Concept is interesting, a sort of skyfy Frostpunk where you need to move your colony to keep gathering resources to survive. I liked how research was implemented (it got downgraded) and backstory, but current overal implementation leaves a lot to be desired.

- UI is uninformative. Example: there are partks with trees and parks with monuments. First clears air a bit and raise morale, second is for morale only, but it is unclear why should I build second over first. Flight mechanic is a mystery, only a tech tree indicates that there are levels.
- Manual operation of some systems, that shouldn't be manual. Example: Mining for some reason doesn't autostart, generaly you want it to always work. The shield facility consumes a lot of power and the only way to control it is to manually toggle level of coverage and shield strength. At least strength could have been automated. Repair is mostly manual, avaliable auto-repair facility has pitiful range and extreme energy consumption. Flight needs sheduling to start as soon as mining is done, because having to babysit mining operations is not nice.
- Too many cutscenes you can't skip when arriving and leaving. And if there is no autostart for mining, at least there should have been autopause when arriving.
- Tiny research tree.
- Terrible map controls.

At the moment I can't recommend it.

While I didn't exactly expect this to be the next Frostpunk, it does share a lot of the same DNA. However, in the debate of nature vs nurture, clearly this was not nurtured as well as Frostpunk was. I saw the negative reviews while this was in early access, and I was hopeful that it would have improved itself for 1.0 release. I am disappointed with the result.

First issue (small): no hotkeys/shortcuts. The only keybinds were for moving the camera. Everything else, from navigating building menus, to adjusting game speed, to toggling between base/research tree/mining is done by mouse. imo a huge missed opportunity.

Second issue (large): the game loop is built around you navigating a world map with your city - but it takes wayyyy too long. Usually with city builders the core loop should be focused on the _city_ you're building. But the citizens are pretty self sufficient once you have basic food and shelter, so after 30 minutes I ended up spending the whole game watching the ship slow move to a new sector to mine (resources needed for both building _and_ research) and find new people. Most disasters threatening your city are easily scouted ahead of time and you can just choose not to fly into them. I'll make it clear: the city moves so slowly. Even at max game speed, I would spend minutes watching the strategic icon of the city slowly drift its way across a low-res picture of the earth.

Third issue (medium): the research tree is overwhelming and unsatisfying. Research is done with a variety of "elements" that are found as you mine available resources on the ground. There's an unnecessary system of "element rarity" that is ultimately uninteresting to engage with. Furthermore, the tree mixes the important with the mundane. Vital unlocks, such as shield strength, or food producing buildings, are blocked behind things like "5% increased build speed."

Fourth issue (medium): is this a colony of people or sheep? There is a single "loyalty" metric that you're supposed to tend to, but unless you leave everyone unhoused it doesn't really make a difference to the game. Most of the loyalty boosting buildings are unlocked by default, so it presents no engaging hook to the long-term gameplay. Additionally, all of the tasks vital to the functioning of the city are carried out by robots, so it doesn't really feel like the people are necessary, except for keeping themselves alive. Robots build, maintain, and mine resources. Occasionally there are cutaways to dialog boxes with a face in them, trying to remind you that there is a narrative, but it's not upheld by and of the game systems.

Really disappointed with this

Updated 16/10

Ive left my original somewhat negative review below, but after a significant developer update today, thought id jump back in and my what a difference a few days makes. Almost all the original issues have been resolved making this a good fun solid game. Wonderful to see that a large amount of work appears to have gone into resolving the initial round of issues. I cant find any major issues at this point now, and have changed my review to recommend and now believe you can play and have fun for a considerable time. Minor issues to tweak dont affect much and Road map forward looks interesting indeed. Hats off to the developers on this one.


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Early Doors clearly for this game but it has potential. Overall I think there is a good bit of gameplay and fun to be had here in time when completed.

What I liked Great intro story sequence leading, giving background and an overall premise of where we are heading. Really liked this and gave good context. The Graphics overall look great and the flying platform looks fantastic.

What i didnt like :- The scrolling / zoom is horrible, inverted x and y and very hard to feel natural with, no way to change currently. The save games dont live save, but save from the last checkpoint so lots of repetition, the game then freaks out somewhat and becomes unplayable. For example. I build a radar station and fly somewhere. Then save/load. I can physically see the radar station is still there, but game doesnt think I have one and wont let me build another.
Not a huge amount of buildings/things to do. Lots of icons appear over buildings and no guide as to what these are (guesswork needed).
The workers don't seem to want to work sometime leaving things annoying unstaffed
Power Generation levels change all the time
The interface needs to provide more detail on who is doing what and what is going on.
Element Resource harvesting seems random and lots of effort for minimal returns
Why don't the repair bots repair automatically?
Shield doesn't actually seem to protect from much, which means you will spend all your resources and time on repairing and then die as nothing left to use in power plants.

At present, I think there is just too much left to do - the game is far from complete and probably shouldn't have been released in its current state. The Roadmap for development looks interesting, but more time needs to be spend on the basics. Ill check it out again in a few months, as keen to pick it up and try again.

The concept is intriguing, but the execution is - to simply put - bad.
+ Concept
- UI is clunky
- Settings are barely managable
- Not enough hotkeys
- Huge performance issues while weather effects are on
- Can't see when raining, foggy or there's a snowstorm
- Meteor showers are way too loud
- Music is flat, poorly composed and sometimes straight annoying (I guess this last is very subjective)
- Game feels drawout
- Lack of statistical data (in a colony survival game)
- No charts
- Late game prone to bugging out, save files can get corrupted
- World map is a seethrough hologramm, and hard to use if the amp is surveyed
- Landmarks shold have better icons: lifeboats and moonfragments look alike
...
And the list goes on. If it would be still in early access I'd say it's just very slow in development and dissmiss most of my negative claims. But it just came out early access, as a full fledged game. It shouldn't have done that.
I do not recommend this game unless under 6€.

Post Full Release Review

First off, see all those Early Access reviews? Ignore them, they are all based of when the game first hit early access, and very few people updated them or reviewed since. Now, a year later, the game is out of early access and is much smoother.

2nd, this review was made at the 3.6 hour mark of playing full release, on Normal mode. This was not a complete playthrough, so some of my thoughts may be incorrect.

If you are coming into this game fresh, then the game is about a flying mobile colony. You are in charge, and have to balance out resource inputs and outputs, constantly be researching, and exploring and moving about the global map to find both raw materials and research materials. That's it. There's no laws, happiness is pretty easy to handle (at least in early game), so it's all about the number balancing and using research to expand your capabilities.

Positives:
-This game has massively improved from people's complaints in EA. The camera controls are pretty standard WASD/QE, or the mouse does it too. The power management is pretty simple in that as long as you have your power in the positives, you'll not have issues. Doing that, I basically improved my shield's strength and radius as needed, and never felt the need to lower them due to power needs. I also never had to expand outside the shield bubble, so never had to deal with maintenance and repairs. The devs took feedback and implemented an auto-mining option, if you wanted it to be on. The travel start and end cutscenes can be turned off in the settings.
-The exploration on the strategic map seems to greatly be enhanced by research. For example, survey drones can go from scanning 1 hex at a time to 7, then to 18. And you can also increase how many hexes you can mine from your city.

Neutral:
-There is definitely some stuff that still needs clarification, and/or could be applied in other ways. For example, you can research Fertilizer production earlier than you can unlock the one chain that uses it, which is fossil fuel creation in the Bioreactor. However, one of the inputs for Fertilizer is Ammonia, and despite the fact I have full storage of it, I have no idea what building is generating it. It's not a map resource, and none of my buildings are creating it. So where is it coming from???
-Oh, right, my second point about Fertilizer. Side note, you improve the environment by creating a pumping station for compressed air, and a emitter inside the dome. the Emitter can also output oxygen, if you hit the toggle. I bring this up, because I feel like Fertilizer could work on a similar system for the Vegetable farms, and yet it's not.
-Music and sound. The music is nothing noteworthy. Kind of like elevator music honestly. There is voice acting, but it doesn't make me emotionally invested in the characters. They are basically exposition monkeys and quest givers.
-Don't look at the vegetable farm all zoomed in. The crops are 2-D. not really an issue, but kind of funny.

Negatives:
-There are still some negatives. First, I wish this game's UI has some sort of input/output numbers. Like, how much food do my civilians consume and am I providing enough food for them? This idea could be a bit tricky for the resources you can only recover on the map, as that'd be a big burst of income, then a slow usage over time as you process them.
-The big sin? No total Jobs. You are told how many workers you have, and how many people. But if you want to know how many job slots you want, then you better open up every building and start counting. This can be a problem when your initial burst of people starting aging into elderly/"Veterans", and all of a sudden jobs start not being filled.

Overall, this game is... decent. It's not a genre-changer, it's not a big name. But it's got solid bones at this point, and I think it's got room to grow.
But if you aren't sure, then I'd recommend getting this on sale. $17.99 isn't bad a price point, but the game was 40% off on full release, and at $10.79, it's a pretty good deal.

This is a game I feel very conflicted about because there are a lot of things it does right, but many things it does wrong. For instance, some pros and cons of the game are:

Pros
1. Is a relatively solid city builder that has the cool factor of being on a floating island.
2. The game mechanics, besides research, are straightforward to understand and utilize.

Cons
1. Storms- At the time of early access the game balance around storms is horrible. During play time almost none of the particle storms encountered are at the shield level of the city. Additionally, the storms are quite frequent, aka every 5 minutes or so. These two factors cause the city to be in a runaway state of damage and leads to my next point.
2. Repairing- Due to the previously mentioned issue of storms repairs are continuously needed so your city doesn't fall out of the sky. This causes the game to get very tedious as most of your time is spent clicking and dragging the repair tool. Furthermore, the repairing has the additional issue of draining your material reserves. This causes a downward spiral of having a constantly damaged city with no materials to fix it.
3. Resource balance- Tying in with the previous points, the rate in which you can possibly get resources is nowhere near what you actually need. Excluding water which you can get with hydro trees, materials and research elements are found way too infrequent to repair your city and/or slow the onslaught.

All in all, the game has the potential to be good but at the moment I do not recommend buying it.

Ok, so let me preface this review by saying that I am only giving it a thumbs up because I want the game to succeed, and it looks like the devs are listening to feedback. For example, there was a patch on day 2 to address a complaint that most people had (not a bug fix, but a mechanic change). There is a foundation for what could be a really fun game, and a different take on the genre; at least I have yet to play anything exactly like it. As others have said, it does give off Frostpunk vibes, and I think it feels a little like Surviving Mars as well; both of which are games I really enjoy.

That being said... This game is not going to be for everyone, in it's current state. The UI/HUD is terrible and offers very little information at all. The research method is an interesting concept, but there is way too much RNG involved. Also, some of the beginning techs are practically impossible to research unless you have god tier luck, or wait until you are several hours into a game.

The game is also difficult, which I am down for because I enjoy a more difficult city builder. But, the difficulty is solely based on the fact that you can run out of Materials (one of 3 basic resources). And, when you run out of Materials your power plants stop working, which causes your shield generator to stop, which instantly ends your game (the city crashes).

So, if you are willing to essentially play test a game and provide feedback/suggestions to the dev team then this is a good purchase. I do not regret buying it, I feel like I have gotten my $16 worth out of it already, and will continue to play it.

I can't say that I recommend this game. It's got a really great idea but, the end result is honestly just such a waste of time.

This game requires way too much micro-management, and uses way too much of your time. Shield strength and radius have to be manually toggled, making power usage a juggling act. The only resources were, at the time of my playing this, Water and Construction Materials. Construction Materials are used to also power your city with the base power plants. So you're also juggling your construction material level with your power requirements, which the power requirements never really go down.

Travel takes time. Way too much time. You want to travel? Wait for your travel meter to charge up, which is a full minute at 1st level. I don't know if this increases with each level of the meter. I sincerely hope it does not. Travel time itself is 3 minutes per zone you travel. This makes a whopping 4 minutes in total for each travel at 1st level. And you're going to use materials every step of the way.

Eventually I got to a point where the materials I required couldn't be mined fast enough. I was literally travelling zones just to subsist on materials, while slowly losing them during travel. To be fair to the game, this can be alleviated with some research. Which gets to the next problem.

The research tree is a total mess. It requires a few materials from the Periodic Table of Elements. And what you get is not going to be what you need to alleviate the worst problems. There are four levels of elements in the Periodic Table of Research Elements, the PTRE from here on out, For even the most basic techs you're going to need at least 1-2 Level 2 elements. You *can* change your level 1 elements into level 2 elements. At a cost of 12-1. Meaning you'll need 12 level 1 elements to make 1 level 2 element. You know how many you get on average from mining? Around 20 total. Which means you'll be spending an hour just getting what you need to make a few level 2 elements. And we haven't tried to make level 3 elements yet! Those require 8 level 2 elements! Good luck with that!

Every tiny little thing in this game is a juggling act in the worst sense of the words. It requires far too much in-depth knowledge of the game's mechanics, which the tutorial does NOT prepare you for, and far too much micro-management. And that's when you're able to do anything at all. 3 minute travel time per zone, my friends!

This game is a mess. I think it has a ton of potential, and it can be so great. But I can't see it becoming better without a complete re-working of the mechanics of the game. Maybe future updates will make that better. I sincerely hope so. For now? Not recommended.

As a person who loves colony sims I thought this would be a nice experience and for the first hour or two it was. I finished tutorial and normal difficulty in 8 hours, of which the last 4 hours was spent on maximum speed, trying to figure out new traveling nodes and trying to see any kind of information in the way too colourful and information-less map. The map is transparent with very stong colours and you can see the markers on the other side of the planet, making any type of information close to impossible see unless you zoom in really far. It is also hard to try to find any kind of resources that you are after (research) on the map after the first 1-2 hours.

The travel time is nice at first, but in the late game the travel time was loads of 20 minute travel times, with the worst being a full hour. This was only saved by increasing the game speed and the twitch stream on the second monitor. There was close to nothing to do during this time, as all the resources was completely oversaturated all the time. This might have been alleviated by running a higher difficulty. Getting a stable colony was also extremely easy after the first hour, which made the bulk of the game feel like it was trying to deliberately trying to waste my time like a mobile game to justify its game time. Without the travel times this would easily be a 3 hour experience.

Some of the higher research objects are completely pointless and a lot of mechanics in the game feels like it does not have any use at all. I made a fertilizer facility and never figured out how it was used. Ammonia magically appeared, oxygen was never used as it was completely pointless. Guide mentioned fruit trees that was not in the game. Some place mentioned hydrogen as a resource but it was never seen in game. The guide is lackluster and many concepts that are in the game are never explained properly with tooltips. My population practically exploded in the late game while the birth rate as stable or low which makes no sense. The children was also included in the unemployed workforce statistic for some reason so you could have dozens of unemployed and still lack workers for your buildings, as the statistics were scuffed.

So I cannot recommend it. It looks nice and has potential, but falls flat due to being undercooked. A lot of systems have been half-implemented and forgotten so it is more of a confusing mess than a finished game. Skip even if you are desperate for a colony sim. This is not it unless the game devs get their act together.

Intriguing idea and I really wanted to like this game, but I feel it is badly balanced; stretches of easy coasting followed by sudden deaths. Difficulty level can adjust how long stretches and how often a sudden death but not really change the fact. This, plus a saved game failed to load, using up all GPU and not progressing while loading buildings. Did not feel like ready for full release, I am afraid.