I have played more. The game was clearly rushed into 1.0 they probably had a deadline or something. It's clearly not finished. Everything past chapter 1 is suspect. Ability’s don’t seem to work at all even on successes. There is no real way to mitigate crisis. They say they have ability that counter balance the risks, they don’t. I played planet fall with a roster of 5 people and still the only ability that seemed to do anything are lone wolf and engineer. Could be a good game when it’s finished but it’s clearly not there yet. So calling it 1.0 and selling it for 20 feels a bit like it’s prepping to be abandoned.

OLD
Fun, apart from mission goals being unhelpful. Still trying to figure out what a damaged forest tile is and weather or not I just messed up playthrough with the placement of my district anchor.

Generation Exile is a unique and atmospheric game that is vaguely reminiscent of Arthur C. Clark's Rama series of novels (and other similar media) that suffers from unclear mission guidance and a strategy layer that often incentivizes frustrating min-max gameplay.

The game is more of a narrative driven experience (at least in the campaign part) with a turn-based colony sim layer (vaguely similar to the excellent Terraformers). Generation Exile offers a lot of gorgeous artwork and visuals and I am personally intrigued by the narrative element as a sci-fi literature nerd. At a high level, the cross-biome turn-based colony management layer is conceptually intriguing and even though it is clearly flawed, it does give you a taste of a unique strategy experience.

The biggest challenge with the game is the constant gameplay dissonance between the colourful visuals, solarpunk themes, narrative elements and the 4X basebuilding layer. The strategy layer seems to require a very a rigid approach with strict building placement and step by step accounting of resources. This flaw is further exacerbated by the often unclear guidance that can lead you to make seemingly subtle mistakes that later turn out to be a massive pain. On top of this, there is an RNG system to your tactical actions (done by in-game heroes, "stewards" in the game's terminology) that doesn't allow for risk-reward management gameplay (at least in the early chapters). More often than not, you have to take the actions without any ability to manage risk.

I would argue the maps are too small; making everything x2 as big (map, coverage radius and even default storage depot sizes) would go a long way to allowing more flexibility and creativity. Right now, it feels like you are boxed in and you have no real option to develop an interesting colony design. Perhaps this is a minor thing, but I think the upgrade token system should be a lot more flexible (e.g. all storage depots should have the option to increase capacity) and shouldn't be restricted in an arbitrary manner.

I like the hero action system, it does adds for some variety. That being said, not being able to manage the RNG action system means that sometimes you get negative traits that require returning to an earlier save. You'll eventually figure out the skills and symbiotic strategies, but it would be nice if the game was more clear on this (explicitly state what each skill should be used for) and had specific early game tasks to help discover this element of the game.

It might be worth adding a "narrative" mode with higher base output figures, storage capacity and steward skills for those who are looking for a more creative basebuilding x narrative experience.

That being said, I liked the game overall and I am looking forward to going through the narrative and achieving planetfall.

I really wanted to enjoy this game. It is pretty and the themes are nice. But it is too buggy and the autosave interval is too infrequent. I encountered a couple of bugs that meant I had to reload much earlier process, including one crash to desktop.