The game comes out today. Has anyone had a chance to check it out yet? I played the demo and wrote my review below.

I played the demo on steam deck and I mostly enjoyed it. It more or less plays out a tutorial mission while the events of the pilot play out.

Game play (in the demo) had 4 distinct parts: space combat, away missions, navigating and flying around space, and ship “stuff”.

I disliked the space combat the most. It was an odd mix of turnbased and real-time actions. I never knew where the enemy ship was, and I had trouble balancing the repairs i needed to survive.

Away missions are essentially choose your own adventure text games with some cool art depicting the scenes based on who you select for your mission and what they do.

Navigating and flying around space was fun, but I can see it getting very boring very quickly. Fly from wherever you are to the next system. fly around the planets picking up resources, investigating signals, talking to civilizations. I think if they find a creative way to mix this part up, it can be tons of fun.

Ship “stuff” is very derivative of games like fallout shelter. You have a sideview of the entire ship. you can repurpose rooms for different things, assign personnel to various places like medical or engineering. You can even install new weaponry or equipment to use in space combat or for flying around.

I’ll be picking up this game eventually, I am curious what anyone else thinks about it, too.