Combat can be frustratingly difficult, until you learn that you really need to pay attention to the game mechanics in order to succeed (at least in underdog difficulty). If you overcome this hurdle tough this game offers a very original world and a great story to uncover and also an ending with a great payoff. If you can deal with difficult games I can recommend this game.

TL; DR A super cool, and reactive CRPG, but also a short one. It makes investing in skills feel important, but you still have to roll with the punches because combat is deadly and punishing. A perfect game for those who wants to stop hoarding consumables.

Note that this is a game for cowards and backstabbers. Why risk your hide when you do not have to?

Colony ships are vast, and filled with a great number of people, but they take a long time to reach their destination, and sometimes discontent festers and the vessel experiences a mutiny.
Your ship has suffered one, order completely collapsed, factions and settlements are fighting for their envisoned futures, but in the end, it is everyone for themselves, danger is everywhere, and you are used to that, but when a contact of yours gets his hands on a keycard, well, things might be looking up, this could be very profitable.

Colony Ship is an RPG about making the best of the hand you have been dealt. There are very few optimal solutions, and you cannot talk your way out of every situation, but you can get a long way with words, especially if you if you are unscrupulous and duplicitous.
I find this quite refreshing; your choices are not only limited by the skillset of your character but also by your own personal morals, how much are you willing to compromise to avoid a fight, how dedicated are you to a deal, and who do you trust enough to work with?
You can switch sides at basically any point to save your own life, and you are encouraged to do that because combat is just as lethal for you as it is for your enemies, and they have gangs, and entire factions backing them up, what do you have? Metaknowledge?
This makes the writing very engaging even if you think that the factions are all self-interested and unworthy of your cooperation, you are forced to deal with them regardless, because it would be impossible for you to keep or make use of this hot potato of a McGuffin on your own.

There are other things I appreciate about Colony Ship, such as all the replayability. Quests can be solved in a multitude of ways by using different skills, by networking with different people &cetera, this paired with the short runtime makes new playthroughs quick and fun.
It is also nice of them to include our faction standings as well as our own beliefs on the character screen, seeing a visual representation of how e.g. religious I have been good is feedback on my choices, and can serve as an aid if you are unsure what choice your character would make.
However, it is the journey that is the centre of Colony Ship, the way you tiptoe around factional politics, resolve disputes to reach your goals and the sojourn you take through the underbelly of the vessel, that is what makes the game great, and while it has several awesome moments, especially in the endgame, I found the epilogue lacklustre. It is far too short for a game like this, it reinforces the fact that human life is cheap and that we are ultimately unimportant people, but they could have spared a single word for the companions, could they not?
I also wish there were more side content, there is plenty of it in the first chapter, but once you reach the Habitat there are only a couple of side quests per faction, they are as interactive as you would expect but it would have been nice to get a few more, and to explore the factions further.

Colony Ship takes place on a spaceship and that can feel limiting from a visual perspective, however, they did good work with the setting, it feels surprisingly diverse. Seeing shuttle bays, and cargo holds repurposed to living quarters is cool and then you have these striking, dilapidated industrial zones, the vibrant but out of control hydroponics, and the futuristic city that is the Habitat.
I am less a fan of the character and creature designs, humans typically look a bit generic, and sure, it is nice to cosplay as a Blade Runner but we do not get a lot of variety, it is that or “futuristic” riot gear, and that is neither unique nor memorable.
The non-human enemies are not better, I admit that fighting a bunch of psychic frogs is novel, but I felt that they could have taken it a few steps further and given us some crazier enemies.

As for the OST, it is stellar, it is like a sci-fi western, best exemplified by the track the Habitat.
It has this really a nice mixture of more involved tracks for inhabited areas, such as the faction headquarters, and more ambient atmospheric tracks for the untamed parts of a manmade construction.
Which is why the blending of electronics, and acoustic instruments feels so appropriate, this is definitely a bigger part of Colony Ship’s identity than character or enemy designs in my opinion.

In Colony Ship you do three things in particular, you explore, you talk, and you handle with encounters without using your words. You can deal with encounters in multiple ways, maybe you saw a console while you explored, maybe you can sneak past or maybe it is time to shoot a bit.
Unfortunately, I feel a bit mixed on the combat, I like that you are on equal footing with other humans, I like that encounters rarely feel “gamey” that it feels like they are people coming to kill you, but I honestly had way more fun just avoiding combat. I can see that it is rewarding to invest in fighting because doing good is very satisfying, but the AI loves to charge and fight without strategy and that does feel very “gamey,” not to mention some targeting quirks like how you cannot aim a grenade on a tile if there is something in the foreground, and the fact that it takes a while to complete a single shootout. I was also a bit annoyed when I discovered that characters lose HP permanently if they get downed in combat, naturally, this encourages you to stay away from dangerous situations but that also means you might not get the chance to try out your sick guns.
These things are fine when you have learnt the game, because you know what to expect, and you know what to do, but it can be off-putting to new players trying to get their bearings.

And that is a recurring issue with Colony Ship, whenever I reach a new area, I like getting a feel for the lay of the land, which is a major problem in this game, since areas feel big, and since is difficult to tell where you can go and where you cannot. Sometimes it will look like you can traverse a walkway, but it is actually impossible, this could have been solved if we could highlight walkable surfaces, or if we had a map that only included them. The fact is that areas only feel large, so a map would be redundant, but I wish that Colony Ship had something to mitigate this issue.
What does not help is the lacklustre pathfinding, if you have a four-character party they will get stuck on one another, or block paths, forcing you to micromanage them to get unstuck which feels like a waste of time.
I find it very annoying because exploration is a lot of fun, it feels like such a haphazard journey to shimmy down from a broken platform, jump across a gap in the walkway, crawl through debris or hack into computers to open up a path. Not to mention that everything you find seems so important, Cells are few and far between, corpses have powerful implants to extract, consumables are super important in the endgame, and you often find interesting stories being played out in front of you or recorded in ancient tablets.
Exploration is one of the most enjoyable aspects of Colony Ship, so yes, I find its faults frustrating.

I rate Colony Ship a positive, with enormous caveat.
Colony Ship is an isometric RPG that places a focus on story and setting, in the same kind of vein as the classic Baldur's Gate titles, Geneforge or any number of the more recent entries that have come with the resurgence of the genre.

The world building, (most of) the writing and the setting are really very compelling; I was drawn very quickly into the setting, and really did want to be invested in it. However, the game feels a little short, and few opportunities to really form the outcome of the story and make meaningful choices somewhat reduce the pay-off.

Exploration elements are good, there are a variety of intereting and well designed and implemented areas. And, the issues above notwithstanding, the overall story is quite fun as well, and ultimately satisfying.

My caveats are these. Firstly, that the game is intended to be played in one of maybe three main ways: Combat, Exploration, Diplomacy. You must min-max in your chosen area; you will find the game becomes increasingly hard, sometimes impossible, to progress if you do not focus and build around one of these areas. You cannot be a generalist (though the game does at some points provide a way to continue, albeit by a kind of deus-ex machina style intervention).

Second caveat, that combat is hard, and unfair. Enemies are given superior numbers, positions and cover that you aren't. They also know how to exploit the game's mechanics, so the AI is simply 'good' in the true sense. If you don't pile all into combat, you will find towards the mid-point of the game that combat ceases to be a meaningful option for you in most cases.

Finally, that towards the end of the game, and this will depend on your own build to some extent, but I found the game increasingly taking away my agency. I wasn't passing the diplomacy checks any more, and most of the combat encounters were not possible either, so the story unfurled in such a way that the other characters simply railroaded us in their direction. To some extent, this was preferable than not being able to coninue at all, and the game did warn of having to accept these kinds of situations in the difficult selection, but it was rather unsatisfying to be forced down one route at each juncture in the game. Ultimately, I was happy with the outcome, but that's because it was a default route, not because I had any agency to choose at that point.

And finally, you'll find a fairly rabid community on the Steam forums, where many of these issues are discussed and attacked by a minority who are very vocal defenders of the game, despite these criticisms having clear merit.

To some extent, all of the above is clearly by design. The developers knew what they wanted, and I appreciate the mastery and skill that went into making this game. And it has been well supported with updates and involvement by the developer in their community. That's why it's a positive from me. But my time with Colony Ship was very frustrating, at times I seriously considered stopping (and would have done if the game didn't provide its own way forward through the story), and at the end of it I'm not sure if I feel particularly happy with the time spent.

I will look to Iron Tower Studio's further releases, but do know what you're getting yourself into.