Stardeus Reviews

The game is a pretty wonderful adventure, even the standard difficulty keeps you on your toes all the way through the game, and it's recently receives some major quality-of-life upgrades. Research and other such systems have their complexities, but aren't overly difficult to understand even as a new player, and the difficulty curve can be about as gentle or punishing as you want to make it. Plus, the dev seems to be active in talking in forums and taking player feedback, so it definitely feels like the game will continue to grow and improve. ^^ Also, you can take people's brains out and transfer their consciousnesses into robots... or your robots into humans, if that's your thing for some reason. Very important.

I've played through the research tree twice before and restarted again after the major update to travel. It was a huge change for existing players and took a bit to wrap my head around. Now that I've got the hang of how travel works, i'm really enjoying this update!

I do not recommend it. Why? I played some time ago and I had good time playing this, recently I came back and wasted a lot of time looking for a basic resources. I'm currently locked with 'plastics' resource, I cannot research tech which allows me to produce it, because it requires plastics for research. So, i started looking for trading stations to simply but it and it turns out plastic is nowhere to be found. I had the same problem with other resources like gold but this can be converted from rocks so it's not that bad. Anyway progression is much slower, than it was before and just annoying. I thought that it will be faster when I start to train my robots in ML booth (It would speed up mining), but ML booth now requires silver as fuel (previously it was working with elecricity only), so no progression for me i guess. If you like annoying grind then go ahead. It seems like instead of adding new content, they changed a bit here or there ( graphics), but the worst part they added more boring micromanagement like the research.

I'm still going through my first play through but it's been good overall. I think It's a decent space ship based colony simulation type game. I've enjoyed figuring out how things work and the tutorial does a good job of filling in some blanks left by the in game codex. I've seen some posts from other players regarding how mechanics work but most of the confusion would be cleared up if they went through the tutorials. I'm looking forward to future enhancements and polish.

I'm too early in to really say if this game has the depth of Rimworld, but initial impressions are VERY positive! I'm really enjoying taking my time repairing and learning how my starship works, and exploring and finding resources while keeping my little dudes alive. Watching my ship fly for the first time was exciting, and getting to go into hyperspace was even better. The UI is really slick, with all kinds of features I wish I could backport to Rimworld. It's just neat, and I'm really excited to see where this game goes in early access - and even if they stopped now, I'd have a big ol' starship thing to explore, and that's cool.

Had this game for a while and come back to it occasionally. It has always had problems with managing resources in one way or another be it pathing or doing jobs in an order that makes sense. Or just simply refusing to do their jobs at all in some cases which still happens. It is fun, for a little while, until you realize that no matter what you do you will lose. Things constantly explode and have to be repaired and you have to fly all over the place to get resources only to run out of fuel and die. It is certainly not a peaceful slow game, it is a slog of repetitive repairs when simply creating an electrical outlet causes an explosion the takes out everything next to it. Try to fly to a new location and your thrusters explode taking out everything around them. Once I figured out how to keep my crew alive I simply wanted to end them so there was less to explode as they are essentially useless anyway.

Game was fine up until this new update now its just a grind to do anything I cannot recommend at this time they reduced the resources locations and changed space flight the game has become a chore to play

Not worth it in its current state. That said, there's the seed of something very good here. The current version feels like an early alpha - systems are there, but they're unbalanced and don't make a lot of sense. Things randomly explode fairly often. It's trying to do Rimworld's thing where sometimes the game is difficult and sometimes it's nice to you, except the only method they currently have of providing difficulty is making things explode if you're not in a 'high-danger area'. Combat system is barebones and most weapons tech is gated behind high-tier tech. Skill progression for robots is incredibly slow, and only slightly faster for humans, to the point where (as far as I know) in my 6 hours of playing at 3x game speed, not a single one of my robots or colonists leveled a skill once. Production chains past basic resources are complex but the game's tools do not allow you to automate them, at least not well. If you add production orders which can't be immediately fulfilled, instead of skipping them entirely, the game will waste like 1 hour in-game-time before deciding to move on and check the next production order. This means any sort of production with scarce resources will slow down all production significantly unless you're willing to build tons of buildings, which is an issue because many of the resources needed for even Tier 3 technologies can be somewhat hard to come by. I suspect the devs WANT us to build lots of buildings, but it's just not reasonable, especially not early game. All that said, there's the shell of a good game here. Hope the devs see fit to stick around and work out the kinks, because this could genuinely turn into something groundbreaking. It's just not there yet.

In its current state.. No. At the very basic you need to be able to assign crew members to carry out specific jobs. However at the moment its very much like Rimworlds basic task system with the Ticks, rather than its more advanced priority system. Personally I found it very difficult to find focus on what I had, what I needed, how to get what I needed.. and after 7 hours of unclear information, with literal crap on the floor and walls everywhere.. I've decided to put this one to bed. I'm most certainly not a rookie at these sort of games.. with over 2k hours in Rimworld, and 1.7k hours in Oxygen not included, I know my way around a colony sim. But this game, although early access.. just feels like it's not ready to be played yet. Even The last star ship had more going for it. From reading through the reviews, the dev seems to have started well, but now is... well.. I almost want to say, taking short cuts, rather than sticking to his original plan for the game. Oh well. I have the game now. Hopefully it will get better, or i'll just discover I was doing something completely wrong. For now, those who are unsure.. i'd hold off. EDIT: So after a few more hours in game.. some combat and some exploration, im quite.. bored. The game feels like there's no real focus. There's a huge tech tree to explore, but you'll not bother getting through it because of pathing issues, and lack of drive will stop you playing before you're through half of it. There's crew passions and skills, but you find you mostly ignore them because colonists have a fairly wide range of them. So much so you'll never attach yourself to a colonist. I've had a few die now and it was just 'Meh'. Nothing like Rimworld where the loss of a single colonist will have you wanting to reload, or store the body until you can find a serum to resurrect them. Combat was horrible.. you can only command crew that trust you as an AI.. and then I just parked everyone in the same spot in the hope that i'd be the victor. I don't have access to any firearms nor would I even know how to equip them. It seems they just pick up whatever they want to pick up. Events are somewhat odd. You'll be fine one minute and then something will explode for no reason. Then a pod will land on your ship, sent by... umm.. space wizards? Then you'll have a breach pod sent by a different set of space wizards(Because no ships are anywhere to be seen). Exploration is boring.. you'll have one planet and maybe 3 moons, with NOTHING at all apart from on the planet. And you'll only have the one resource on the planet. It just seems the dev wants 1000 things from the game, but rather than focus on getting the basics in first.. we have many many things that dont serve allot of purpose or are no where near finished. I mean why put 6 space stations in one system??? ALTERNATIVES: Rimworld does everything better than Stardeus. Quite frankly if you're looking at this game before buying Rimworld then do yourself a favour and go add it to cart. The last Starship has plenty to do atm, with trading, ship combat, missions, mining, and exploration. You even have automation. It's worth checking out if this game interests you. Space Haven does a good job of many of the things Stardeus is trying to do. And its cheaper. I think Stardeus could be a great game, but right now its lacking focus, and the small things like pathing, resource and colony management, as well as jobs and skills are really letting it down. It's definitely one to watch.

The last update made this game harder and less fun. Devs heading in wrong direction.