Destination Ares Reviews

Imagine if you took FTL, but could only tell the crew what you wanted them to do. It oddly becomes even more engaging as you fret over what your crew is doing and sometimes want to scream in exasperation as they don't do what's in their own best interest. I haven't managed a win yet, but do see an unlock system that may give me some better systems to improve my chances. Part puzzle, part simulation, part psychological experiment, Destination Ares is a bunch of fun!

Pretty poor. UI needs a lot of polish; I shouldn't be having trouble just clicking the buttons. The events that pop up are repetitive, and most of them require you to do a minigame that isn't any good - it's sort of like minesweeper, but with a floaty spaceship as a cursor so you just stumble in to the mines unless you tap the buttons and go really slow - but why not just make the movement tile-based if you're gonna make me do that? And then even if you succeed in the minigame it looks like (never failed it...) it just enables you to roll a die to see if your choice succeeded instead of success being based on your performance in the game. The main part of the game is about managing the ship's systems, but all it is is turning power-consuming things off when the power gets low, then turning them back on when it builds back up again. If something breaks, you can prioritize it, but the crew will get to it anyway so it doesn't really make much difference. I can see that more mechanics unlock as you play, but, uh, I'm not gonna play a game with the promise that I'll be rewarded with compelling gameplay _later_. You can never tell what's going on - for example, if you put an alert on something so a character will go repair it, if he fails, he just walks away as if he succeeded. I get that you're supposed to pay attention, but I really think it'd be better to have, like, little sparks come out of the thing so you can see what's going on. At least don't clear the alert if the thing isn't actually fixed!

My current favorite game on steam - a hidden gem! It's tragic that most people haven't found this game. Definitely worth the price for me. Reminds me a lot of FTL. I think if you like FTL, you'll like this game. I watched the videos on the store page, thought I would enjoy the game, and enjoyed it even more than I imagined. I wouldn't pay much attention to negative reviews before October 13th 2017 - the latest patch. It also helps if you're good at doing minesweeper quickly. Current best run: got to 99% and died. Also died a little inside, in real life. :)

Very poorly explained mechanics, with no severe telegraphing of what causes what, or what certain traits or attributes mean. User interface both ugly and buggy. Extremely prone to the spiral-of-death effect; it only takes a few simultaneous failures to be basically unable to recover. Idiot crewmembers who take forever to get anything done, only for them to fail at said thing, and no real way to mitigate that. Random events which have a minigame attached to them that will end in failure even if you succeed at said minigame. You have so little control that even if things momentarily go right, it feels more like I dodged a bullet by accident, and not like I did something to warrant said success. This adds up to something that is very frustrating, and not nearly enough fun to make up for it.

The main game is a hard resource utilization game, and that part is solid and fun. Unfortunately there is a mini-game with the random events that is nearly impossible to play. These have resulted in frustration, and inevitable game failure when the negative consequences of those failures resolve in the main game. Until those mini-games are fixed or replaced with a better mechanic, I can't recommend this game.

Tiny game but delivering what's on the box. The chore idea of the game is to build a ship so that it is the fittest to make a long journey (30 minutes). The build phase (unlocked after the first games) is pretty simple and will ask you to allocate points / space and weight for what matters the most to you. A balance to find between crew, modules, quality of modules, abilities to transform one resource to another or do you prefer to pack a lot of each at the beginning of the journey, up to you. Most of the times, if one resource comes to lack, you're dead : Oxygen, parts, material, food, waste, fuel, energy. The second part of the game is not really difficult, start the journey, set some priorities, activate or spare some modules, react to random events (often leading to a minigame that is a bit annoying though). And fail, fail, fail, fail, until you manage to unlock some improvements for the ship so that you can rethink your blueprint and finaly make that journey. Cute, interface sometimes a bit clunky because things are not obvious on the screen but overall a good experience. Might lead to some quite a few blueprint rework loops that I'm not super fond though. Keep in mind though that the lifespan of this game is probably rather short and you might get bored quickly but worth a shot !

I do get that the point is that it's supposed to be hard to reach Ares, but when you're two minutes into the run and say "yep, not going to reach Ares" you know that something is not quite right. To me, the main problem is your agency. In Destination Ares everything has a chance to break on usage. Even when you tell a crew member to fix some equipment they will take their time trying to fix the thing, they don't succede and go away instead of trying to fix the thing again.

I really like the concept behind this game. I look forward to seeing where it goes. Positives: The game has interesting presentation, aside from a sort of view tilt that feels a bit off. Crew members appear to react to the actions of the player. Ship gameplay is interesting, and the decision-making aspect has promise. Negatives: Current variety of events and crew dialogue are limited and repeat fairly frequently, although hopefully that will expand with updates. The minigame that the player must play for each decision event is repetitive, bland, and seems arbitrary and unrelated to the higher-level gameplay. This minigame could make sense for sensors or piloting events, but doesn't make sense for character events, etc. Overall, the game gets old pretty fast in its current state, but has a lot of potential. It is a good idea, and one that I hope to see polished in the future. At present, I don't recommend buying the game unless you want to follow along with developer updates. I look forward to seeing where this goes from here.

A good concept but the irritating mini game for decision making lets it down, for me, it doesnt feel like it fits in with the game. The mini game you move your mouse though a invisible maze in a limit time, every time you hit the side you restart and you lose seconds out of your 10 second timer.

Interesting concept but this game has a long way to go. There is potential here. There is this sort of white-wash high gamma haze to the pixel graphics that makes it a tough game to look at. Not sure what the goal here was. There is one terrible aspect in that you have to play a mini-game when you make a decision. For example you may get a prompt like this: "The ship is overheating do you: A) Turn everything off (easy) or B) Vent the heat into the airlock (hard)". Once you make your choice you have to win the mini-game which involves moving a cursor through a maze with invisible mines to get to the exit otherwise you fail in your choice. It's an extremely odd mechanic that doesn't make much sense and the mini-game itself frankly sucks. If it's going to be a big part of the game, this part needs to be done much better. Can't recommend at this point.