Good - but …
Great Game, Great Service
The void in particular is a very cool chapter of the game. Definitely keeps the game interesting without spoiling it.
The customer service of this developer is incredible. I had run into a bug and was unable to open the game. I sent an email and they were incredibly responsive. They took my bug data, fixed the issue, and put out an update in less than 24 hours.
This is worth a play for sure.
Pro, Cons, Suggestions
Pros:
Clean UI
Feels Future Corporate
Doesn't need to he baby sat
Retro-future feel
Good sounds effects
Good art aesthetic
Strong ideas
Cons:
Player essentially cannot fail
Tutorial is a relatively minimalist
Routes feel one way
Pay off scales quickly
Conflict with rivals feels abstract
Suggestions:
Consider altering route design so routes do outgoing and return items. For example: Food to Titan from Earth, ship returns to Earth for food shipment and brings Helium or some such to Earth. This would add some realism.
Consider scaling back how fast routes scale income. Right now it's exponential and feels a bit too easy to build a freight empire.
Change how sabotage, interdict, monitor etc. operate. Right now you can select to monitor rival routes or interdict cargo etc. many times. It might be better to drop this to one chance to do one option, fail or succeed and change the fail rate. Right now the detected and retaliated against rate feels a bit high or I'm misunderstanding the mechanic.
Improve tutorial. Consider allowing players to outright fail building an efficient empire. Something like: "you've gone bankrupt, start over" maybe. I would consult the rest of the community on this one first though, as some people may prefer building over managing.
Response from developer
Thank you for the specifics, really appreciate it. Return-cargo routes, flattening the income curve, and reworking the rival-ops (monitor/interdict) so it's a real risk instead of a spammable action are all great ideas - I will work through them. In the latest update there is a hard fail-state later in the game (you can be betrayed and exiled with nothing, then have to claw it all back). Interestingly, there was already a whole arc where you go bankrupt, restart, and your original (named) company becomes your nemesis, I'll trace why that isn't occurring correctly. Thank you again for playing!
plans to support Chinese
Response from developer
Simplified Chinese isn't in yet but it is on the list! I'm also cutting down on-screen text density, which should help focus regardless of language.
Progress Reset
Response from developer
Really sorry for these crashes. In the current update I've hardened the crash recovery so a few launch errors can't wipe a healthy save, and Settings → Recover Previous Save can restore a save that got reset. If you still have the reset save, try Recover Previous Save. Hopefully works!
