game mechanics make the game very frustrating. The tutorial is very basic, and not very fleshed out. It is helpful when you first start out, but there is a lot missing from it. Once you're on your own, there are a lot of issues. The first thing I encountered was not being to move items. The developer has stated that this a core mechanic of the game. If you build something in the wrong place, you have to destroy it and then rebuild it elsewhere. This would probably be fine, if you could get your people to get onto that pronto. But here we have the next issue I encountered. There doesn't seem to be a way to prioritise tasks. If all your people are busy doing other things, the object you want dismantled will sit there waiting for minutes and minutes. This is also an issue when it comes to crafting items - especially cooking food. For example, I had almost 30 people in my small colony at the time of writing this review and they were almost all starving. Not because I didn't have any food, because I had plenty of raw ingredients. No, because no one would cook it! I had every single person set to cooking. In the global settings for kitchens I had it set to maintain a minimum of 100 basic meals, and I set the kitchen to make 100 basic meals. And then.... nothing. Occasionally someone who finished a different task, would wander over and make themselves one meal. And then... go back to doing something else. Not cooking. Not making soap. (Everyone was feeling dirty, but no one was making soap either.) And then, everyone started losing their minds. They would stop working, and started attacking other people. Nothing I would do would restore their mental health. But there wasn't a whole lot I could do because everything that could help was locked behind advanced research and after 7 hours or so of playing I still had not unlocked the items that would help. There were other more important things that needed to be researched first. And then there were building issues. If you want to expand a room, you have to remove the wall which of course, means that the items in your room won't work because they need an enclosed room to work. And if the wall is external then the objects start degrading because they are exposed to the outside air and by the time your people get the wall removed and rebuilt everything is fritzing and exploding and [i]of course[/i] when things explode, no one puts the fire out even though everyone is set to firefighter. I mean, jeeze. It just got so very frustrating. I really wanted to like this game, and I think given time, it could be great. But right now there is too much that feels like it needs to be fixed. Buy the game if it goes on special for cheapy cheap but otherwise wait and see how it progresses. (Though you may be waiting a while. The game has been out for a year, and its still in Early Access!)

An interesting idea mixing "Star Trek" and "The Sims", but far has too much grinding and not enough pay offs to consider this a "good" game. Last update was in 2019 so the game is abandoned by its developer. :-(

Play the first one instead. While this game has some good additions to the original concept, the balance is horrible and it lacks any way to tweak it without mods. Once attacks begin on your station, they don't stop, there are no pauses, it's just one after another. These attacks begin whenever you advance far enough in tech or try to get to the resources you need to setup defenses. But the only setting that you can use is to turn them completely off, no way to just reduce the frequency. This minimalist settings is a huge problem for other parts, like many of the "helper" effects that are really just downright annoying, you can't turn those off at all. The original was just right visually and though you had to grind a lot it is still a lot of fun.

Man, I want to love this game - but I hit a wall every time I play it. Not because the game is bad, but because of performance issues. It appears to do most work on a single CPU core and, as soon as you have a "medium" station, you start getting stuttering that makes the game unplayable. I came back to give it a go with my Ryzen 3600.. it didn't fair much better than my previous Intel 3770k. Performance issues were also seen on Steam Deck. I love this sort of game, and I am just sad that with 70+ hours played, I have never been able to build a full station.

This one will fall into the category of "i don't get why this is popular". I like gathering resources etc and building but this one makes you go to planets to get those resources delivered to you. There is none to harvest on your own planet. I see plants and trees everywhere, you mean to tell me I can't harvest any of them? This is a very basic game and has little depth so I am baffled why it has such great reviews.

The game isn't too bad, but it feels like you have to learn a lot through trial and error. There isn't much in the way of information either inside the game or on the web. I played for 10 hours and I've still barely escaped the initial systems, and mistakes slow things down even further. As an example- every time you recruit someone the next recruit costs more. So if you have a bad mission, or invasion, and lose a bunch of a staff you are now in a position where replacing each experienced staff member costs increasingly more, and you're replacing fully geared experienced staff with inferior unequipped, untrained versions. This forces even more conservative play as you slowly crawl back up.