Dyson Sphere Program

At least 80% of the content we have now was in the game almost 6 years when the game entered Early Access. The devs were very active the first two years. Then they hunkered down for over a year working on the big Dark Fog (adding enemies) but decided to only ship half of it. That was 3 years ago now and all we've gotten since is some UI stuff, the ability to place trees, and a bunch of empty promises and announcements of side projects no one asked for instead of completing past promises first. The game is playable but devs have gone from prolific coders to basically human glaciers. Too rich to work anymore I guess.

In it's current state this game is quite good. Why do I not recommend it? Because to access that goodness you must deal with unintuitive controls that exist in no other factory game and a lack of QoL in exchange for scope. It takes me 30 seconds to walk across my starter base because the mecha walks so slow from the getgo. That's more time than it takes me to build a blue circuit build in Factorio or a rotor plant in Satisfactory. There's not a balance reason for it. So the game looks like a lot of: "Why am I so slooooooow" and "why do my construction drones SUCK" before you access the goodness that comes with building a dyson swarm or a dyson sphere. Oh and then there's the energy scaling. Yeah... A dyson sphere around a star that should be outputting ~384.6 yottawatts (3.8 × 10²⁶ watts) of power (for just a star like our sun) outputs gigawatts or terawatts. Yeah... It doesn't really feel like a dyson sphere if my power grid in Factorio is bigger. I get that they want to work with units people are familiar with but it does seem kind of silly that a dyson sphere of all things, something that makes a civilization Type II on the Kardashev scale outputs less energy than humanity produces right now (~9.6 terawatts) when we aren't even a Type I. On top of that you cannot change the hotbar. And the hotbar system sucks. You have two options: Press 1-9 for the building CATEGORY and then F1-F12 for the BUILDING. I'm sorry WHAT? Who thought that was a good idea. It's terrible. And your other option isn't any better: Clicking. Yeah. Click menus in a game where you control a character. It's slow. It's clunky. It could be so much better. And you Cannot. Change. The Order. Of the Hotbar. Why.... Basically you're going to be waiting for your mecha to take 30 seconds to walk across your tiny base and suffering through the bad controls, then still dealing with the bad controls to access the cool stuff. Put it to you this way the controls are so bad right now that I'm pretty sure you wouldn't see much of a difference in build rate using a controller versus using a keyboard and mouse. Yeah. Ouch. And right now the combat... Is not really super interesting. Basically you fly at space nests and your fleet automatically takes it out. And you stand around while your autoturret and fighters fire at ground enemies. Yeah... It has potential. Like if you turned it into an RTS where you could command fleets at nests and clear out star systems remotely now THAT would be COOL especially if you could automate it, but right now your two options are to set up planetside turrets that fire at both planetary and space targets or take care of it manually. So basically this game nails: Orbital mechanics Dyson spheres Dyson swarms A unique spherical polar coordinate building system but fails pretty hard at: Intuitive controls Interesting combat that doesn't feel like a chore Menu design QoL Planning for the Factory Gamer (Eg people who play other factory games like Factorio, Satisfactory, etc.) Making scale effortless (Bluprints are kind of a pain in this game) Some other gameplay basics Oh and perhaps the worst offense is conveyor ramps. Yes. You must do silly conveyor ramps which take a ton of space and are pretty annoying to work with when there's no good reason to not have conveyor lifts or give sorters the ability to go vertical. So yeah. There is potential, but right now if you're coming from Factorio, Satisfactory, Mindustry, Shapez, or Captain of industry it's going to feel clunky, slow, and you likely will get pretty frustrated with it before you do anything cool because of these problems. But to be fair and give the devs a shot if they fix these QoL and intuitiveness issues I'll change my review.

used to love the game now it wont load past the unity screen befoer becoming unresponsive i surpass the min requirements by far and ive put alot of hours in but this last update seemed to have broke the game

It's very grind-y, and the lack of cloud saves is a problem if you're playing on more than one system (just lost several days of progress).