Interstellaria Reviews

The tl;dr line for those lazy: [u]There's bugs in this game, but it has potential. The UI is the biggest road block still. And still after the big patch update, there's still more to work on.[/u] Now onto the actual review. Interstellaria is created by one dev named Coldrice, with music provided by Chipzel. The game's theme seems to be that of "here's a ship, crew, and the stars. There could be a story, but make your own." Designed with pixel art, the game could easily be transported back in time to the 80s-90s with no problem. If this were presented to my younger self, when I had a 486 pizza box style computer, I would be blown away by the concept of what's shown. With that in mind, some people might not enjoy such art style where others find it quirky or nostalgic. But how does the game play? Fairly simple, with glitches, and a UI that is out to conspire against you if you have more than around 4 characters. You are given one busted down corvette at the start and two crew. Eventually you buy, sell, and salvage enough to recruit more people and amenities on the ship. In a mixture of FTL with The Sims, each crew member has certain needs and traits which help or hurt the character's ability to gain skills. If you don't take care of said needs, the crew will leave your ship. So there's a slight balance between "purchase a new console to repair us over time" or "need to get that jukebox because Billy is looking bored and he's the one guy who can fly this rust bucket." Characters gain skills by doing things. Want a better weapons officer? Stick them in Tactical. Need a person to drive? Navigation is where they need to go. Tired of losing money with repairs at a base? Get that Engineer station filled with duct tape and sit it out for a while. As you land or encounter ships in space, there's the potential for trade or fighting, or just plain old salvaging. Overall the principle game play has no real focus, allowing people to craft their own goals in this 8-bit-ish not-quite Mass Effect/TOS Star Trek sandbox. So what's the problem? An open universe where I can fight/trade to my hearts delight sounds wonderful. It would be if the User Interface and game bugs weren't to the point of literally breaking the game. The UI's inventory system is small, cumbersome, and splits up your ships inventory (stations and weapons) from your mission inventory (things you can equip for your characters and cargo you can sell). When you land and find a merchant to update your ships, there's no way (on planet) to determine [b]just what your ship has[/b] so you can run the risk of purchasing that new gun system only to realize it does the same amount of damage as one you already have, or worse. Though in my earlier version of this review I mentioned the infinite item bug, I could not replicate now. However there's other bugs such as every time i hit the Y button some events pop up as if I'm generating them. Typing up a new name even does this, but also when you type up a name it is rather easy to duplicate a letter. Even still when you do it, the hover over still refers to the old name. Plus the Harvest button is nitpicky. I would have one person strip a planet bare but because I misclicked one ore node with a character a while back, it doesn't register to harvest. I will give thanks to the developer for fixing other bugs such as the resolution switch. Earlier I tried playing with a new resolution and it would break the game on me. That's not a problem anymore. Earlier in my review I complained about the story or lack thereof and as I tried to go back I didn't have the drive to try and explore this further. I would enter the game, stumble on a problem, try to plow through it to enjoy the game but then turn it off and make notes. Maybe one day I'll try to find the story, until then keep an eye on this ever changing review. The music is chip tune in a sense. Lots of beeps, whirls, and tempo reminiscent of my past when the Amiga's music and graphics were shown off to computer conventions. It does the job well enough without being too annoying or repetitive to me. The developer hasn't completely left it seems seeing as how I got notified by someone in comments about a patch update, thus prompting this review change. I'm glad to see the developer continue onward with this. Don't give up on it, this has potential for a solid fun title. The concept IS there and I'm not going to give up on trying it out every so often. If you're at this point of the review and still thing this game is worth the 10$, you'll enjoy what you get. However if you're on the fence, I suggest keeping tabs on this to see if the patches keep coming in which I hope does happen. I understand indie dev work isn't going to be like clockwork, that's why I'm constantly going to update and retry this with every patch I see. I cannot fully recommend this game in the current state. Yet I don't think it is a bad game in concept. It needs more tweaking before I change my review to a thumbs up.

I want to like this game, I really do, but I can't. Interstellaria has a lot of good points to it, it's essentially an adventure based FTL, and damn it's fun. You manually fly your ship during fights to avoid enemy fire, you manage a crew and have them man different stations for different effects, it's just a lot of fun. There are unfortunately so many bugs and inconveniences that the game borders on unplayable. - Incredibly tiny universe. I'm not too far into the game, and I'm hoping the game holds more in store than what I've currently gotten to, but as it stands, there looks to be only about 40 planets, less than half of which are explorable, and a large portion of the 'explorable' ones are simply ports to sell goods I can no longer find because I've harvested everything in the universe, and parts/ships I can't buy because I can now only make small change hunting the same ships over and over. -The sound and graphical options don't save, so unless you want to play in a low resolution windowed mode, you have to redo your options on every launch. - Keyboard shortcuts sometimes don't work on the first press. I'm really not sure what triggers this, but usually any time I try a keyboard shortcut if I haven't used the keyboard for a minute or so, I'll have to double press it. - Can only see a single team member's health at a time. This forces the player to constantly rotate between crew members for fear that someone is near death. - Can't see ship part descriptions in the fleet menu. Want to compare power use of MKII and MKIII parts? Well, you'll have to take the current one off your ship, leave the menu, go into the inventory, decide which one you want to use, leave the inventory, open the fleet menu and put the part down. And the list goes on. All in all, this game just feels unfinished, and if the creators can consider this 'good enough' to be called a full release and start working on something else, I can't see them getting around to fixing too much. Edit July 27: So, I haven't played the game with any of the most recent updates, but I just want to say really quickly that Chuckle Fish has proven me wrong by tossing fixes and improvements at the game as quickly as they can. I really do appreciate the team working their butts off.

An absolutely fantastic example of an indie game. Taking place in a sector of space inhabited by many unique species, you will play the role of a freelance trader/explorer/bounty hunter/whatever you want. It's a very charming game, with humor littering it's light hearted universe. It constantly nods to star trek in it's own way. Not only does it have space travel and combat, it also has sidescrolling planetside exploration with a huge amount of planets each with multiple landing zones. I should probably go through pros and cons to make this review easier to read: Pro's: -Charming pixel art style -Lot's of unique planets to explore -Customizing ship interior -Indepth crew inventory management. -Fun space combat which involves moving around a 2d plane dogding oncoming fire -2d sidescrolling planetside adventure -I haven't really gotten into the campaign objectives but so far it is interesting. Cons: -Slightly clunky interface (gets easier the more you use it) -Occansional crew pathfinding stupidity -ummmm... -should i put more stuff in the cons section? -lack of walruses so far Overall I say buy it if you like space sims.

Quick Read: Interstellaria is a charming game, that is approximately 110% grinding. There is also a self destruct button, that is never explained, and is right near the launch button. Perfect to press after 3 hours of grinding with no autosave. Looks good, sounds good, plays mediocre. Pros: -Nice, Clean Visuals -Nearly No Bugs -Good Sound Design -Very Nostalgic -Genuinelly Enjoyable (First 3-4 hours) Cons: -Lack of Depth (Combat, Story, Items, Characters) -Repetitive Missions -Few Items -Little Variation (Locations, Missions) -Oversimplified Combat -Ground Missions (Massive Grind)

This game is not done yet. It could be fun, but it is buggy and has a inconsistent UI. I had to look twice before writing this review to be sure its not a beta/kickstarter. Micromanaging your crew is a pain because they often choose to stand on the same place. On planets you can at least see the name of the crew member you have selected (but only one even when you have selected more than one), but on your ship you have to guess because the part of the UI that should show you the selected member is now used by the status of your ships shield. So have fun fiddling arround to make your crew members do what is needed to survive a combat situation. Something like a list of your crew on a sidebar where you can select and, also very important, see which of your members you have actually selected when selecting more than one would be a great improvement. When you are unlucky the pathfinding decides that your crew is now stuck into the ground, which means that you will lose them for good. I would suggest to wait before buying, its not an expensive game, but without the bugs and with a working UI the game would be so much better.

This game broke my heart. I was so hyped about it that I didn't even wait for a sale... From the first time I heard of this game, it was portrayed as a blend between two favorites of mine, Starbound and FTL; combining FTL's epic space combat and Starbound's limitless exploration. This game has neither. Space combat is a bit challenging while you're still on the starting ship, that has no shields. But once you get a shield or a decent speed, it becomes child's play. What you don't easily dodge by moving around, you shields will suck it up like a sponge. And once you get bigger ships like Kursha Cruiser and slap some Death Rays to it, then you're set up for life; nothing will ever give you a challenge. On the exploration, for a game whose developer was in clearly in contact with Chucklefish, it's ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like Starbound's exploration (unless you count the platformer part). Of the few dozens of planets available, you can only explore two or three, and most of these have absolutely nothing but a fistful of resources you can collect, and some won't let you land till you're doing certain mission of the Main Story, which is the other bad part. And this is all without mentioning how buggy are the whole pathlines your characters follow; you'll have to get used to them suddenly stopping over a stair step because they failed to jimp over it. The Main Story is just a linear and uninspiring streamline of Fetch Quest; go talk to this quest giver, go to this planet, kill all the monsters, find the quest object, grab all resources, go back to your ship, return to quest giver, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat FOR HOURS. And the slow space travel only makes this even more tedious, as some quests send you to the other corner of the map just to talk to some guy or fetch some Space MacGuffin. The only thing I admit I enjoyed is the Soundtrack; which is quite good, but soundtrack alone doesn't make a game. So, to sum up, if you're looking for a epic space-faring experience, filled with exploration, twisted plots of intrigue and a really challenging combat... go play something else. I'd reccomend you Freelancer, which has all of the above sans the exploration part. You can try Starbound for that one. This game is a waste of money...

This game, while gorgeous and interesting on the outside, suffers from awful bugs (including achievements being broken and crew members getting stuck on stairs). I can only pray that Chucklefish gets these guys to fix the game. Then they can fix Starbound. TL;DR - Interesting concept that will not tickle your Terraria/Starbound itch. Poor design choices and rough presentation. Pros? - Awesome pixel art. - Charming attempt at customization. - Interesting space combat that you can definately get absorbed into. - Real exploraton that functions as a method of earning money and supplies. - Very simple. - Hands free function on exploration. Cons? - Outside of space combat, there is nothing that's intriguing. - Huge amounts of time spent feeling like you're AFK. Until pathing is broken. And then you're annoyed about that. - Money is easy to find. Planets are farmable and I have not once seen where Valuable Metals or something has not been in demand in the HQ. This makes buying ships and crew far too easy. - Clunky UI. UI windows that interact with eachother horribly. (Two menus up? You just hit the menu behind the one you wanted to.) - Annoying bugs. Like randomly generated astroids that are generated so that you cannot get back to your ship. - Bugs. Like the kind where mapping where certain crew members.. ahem.. most crewmembers need you to physically walk them up stairs or jumps. - Like a lot of bugs. A little less with the new update. - Hands free fuction on exploration. Crew members die. All the time. Conclusion?: Starbound exists. FTL exists. They both do what this game intends to do better. Play those instead. EDIT: Chucklefish isn't the dev for this game, silly. Added some more pros and cons. WIll continue to update as game is updated, unless it isn't. Steam might be seeing an influx of return requests soon. Lol. EDIT II: I'm getting comments that make it seem as though people are misconstruding the fact that I am not reviewing a triple A title for an article on Destructoid or something. I am going on the information that I acquired through nothing but my gameplay experience. Just as 90% of consumers do. This is a user review. If you're looking for a college length essay, perhaps look elsewhere, as there isn't enough about this game to go into immense detail. I added some more discussion about bugs, but I won't be updating further. As I hear of bug fixes I might. We'll see. EDIT III: I've been told to revisit some of the points I made. As someone else has stated, Steam gives me the option to either negatively or positively rate this game. There is no "circumstantially" button next to "Do you reccommend this game?" However, that is indeed my true answer. This game is fun and interesting but poor design choices caused it to royally flop. I enjoyed that sapce combat was simple and floaty. I did not like that when I was out of space combat there was cirtually nothing to do. See my cons section. A series of nitpicks, maybe. But you would most likely have the same issues with the game as well. I bought this game for myself and a friend. I was excited to play and I went into it with an open-mind. I'm just looking to save you your money on a game that isn't worth your time. I did do some rewording and spelling error fixes though. < 3

well then - There are very few ships. - no form of auto save - frequent crashing (see no auto save) - taking off resets the map, all resources, enemies, and quest items are put back in place this would be less irritating if so many quests did not require returning to the same map. - plot is nothing like what is advertised its a linner plot with little content - poor user interface - resource gathering involves sitting and staring at the screen. - healing characters involves sitting and staring at the screen. - travel involves sitting and staring at the screen. - most of the games time in fact is spent waiting for time to pass. actual gameplay is brief and far spread out. - many, many bugs (but hay they may get fixed) - poor ai pathfinding. I want to like the game, however it feels quite short on content, has no replayability, and is to short on any actual gameplay for me.

I'm not sure how I feel about Interstellaria. I want to like it. For years I've been looking for a subsequent continuation of Star Control 2's Gameplay (one of my favorite games of all time), and while this comes close, it's suffering from several small issues and 1 massive issue. I'm 8 hours in, and I've literally explored the entire universe. That leaves a bad taste in my mouth. That should not happen in a game that allows you to freely travel an entire universe. There are too many planets with nothing to do on them, and there's too much space on the map that is just empty. No planets have moons, no planets circle a sun,every star system is 1 planet, there is no variation in gravity from planet to planet, but there are temperature "biomes" that encompass an entire planet, there are no gas giants, or variations of types of planets either, no satellites, no leftover or abandoned tech, nothing, just lots of nothing on a planetary scale, no planetary info, no day/night cycles, just a static marble in the vast emptiness. Save yourself the money and go play Star Control 2 (also known as Ur-Quan Masters), which is from the 1990s, free, is better than Mass Effect (yes I said that), and even has voice acting. Developers of Interstellaria... Allow players to make hotkeys of crew members/management for easier control and selection. Allow players to make hotkeys of ships in their fleet, just like any RTS game. Allow players to save what crew members man what stations and tie that to a single button for ease of use. Fix the enemy AI, as the game is too easy to play through. I can literally fight anything with 1 ship (that is 1 step removed from the starting ship) and win without being touched. I can also fight anything with 3 crew members with a basic pistol and kill them with ease. Adjust the weapon systems to be able to fire alternately, tie it to a key, and create a button to fire them all - just look at FTL for christ sake. Add a timeline system for the universe to change as time passes. Make those influence circles increase, shrink, or move as territories change hands between races, or just have the circles change size based on which race is winning more fleet fights. Allow more conversations to take place in space between friend and foe alike, hostile ships never open up hailing frequencies, and I have NOT ONCE found a use for hailing a ship as friendly ships auto-hail you, and enemy ships never accept your hails - why is this button in the game? I see you've included a fast forward button because you realized how much waiting was involved in the ground/exploration systems - while I appreciate that, that's a bad design sign from step 1. If you need it, that speaks volumes for your design choice from the drawing board. I can keep going. I have a degree in this field and have worked on AAA titles. I want to like this game, but it isn't done, there's too much emptiness to it, and there's so much more that could be done.

This game was on my "wait list" for a long while - since they announced its Kickstarter. I was not a backer, nor a Early Access founder - I have been burned by enough EA projects by now, so I rather buy things on release. And that's what I did with Interstellaria. Before I get any more personal, I'll review the game for you for what it is. It's important to start with what this game is and what this game isn't - as appearances can crush many expectations! - SPACE. The final frontier. Or is it? In Interstellaria, you control a fleet of up to 5 ships along with the big crew to man all the stations, in adventures across the galaxy. WHAT IS INTERSTELLARIA? Better described as Very Lite FTL [Faster Than Light, game] meets Very Lite Starbound. Tactical Space Combat with planetside exploration and combat with away teams, with infinite amounts of nostalgia - all made, for the most part, by the hands of a single person. What Interstellaria isn't: IT IS -NOT- a complete dynamic sandbox of procedural exploration. In summary, Interestallaria is completely linear and static. For example: - Economy: goods are always in full supply in Planet A, and always in full demand at Planet B. No price fluctuations. No economy. - Simulation-wise: Space Combat encounters are random and have no influence on the game universe. Same can be said by Ground Combat - mob spawns are fixed and always respawned after leaving and reentering the same planet. - Story-wise: There's a single ending and there's no decisions to be made - the story is linear and directed. Therefore, mind your expectations before buying! The CONTROL SCHEME is straightforward, with hotkeys for all screens. Right-Click usually involves moving around and assigning orders, left-click usually examines or sets a target (in space combat). The INTERFACE is easy to use and understand, and brings much nostalgia. GRAPHICS and SOUND are amazing. It's a 10/10 in my book. If you like chiptune, you'll probably want to acquire the soundtrack. And again, the graphics bring much delicious nostalgia for those who either played or watched someone playing Space DOS games back in the 90's. CONTENT, STORY and EXPLORATION are rather limited, even though the game might take the "default" 15-20 hours to complete and explore. This is where Interestellaria gets weird and easy to criticize: you'd expect much more from a "Fully Explorable Galaxy". Not only that, but ALL LANDABLE PLANETS have "Breathable Atmospheres" - there's ZERO Survival or Life Support component in the game. Even though there's a in-game/in-universe explanation for that, it feels really cheap and left out. The plot itself is good and interesting enough, but there's too little universe lore to support anything more than that. And the lack of different endings or actual choices throws the opportunity of a real "Space Epic" experience down the drain. This doesn't mean that the game isn't OPEN WORLD. You are free to forget about the plot and explore the available universe, trade and build your fleet at any time. I actually got my Kurshan Cruiser as soon as I could, and then I followed the story. CUSTOMIZATION and MICROMANAGEMENT is existant to a certain extent in the game: - RACES: You choose which race to recruit for your crew, and some races might have constraints applied to them. Bashiens, for instance, don't wear armor. Some kinds of robots never level up, while Drones do. Whatever other variables, though, is not exposed by the game. So I don't know if humans gain XP faster and Kurshans deal more melee damage, etc. - TRAITS: Your crew can also pick up traits, which is a very interesting system to have. However, most traits are bad or silly. And by the end of my game, everyone who could have a negative Gathering trait, had it. - CREW CUSTOMIZATION: You can choose which equipment to put on the Helmet, Armor, Legs, Weapon and Augmentation slots of your crew. There are certain "Vanity" items dropped by mobs, which is a nice touch. - AUGMENTATIONS: Make characters even more unique - some augmentations simply give more health, others might be weirder and make your crewman shoot lasers. Still, there's a lack of variety here, and augmentations are rather hard and rare to come by. - SHIP CUSTOMIZATION: You can pick which modules and levels for each ship station, and where they'll be positioned on the ship. This is really cool, since you can tailor ships for different roles - you can even crew a ship only with robots to save space and time! Further Ship customization would help make ships really unique, though. - SHIP EQUIPMENT: There's a decent amount of weapons, and each race specialize in a different weapon types. - CREW MANAGEMENT: You can assign crew for different stations, or order them to eat, have fun, sleep or heal. If a crewman is not allocated to any station, he'll take care of his needs himself - but if left unwatched while allocated, he might leave your command next time you land..which makes it rather frustrating. Therefore, currently, Crew Management is rather weird and unwiedly. It's manageable with a single organic-crewed ship, but needs improvement. (My solution to ignore micromanaging issues was to crew my other ships with robots). - This might be a good time to warn you: there's NO CRAFTING in the game. SPACE COMBAT is not as complex and chaotic as FTL, but is very fun and cool in its own way. You actually move your ship around in a screen, and can dodge and position yourself at will. Taking hull damage might cause hull breaches, damage ship stations or cause fires. There's NO BOARDING mechanic in the game, which is rather disappointing. Currently, Space Combat is too easy and has no variety, unfortunately. GROUND COMBAT is simple, but needs improvement. Right-clicking a target will give a single move/attack order to your crew, who might stop attacking after the first blow, or not. Pressing G or clicking the Guard button will make your crew automatically attack nearby enemies, which makes it much easier and faster, but your crew can still stop attacking the target. The bosses are actually surprising, but usually the low ammo capacity forces you to fall back to the ship to resupply and heal before a boss fight, which feels cheap, completely breaks immersion and makes the game lose all of its character. REPLAYABILITY is probably null. I've finished the game, got all the achievements, and there's no point to replay the game - unless a big content update hits us. CONVENIENCE is bad in this game. Menus don't use the mouse wheel, trading goods requires you to single-click for each item unit, transferring power between the ship's systems will have you click multiple times for each energy unit, you can't access you ship's cargo hold while landed, and there's NO AUTOSAVE at all in the game. Therefore, most things that can be boring for the player, will be. At least "Harvesting" is automated - but it can largely be ignored by trading instead. About BUGS and ISSUES: Post-launch, players had many problems, ranging from simple UI issues and typos, to save-game corrupting bugs. I managed to finish the game without major issues, even though I had to reload a few times and probably lost one or two hours with that. Constant saving is necessary. It's important to note, however, that the developer released two patches in two days - on the same day of release - and through the weekend. CONCLUSION: There's a lot of bad inside and around Interstellaria - there's no denying. No matter how much you want to love the game, you'll probably end up hating on it instead. But that's when you have to remember what the game is: a linear, static, light hybrid space adventure game that costs 10 USD, made by a single person. I've reached my word limit, so I'll end by saying I actually enjoyed it, and smiled at the end - the galaxy is saved, and mankind is, once again, free and safe. Or is it? Mixed Feelings alright. :)