Update for extra playtime(42hrs):
Definitely promising. There's an ebb and flow where you do feel some of the pain of early access(lack of blueprints and some QoL features), but these things are on the devs road map.

If you play efficiently, you CAN get gated on resources where you're just waiting for things to finish. Generally it's a good time to reorganize stuff and also expand in preparation for the next zone, but it does feel a bit bad to be bottlenecked waiting. The coming addition of tier 3 miners should help with this(edit: in the following stage, it's 15 hours worth of production time to get all the materials, which is... not good. Early access, so I hope they review this. I might set it up and let it run idle but I don't think that's a good design...)

The devs have a solid roadmap that seems to address most of my current issues with the game, so I would say for something that's just out in early access it's very promising. It IS still an early access game. It's not riddled in bugs(I've encountered very few and they're not game breaking), but it is missing QoL such as blueprints or production statistics, and some small balance tweaks, so if you're looking for a complete experience maybe wait a bit, but if itching for a new factory game with it's own twists, at this price it's a bargain.

Original review below

Another automation game with its own twists, such as just not having belt spaghetti at all(which is good and bad with the shared flows. It's less fiddly to set up but it's also less visually obvious what's going on, so you need to be on top of organizing)

I've not run into any bugs at all so far, though apparently there is a memory leak that requires the occasional restart, and the balance between making you do things by hand early and then automating it later is very solid. A popular review is really off the mark on this, though apparently the devs did make solar need less micro management which is something to be very thankful for.

It does some things differently from other games in the genre, so they may not be familiar. That's not a bad thing in my book. If I just wanted to play a factorio clone I'd play factorio.

In general the QoL features are pretty good though I hope that the advanced setup of storages and the like can be made less fiddly. It's good if you're just filling with one item, but if you want to set multiple, you need to set each slot individually. In the long term as factories grow, blueprints and the like are going to be necessary, these are apparently already on the early access road map, so I look forward to them. The dev team appear to have a solid vision of where they're going and what the game still needs.

They've also struck a pretty solid balance of keeping you busy with events and exploration and giving you solutions to them eg with automated defenses.

For fans of the genre, definitely worth picking up at the current price. I normally want to get more gameplay in before writing a review, but I felt the one negative review getting a lot of attention is unfairly turning people off this little gem. I will update the review as I progress more.

Pretty good overall.

I enjoyed it, but it does feel a bit shallow still. End of the day it just makes me want to go back to Dyson Sphere or Satisfactory, which are a little more fleshed out.

This one will get there I hope. 7/10.

Its a mix of boring and mindless fun.

Seeing as its EA, I'm just going to list the things I think need to be fixed/reworked:

1. The base is filled with mostly 1x1 buildings, making the base building process boring, and the end base result typically dull to look at, overly dense, and easy enough to defend.
   
   Buildings should be larger, less spammable, more impactful, more important to defend, create challenging layouts, and be individually more visually distinct and engaging, but also the same for the overall visuals of the base.
   
   
2. The efficiency metric is wrong, making identifying bottle necks more painful than needed, because a building that isn't producing because its output is full is completely different to one that's not producing because its input is empty, one is 0% and one is over 100%, because you have gone past production into stockpile, you are over producing, ergo: Efficiency should go over 100% and not show the same icon colours.
   
   
3. There is no need for manually ejecting ships and aligning solar panels, its not fun and you just completely remove the mechanic later on anyway through automated Fusion Reactors and Tug Boats.
   
   
4. You should be able to filter your personal storage.
   
   
5. Freighters shouldn't all sit in the same location underneath Dock's, all clipping into each other, it looks stupid and makes it hard to click individual ones.
   
   
6. Manual combat is tedious. There might as well be soft locking or auto targeting when firing. Its not as if the combat is complex enough to warrant the extra effort.