Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Jul 5, 2017

  Rimworld had a baby with FTL Has problems with UI scaling. The UI is clunky and awkward. Recent updates have been improvements. No offline play is annoying Has potential. The developer listens and responds to feedback. Big positive *** EDIT *** The developer appears to have abandoned working on it. It's still a functional, fun game
• gamedeal user

  Jul 7, 2017

  *Updated 04/09/22: The game is even easier now than when this review was written (sadly), and this appears to be the final version, as the game has not been updated in years. Unfortunate that it will never leave Early Access and grow to greater potential, but it's already a great game and no bugs to report. I've also updated a starter Guide, linked below.* I notice there are a lot of negative reviews for this game, so much so that it is rated "mixed," and that is a travesty. To help you decide whether this game is for you, I will say this; If you are a gamer who enjoys using your brain, you will probably like this game. If your idea of fun is to completely divorce yourself from critical thought and still succeed, you should look elsewhere. All the negative reviews complain about the game being too difficult. I picked the game up for the first time a day ago (the hard start version) and succeeded on my first run. To make sure it wasn't a fluke, I restarted 3 more times. Every run was successful. I am not a genius. If you make an intelligent plan to build what you need, in the order you need it, and do so efficiently, you will almost certainly succeed. If you're having trouble with that, I made a detailed Guide that includes everything you need to get through the early-game. You can find it here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=969972180 That issue addressed, the game is limited in scope and has no story, campaign, or multiplayer. It is a very simple, procedural, endless survival and ship-building game, but still a good one. There is no tutorial, and some game mechanics are not obvious (e.g. that you can rotate components, needing an Airlock to exit the ship, many options hidden in right-clicking things, etc.), which is part of the frustration you'll run into. Patient examination of everything on the screen (and the controls) solves most of it. For the first half-hour, you're problem-solving skills will be challenged with a series of crises. Asteroids will bully you. Your Crew are running out of in-flight snacks. Stars are spreading their fiery love far too liberally. Some other ships take offense to your puny space-dingy. It's fairly hectic and I find this the most enjoyable portion of the game. Soon, you will have overcome immediate threats and enter the more sedate portion of the game, where your time will be spent mostly building out your dream ship. This part is for the creatives and also has great appeal. Check the screenshots in the Community Hub to see some possibilities. I have encountered no bugs at all, though the game is not well optimized (demands more from your CPU than it should); no doubt something the dev intended to get to at the end, but never did. You can save the game at any time. If you enjoy games like FTL or Rimworld, you'll likely enjoy this. It was worth the price back when it was $12. Now it's free. Why are you even reading reviews? Go try it!
• gamedeal user

  Jul 7, 2017

  I have a strict "don't buy games in early access" policy. I caved and bought this one to give it a try. That was late Wednesday (seems it had just come out too). Now it's early Friday, I'm standing at 18 hours played, and I'm very glad I waivered my policy. Yeah, it's a difficult game. Yeah, it lacks a tutorial and that makes it even harder. Try a couple of games, fail hard, go read a beginner's guide, then try again. I promise it will click. Most reviews mention this being "RimWorld meets FTL" and it's pretty bang on, if you like both you'll probably dig this one, though it is much more RW than FTL. It succeeds at what to me is the biggest flaw in RimWorld: pacing. While I spent hundreds of hours building unnecessarily complicated fortresses in Dwarf Fortress, in RW after a couple hours in a map I feel like I don't have anything else interesting to do. It's now a boring game of amassing resources so I can get to some arbitrary end game tech (never got to that point but I assume the objective of RW is building a ship and buggering off). In that regard, ST feels like DF: I'm building a ship just for the sake of building a ship, and it's fun to do it and there is always something I'm aiming to do. Resources are hard to come by, research takes a long time (which is possibly what makes RW reach end point so fast), so your ship will be ragtag for a long time before it starts getting powerful enough to stand up to enemies. Stars are a pain in the ass, mostly because your pawns are kinda stupid regarding putting out fires sometimes, but once you learn to set up so you vent areas of your ship while crossing stars it becomes an interesting addition to the challenge of designing your ship. It has a lot of things that are not as good as DF and RW (pawn psychology is very simplistic and they have little skills, save scumming is very easy), but it does other things better, which makes it worth the try for fans of the genre. As far as early access goes it's not the buggiest by a long mile - had one crash once while loading a save, paws sometimes get stuck trying to perform a job - but it's definitely not an impediment to making the game enjoyable.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 8, 2017

  Recommended with caution. EA description strongly applies: only buy the game if you're excited for it in its current state, and don't buy for what it will be when finished (which will probably be an awesome game). That being said the game is already interesting, the music is good, there's a good amount progression and challange in it. The devs are really active: there were at least 3 patches since release (2-3 days ago). Including bug and balance fixes, mostly based on community feedback, which is really nice. There is NO TUTORIAL, so you'll just have to figure it out. However you don't need to read pages to do it. Mostly because there isn't that much description, because it's not necessary. The game has quite a lot of elements, but they are kept simple, and intuitive, so you'll figure it out. Takes about 5-10 deaths to get the build order for necessities, and another 10-20 to optimize it. Yes, you will die a lot. That's mostly the reason of negative reviews. The game was extremely unbalanced when it came out, but it was made easier with every patch. There's still a relatively strict build order at the beginning, hence the part below. IF you decided to get the game I'll give you some help, in case you don't want to figure it out yourself, or you wanna enjoy the game without dying too much (for 1.0e): 0. Re-rolling your crew: Get 1 Engineer lvl3, 1 Science lvl 3, and preferrably another Engineer 2-3. Just click "Select new" until you get it. This is necessary to get your ship ready for the 1st asteroid field, and to get new parts fast. Science also helps in lots of other things. 1. Assign all your crew to Engineering. 2. A good build before the 1st asteroid field: - 2 Hull tiles - 2 Mining Lasers (at the front of the ship) - 3 Small Heat Vents - 1 CPU panel - 2 Small solar panels To do all of these you'll need to deconstruct the Small engine in the back. It doesn't have much effect, and you want to mine as much as possible, so might as well get rid of it. 3. Your next priorities are: buying Food from a trader, building another 1-2 heats vents, a Small chest and a Water cooler before your crew starts dying of dehydration. This last one can be a temporary addition, if you really need materials. 4. After those you'll also want to feed your crew, so a Food dispenser would be nice. Depending on materials, you might be able to get a 3rd Mining Laser (but have at least 5 heat vents for it). 5. Now you've probably encountered 2 ships, which are guaranteed friendly, however the 3rd isn't, so start getting weapons. You don't need to have these on all the time, so you don't NEED to add extra solar and cpu panels, you can just turn off your Mining lasers. However you can encounter ships in asteroid fields, and you might want to keep firing on the enemy while breaking rocks in your paths. You can survive the 1st hostile encounter with just 1 turret, but that won't restroy the enemy ship, I think you need 3 for that. 6. Build a Research Station and go for either Small plant bed, Medium solar panel or Mining console. If you have 30 food, then forget plant bed, and go for the other 2. If you have 2-3 turrets and 3 mining lasers AND you micromanage a lot, then you can get crazy amount of materials from asteroid fields. 7. At this point you've reached what I'd call mid-game. Your biggest problem is probably getting more crew. You can buy them from trading ships, and sometimes they join you from destroyed ships, I haven't had anything else. Additional tips: - keep an eye on HEAT: fires will start on your ship and you can lose your weapons and mining lasers easily if you're not careful. - don't forget to BUILD: after getting 3 Mining lasers and 6 heat vents you might really be enjoying getting all those precious materials while mining, but even then you need to remember to build stuff constantly. You need Hull or Floor to add anything relevant to your ship, so plan and build ahead! You can just pause the game any time to do so. - always keep in mind the CPU and Power costs. - buy Food from the first 2-3 traders, it's unlikely that you'll get the research done and build the equipment needed to make your own food in time. - always sell Water: very common, you don't need much of it and Credits are hard to get. - don't run out of STORAGE SPACE: materials just get destroyed if you do. Especially at the beginning, where starting with the engine deconstruction means you can't get everything built before the 1st asteroid field. Also get that Small chest in time! - use the CONTROL GROUPS: CTRL + [1-9] to assign them and [1-9] to use them. Very useful for weapons, mining lasers and possibly non-essential equipment, like Research station, Water cooler and Food dispenser, if you're stretched too thin on Power or CPU. - build vertically: this means you need to break less rocks to be safe. - mining laser in front, weapon placement doesn't matter. Mining lasers have a relatively short range, while weapons don't. - that being said rocks can be broken with the Laser turret, howeve you might accidently destroy resources. - SAVE A LOT: since there isn't much variance between games atm, you might as well savescum and just experience the whole game without restarting all the time. But ofc you can do ironman and just torture yourself like I do. - build smart: at the beginning you won't have the luxury to build long/wide corridors, or to make your ship look good. It's an escape pod, you're barely even alive. Prioritize what you really need. It's definitely not the only way to play the early-game, but it's an effective way. Good luck!
• gamedeal user

  Jul 11, 2017

  If you're wondering "Is this game for me?", well if you're a fan of games such as Rimworld or FTL, then yes. Yes it is, and it's definitely worth the current price tag. Now, that being said, I think this game is currently far too difficult. There are points in the game where, no matter how much skill you may have at managing your ship, it simply doesn't matter, you were going to die, and there was nothing you could do about it. That shouldn't happen in games. It's not "A difficult game", it's impossible at times. Such as the first asteroid field when you have one laser, and several large asteroids come at you and you are completely powerless to stop them from breaking something, and that early on in the game, if you lose even one piece of your ship, you may as well restart. Some things I would like to see tweaked: -Resource Management It is currently too difficult to maintain a good amount of each resource. From what I have experienced so far, you either get lucky and get what you need when you need it, or you can go several asteroid fields in a row where you get nothing from them. Even after destroying every asteroid within your range. No water, no gold, maybe 5 metal total, and well there isn't anything you can do about it. Food isn't hard to get, if you can afford to be watering your crops constantly, and you can only get water from mining (have to get lucky), or if a trader is selling it (have to get lucky). No skill involved here whatsoever. -Trading You are forced to trade a set amount of a select few resources for each trader. Seriously? Give us a sliding bar so we can sell any amount, and the price simply scales off the per unit price. Realistically, this would make sense. Traders wouldn't deny selling you 15 metal because they wanted to sell 16 instead. I think you should also be allowed to click on any part of a trader ship and see if they are willing to sell it to you. See a trader with a turret, want to see if they'd sell it to you? Right click it, see option for "Offer to buy" or "ask price for part", something along those lines. You could even sell parts of your own ship in a similar fashion if you wanted. I think this would be a good addition to these encounters. -Hostile ships (and unrealistic ships) The ships you encounter that are hostile are almost always going to win. About 5 asteroid fields into my third or fourth run at the game, I had two mining lasers, and had only a research station as an operations station so far. I get attacked by a ship with a plasma turret and a chain gun. What?! What am I supposed to do against this? Not to mention looking at the enemy ship, it shouldnt have even been able to function. It had no way of taking care of it's crew, and no mining lasers. I think the enemy ships should at least have to be realistic, otherwise they are at an advantage to the player in that, they don't have to care for their crew. -Drones Think FTL. Drones should be a thing. Where are my defence drones shooting down asteroids? Mining drones mining asteroids I select for them? Guard drones repelling intruders? Assault drones torpedoing into enemy ships to breach and assault their crew? This would be an awesome addition, maybe make it a very late game availability, due to extensive research done by the scientists or something. -More random encounters There should be more random encounters. Examples: Maybe you find another pod passing through space and you have the option of opening it up. You could have a random chance of "Hey, there's a passenger in here!" (Passenger joins ship), or "Arrrg!!" Pirates/Aliens spring from said pod into your ship. Maybe it's simply carying supplies, or maybe it's empty? Who know's? You could be given quests to aid other ships you encounter, help us get to our destination, we require a guard (protect us for ______ amount of time), delivery quests, and such. You could find beacons, that have messages in them, could be silly messages, important messages, plot/story messages (if you ever decide to implement a story to this game). That kind of thing. You should be able to interact with planets, maybe you can send a team down to investigate the surface of a planet. Why is it there are no space stations to encounter? I think you should be able to find trading stations, community hubs, or any number of other space statiosn you can think of. I think this game is great as is, but it has a lot of room to grow. It has the potential to be amazing, but I would first make the game easier, before implementing newer features. The game is simply too chance oriented and is far too difficult in it's current state. Especially at the early stages of the game, where lack of resources, guns, money, just force you to run from any and all fights you get into, and hope you get very lucky when mining.
• gamedeal user

  Jul 16, 2017

  I've tried really hard to like this game, as I play simlar, like Prison Architect. Firstly, the UI: it's nice, easy to navigate through, and most importantly, scaleable. It's also pleasant that you can change the colour - yes I know, it's a gimmick really, but having a purple UI is pleasing! Secondly, fires: these can quickly become a thorn in your side, even with adequate cooling. The mechanics behind how your sims fight them is flawed as instead of one sim fighting all the fires in one area, the game will send multiple sims to fire each individual fire in the same area, which can mean that some grow to the point where they're close to compromising the structural integrety of the ship. Now, there is a manual mode that allows you to control sims, but when you're navigating an asteroid field, while being pewpewd, there are things you don't want to micromanage, and damage control is one of them. Thirdly, NPC ships: In the beginning, they're the same as you, possibly with a mining laser, or single laser turret equipped, but as soon as you start to equip weapons on your own ship, the strength of hostiles appears to grow almost exponentially. This is far from helpful when you've just managed to fight off one attacker, have had to use your jump on the next one, and a third hostile ship pops up in a row and blows you out of the sky because you've not been able to repair everything from the first ship. Fourthly, the sims: these guys are slow. Their movement is painfully slow. They build at the pace of a snail, even with maxed out engineering stats, and the repair times are just as bad. Fith, resources: while mining for resources is not a bad idea within the game, having to make the player do it almost constantly really does take the fun out of it, especially if the player wants to build a ship that's even half decent. It would be nice if the sim who's at the mining console could be set to auto-mine. It would also be nice to have a way to manufature water somehow that doesn't require mining, much along the lines of a grey-waste system on cruise ships. It might also be worth implimenting a system where you can exchange gold for credits without having to have a trade ship there. Sixth, the music: I have to say that the devs have managed to source/create some really decent music. Yes it's "elevator-esq" in its style, but I can't say that I have minded listening to it for the 60+ hours I've played of the game. Would I recommend this game at present? No. Does it have potential? Yes. It needs work, and refining. I'll continue to play the game non-the-less as I'm eager to see how it develops. 17th July 2017 So, after the last update this morning, the interaction buttons with other ships are now buggy. Sometimes, about 1/10, they're all the right size, but the rest of the time [i]bribe[/i] and [i]threaten[/i] are both massively oversize, sometimes to the point where you cannot click on the screen because you'll end up threatening the ship. This makes it difficult to buy/sell stuff if you do happen to need it and it's being offered from the ship. However, this may be an arifact related to the UI scaling and my screen resolution as the screen shot I took with a ship earlier today shows normal interaction buttons. With some hard graft, and many attempts, it is possible to get a ship to a half decent state. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1078771455 20th July 2017 Fires, fires, and more fires. I'm still trying to fathom the mechanics behind these thorns. Sims are incredibly stupid when it comes to fighting them too, for example: if a sim is trapped in a room because of a fire in the doorway, it won't fight the fire to get out, it will just stand there until one of its fellow sims comes to put it out. Even then, if there is more than one tile of fire, the sim that was auto sent to fight in the first place won't fire the newly sprouted tiles of fire; instead the game will send a string of sims to fight, which if you're in the middle of pewpew means that sims are pulled away from working their consoles. Of course this means that you end up micromanaging something that really shouldn't be needed to be during the middle of pewpew, while at the same time often vital multipliers are being diminished by the crew being re-assigned by the game to fight the fires. The mechanics surrounding fires and how they're fought, I feel, really do need to be looked at and re-assessed by the Devs. 22nd July 2017 After lots of hard work, pain, headaches, dispair, etc. I've manged to build quite a decent ship: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1085331776 26th July 2017 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1091121724 After finishing the latest expansion of the ship, a new, larger class of trade/enemy ship appeared. This made a nice change, and a bit of a tactical challenge as it was far better armed ande equipped than previous version. 31st January 2018 So, I've not played the game for a while in the hopes that the devs would get around to patching alot of the issues. I was so very wrong. The game is still as bugged, if not more so, than when I was playing last year. AI ships all melding into one, or superimposing themselves over your ship. Random fires that make no sense. AI ship UI scaling issues where [i]Threaten[/i] and [i]Bribe[/i] increase in size as each ship spawns, or as you click the button to the point where the button will cover the entire screen and make the game so ridiculously CPU heavy it crashes out. The game had so much promise and potential, but it's sad to see it seemingly abandoned. It really is not worth the current price of £8.99.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 6, 2017

  I am very torn on this game, I LOVE rimworld, so this is right up my ally, It had many very frequent updates in the beginning, but I'm starting to think it was a money grab... No word in two months now, after multiple updates in one week. I want to love it, but I cant reccomend it unless the DEV starts comminucating more..
• gamedeal user

  Sep 7, 2017

  I can only repeat what others said: No update for months. Hard difficulty cliff to hide the lack of content. Fights are very hard, because the enemy ship is repairing constantly. After 6 hours of playtime, I feel like I saw all there is to it. Didn't research everything but what you can research comes down to: Have more of ressource x and y which you had from the start and get a bigger ship. Can't recommend this one at the pricepoint and without getting a bit more flesh on the, very promising, bones. Edit: Just to be correct: Shortly after this review there was a small update and the information by some members of the community, that the developer had a child. Congratulations to the kid, but communicating with the people that finance the project (all players buying early access) would be a very much necessity.
• gamedeal user

  Oct 7, 2017

  Good game concept, well executed and fun for what it is. That said... the game is DEFINITELY lacking in features and content, and the already pretty glacial pace of development has basically come to a screeching halt with the dev starting a family (apparently). The latest "patch" bugged the hell out of the game, and at this point, I would consider it semi-broken and abandoned. AVOID THIS GAME until the dev resumes regular updates and/or an actual, properly working, feature-and-content-complete game is release.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 28, 2017

  Something to consider when reading the reviews, good or bad. Dev apparently has left for 6 months parental leave and, at the time of this edit (12th Feb 2018), its been roughly 5-6 months plus. Again, the game is not guaranteed to be abandoned but neither is it that the dev will pick it up. If you want to buy this game, I would advice against it unless the dev has returned and started to work on the game again. Sigh pie~ Edit: The dev is back! Yippee :D Old Edit: This was approximately 3 months ago from the 1 man dev https://www.reddit.com/r/StarshipTheory/comments/7a4cap/happy_halloween_update_and_a_first_look_at_the/ "Hi, I am sorry that things have not gone to plan. Some of you will know my second child was born 3 months ago both early and under stressful circumstances. I have found it hard to find the time to work on SST during this time. Working on a game consumes a huge amount of time, and I had hoped to get more updates out before our son was born. Not the case! I can see that there are many valid comments that deserve a response and I hope to get to them all in time. Meanwhile here is a preview of the autominers coming soon to SST. They currently only seek and target ore as mining in the code is quite different to shooting. They will be available soon along with the larger CPU stack, a fire suppression system, and bug fixes. https://gfycat.com/gifs/detail/SorrowfulGlumKakapo Thank you for your support and patience. It's flattering to have people interested in the game! Happy Halloween!"