Fresh take on the fortress automation genre. If Mindustry and They Are Billions had a baby. Suffers from some of the same awkward/ugly/weird UI as Judgement (but to a lesser extent). Needs more feedback like alerts when resource nodes fail, resource history charts, and a resource counter on screen. I seem to need to retool my base now that I'm further along in the game but it never quite feels safe or convenient to do so. But these gripes are minor compared to how refreshing the idea is.

Ah man, it pains me to give a negative review... but this game has great ideas poorly executed. This is the loop: land on a map, secure the perimeter, secure the key production resource, explore (and clean) the map to access raw resource nodes, process raw resources, defend from raids until as long as you can, then take off and repeat.

The concept is interesting, but the execution is not. There are three fundamental problems:

1. Exploring and cleaning the map is tedious. It's a chore since you just point at enemies and shoot, backtracking to avoid being overwhelmed in melee. The avatar is slow and has little customisation of weapons and plugins, so it's just not fun.

2. Micromanaging hell. Space in your city is limited, so you'll constantly move buildings and change recipes depending on the map you're in and the resources (not) available. Not all resources are available in each map, so you're constantly trying to balance workers availability, with flux availability, with power availability, with production volume... despite a huge variety of resources, it never felt I was making progress. Fix something and something else breaks. Production chains are varied and complex, but there's no real scalability of your base given the space and weight constrains and resources varying between maps.

3. Unbalanced roguelike mechanics. Which brings us to the third point. Once you land in a new map, you don't start from zero taking advantage of what's there (compare it with Against the Storm, for example), but you keep your consumption of flux, power, and food for workers. So every time I landed on a new map, it was a firefighting experience to stabilise those the production of those key resources, or everything else would break. Considering that there are plenty of modifiers to the production rates, and many vary depending on the map and the council head selected (valid for 50 cycles or so), and finding balanced production is impossible.

Overall I researched on third of the (huge) tree and explored five maps, but eventually gave up due to the frustration given by stabilising the settlement when you land in any new map.

As I said, the idea behind the game mechanics is good, but the realisation is not enough. Which is a shame.

Get it with a discount (I got it with 50% off and don't regret the purchase) if you're curious to play it, or skip it altogether.