Recent reviews by namidim

For the price I'm extertained. It's similar to some other small indie games about trying to hope home across the galaxy, but with some more interaction. Not amazing graphics, but fine and fun.

It's a fun twist on the genre of open-ended space traders. I enjoyed the 80's computer in a spaceship feel and tooling around in the engine room and building my trading fortune. I didn't love the NPCs (turned them off more or less immediately), but otherwise enjoyed dropping into the universe and trying to figure it out.

fun! Easily worth the price. I did have an issue with it locking up but was eventually able to find a fix.

In the end more addictive than fun.

The basic mechanics will be familiar to anyone who has played a deck building game.. kinda like dominion where you build the deck as you go. You start with your starter deck, enter a tower where you get more cards, and continue until you either give up or die.

In theory each run is different, your crafty strategy makes a difference, and it matters if you leave or die... but in practice each run feels more or less like the last, there isn't really all that much strategy, and no matter what you do you loose all your progress at the end. (you get to keep some money, but you can't do anything all that interesting with it)

Anyway the net result is a game that feels more like penny slots than strategy. It's addictive and when the right cards eventually align you get a hit, but you're not really accomplishing anything.

In the end more addictive than fun. Plays like final fantasy tactics in terms of the battle elements, but spread out and repetitive. You spend a lot of your time in the game waiting for people, caravans, etc. to get from one place to another, even at the maximum speed available. And when you get there you are generally doing more or less the same thing over and over with the occasional rush of getting something good or running into something interesting.
Any one game takes a good long time; Actually exploring the content takes many many randomly generated games together.
The result is something that is interesting and fun in a way a faster game couldn't be, but at the cost of being reminded of your own short mortality and how much of it you just wasted.

I've had this for... years? now and I keep coming back. It's a great little strategy game that's not like anything else I can think of. It's a lot of fun and you can play a round in 30(ish) minutes.

For four bucks? Hell yea. Is it deep? No. Is it hard? No. Is it long? a little longer than a lord of the rings movie. Does pretty much any of the plot make sense? ... no? It's more or less a cinematic that requires you to push buttons to continue, but in a... I dunno exitebots racing, first person shooting, tomb raider, bioshock, platformer wrapper where there are elements of all those things, but none of them require much skill or have any depth.
Does it matter? Not really. It was pretty, fun, pulpy quick and entertaining and a silly way to waste a few bucks.

I've played through 5-10 single player skirmishes. I like the novel concept where battle is done via economics and I've gotten a good number of hours of enjoyment out of it.
My only real complaint is that I don't yet feel like I'm really using different tactics between battles so I'm not sure how long-lived it's going to be. Worth the 10-ish bucks though.

Blueprint Tycoon is 3 bucks and it's actually finished and basically the same thing. This is ok and cuter I guess, but there are buildings that don't do anything and it's clearly a work in progress.

Edited: That being said I'm still playing so obviously I do recommend it.

If you play it now you have to play against people who have been playing it forever. There is no AI. And it takes hours to play a game. So did you like being 5 and having your older simblings beat you at long games of risk over and over? Did you wish it took even longer? Buy this game.