There's gold in these hills, but it needs more polish; it needs more time. Alien Horizon started with a slightly obtuse tutorial. It kind of vomits all it's systems at you, never allowing you to, 'play the game,' in the beginning. I understand complex city builders, but being given so many text boxes so soon, with no time to actually be allowed to interact with the systems in the game made me quit very early.

I want to play this game. I don't want to spend 30 minutes or an hour reading the game. Let me play some before each new window of text engulfs me in a new mechanic or system. I wasn't even allowed to unpause the game to allow for construction of a power grid, which I knew how to build, but wasn't allowed. Then I was told to go to a map in the lower left corner, that wasn't even there. Then I found out that clicking on new items open new text boxes, but do no close old text boxes; so even though I was told by one text box to click an icon, and that text box went away to display another text box, the original text box was still there waiting for me to close it after I closed the subsequent text box.

To exit the game and write this review I had to close 5 text boxes that were stacked on top of each other. I'm sure there's a good game here. Other players are leaving good reviews. I however, think the opening sequence of the game should be better. I want to learn your game and enjoy learning by doing, not by being lead from one text box to another. I want to experience this game and see progression. Even my personal progression of text box reading wasn't progressive.

Howdy! I just wanted to say that I loved the preview build that I played (24.05.03) The game at it's core is very well done for a city management, space simulator.

The early pacing is wonderful, technologies and new structures unlock at a very comfortable pace. The distributions systems with the utility towers worked as in intended with power and life support when the lines have no malfunctions. If a has a minor malfunction though, it can be crippling to a section of the town.

The pipe distribution system was a bit aggravating. The pressure tanks for both air and water constantly froze up the system even when allowing for extra storage then what the system needed to function on a daily basis. (For example, I had 1.5X the waste water, and 1.5 the water then the system needed, but constantly the system kept getting clogged up with waste water that wasn't being recycled properly by the life support units citizens kept dehydrating even though there was an excess of 200 units stored in the tanks) That was after triple checked the storage, life support, and farms usage rates in the system. The only thing that I could think of that might fix this would be a "do not allow tankers to service" option.

The logistics cargo carriers were a bit aggravating in the game. The units would go to a location pick up 1 item (example: 1 scrap transistor) then run all the way to a drop off location and drop off 1 item. These units wouldn't stop off at multiple locations (ex. pick up 5 scrap metal, 5 scrap transistors, 5 scrap cables and then transporting them to a location to drop off) This caused several moments in the game where logistics had multiple day ques to pick up just .2 or .5 of 1 item for maintenance uses. This issue also impacted facilities when switching production lines (switching gas types from producing carbon, to methane gas) the facility would not producing carbon for example because of 1 methane gas being at the location.

Not being able to drive over pipes was a bit annoying, typically in other games like this they are in a layer that is underground, or suspended in air.

The Wind turbines felt just useless. They required a lot of materials to build, however, instead of producing the 300 units energy, they were limited by the air speed which could mean that they only provide 1/2 at max the energy that solor panels did. In the early to mid game, this seemed to hurt the most, in late game stages when shuttles and construction options are available, then servicing a long power line to a hill isn't as much as an issue.

Tool tips for how to build items such as pipes or cables, etc, would have been a great quality of life improvement. It too building a 3D printer, then learning how to build the additional units (at first I thought it was broken) to find out that pipes could be printed, but cables couldn't because of not having the copper ore, or other multiple ingredients to make. I couldn't figure out which buildings were needed, or how to do the production line chain through the methods that were available in game in the preview build.

Overall all very well done, and worth trying it out if you like games like surving mars!

Disclaimer: I am fully aware that the game is in alpha

When I started I thought about another of the base builders, but it isn't, it is unique enough form casual builder games
Modular buildings, fine-tuning of each building etc.
I will definitely follow the progress of the game development and change the review as the game is updated

Graphics:
I like the style they used. Industrial buildings looks industrial, vehicles looks and move like real counter-parts, terrain could be better, as sometimes the slope of terrain (very important) is not visible (but you can rotate camera, or use visual overlay to show slope) There is even an option to adjust ambient brightness and gamma in settings, very nice from devs!
9/10

GUI: too cluttered, too much information, too much windows, sometimes you close window by clicking away with right-click, sometimes with left-click
5/10

Tutorial:
Overwhelming, too much info and too much blinking icons at same time, yet it explains almost enough
Maybe something less forced could be better
8/10

Control:
Some settings are require so much clicking trough menus and windows just to get to what you need
Settings of storages was a bit of pain, because if you trying to sort things out, but as you select them individually, the settings are copied from the previous one, I found out the hard way (storage full of junk)
6/10

Optimization: Poor
I can run real-like graphics like Snow-runner at high above 60 FPS, yet this runs on lowest settings below 30 FPS constantly and gets worse with exploring the map (which is mostly barren)
This is expected from the state of development (alpha), so no score given for this category
-/10

Bugs:
Only bug I encountered was a crash ONCE when placing a new building
Only minor visual mistakes: ship rotated 180° at crash site
You an see buildings being progressively build in real time (their model changes slightly),
yet stated progress updates only each hour (more on that later)
8/10

Missing:
When you are placing a new building, you can see the ports, but when it is already build, there is no way to see where are those ports, but game will warn you if you try to block the port with different building,
yet it is up to you to figure out what port are you blocking

Annoying:
The game is something between real time and turn based game, you can see vehicles and people move, yet things are done/updated only each hour. That means there are some hours that nothing is happening and then next hour you will get tons of notification of all that happened. Building are build same way, consumption and generation too. How to balance stuff? I'm not sure, as it not showing anywhere actual consumption/generation, only last hour average, which can change rapidly due to logistics
I think that this feature should be ditched, update building states every game step, same with con/gen of resources

Very annoying:
Constant audio-visual notification about too much resource
example: too much water, instead of drills automatically shutting down, the game will keep beeping about full water storage
There are accidents and broke downs that happen so having full storages is a good thing to do, as it takes some time to fix broken building

Surprising hardlock:
If you order to move too much food from cargo ship to your colony, it will fill your storage and everything else will stop working and whole logistic grind to halt. For some reason building additional storages have to be unlocked way later in game. This is how my first colony ended.
Cheap and dirty solution: Let me use cargo ship as storage, dumping stuff back into it, it will prevent this from happening

Confusing:
Research tree type structure is applied multiple times in game, except in research itself, which works differently
You unlock new buildings trough "achievements tree", so you need to finish achievement to progress
This, in my opinion, is big problem, as it was not addressed, quite opposite, game tells you to loosely follow them.
I'm currently stuck, because game wants me to have 20 active builders, yet I am not sure how to do it,
making more building plans don't do it
Some other requirements are not understandable, like store 80% of waste in stockpiles
What is waste? Which stockpile? I though it meant to get rid of damaged material from main ship storage, but nothing changed
The have pre-requisites, but order in not fixed, so why even have arrows in "achievements tree"?

Ideas:
Make solar panels or batteries being able to "squeak through" (Factorio joke) for maintenance vehicles only, so you can make more efficient solar farm that don't require large gaps everywhere

TLDR: Recommend trying out for yourself