Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander Reviews

[i]Note: as an early-access game, it's prudent to advise that this review applies to version 0.28.1.[/i] [h1]TL;DR here[/h1] It's fun and the single-player difficulty can be adjusted. I don't recommend starting in "Creative mode" head first, do the career mode to understand the nuances in smaller ships before trying to build or use some kind of mega behemoth. [h3]Interface & Controls[/h3] The controls are difficult to master and sometimes difficult to understand. Some QoL improvements are obviously missing, such as the ability to dictate whether or not an uncentered rear-facing thruster should be activated when the ship is given the command to rotate. On-screen statistics for your ship are also a bit... shall we say obscure, and not very helpful except perhaps for the greenest of players. The game doesn't teach you things like calculating the total mass of the ship and the total thrust and seeing how fast it will go, you basically just learn to build, test, and rebuild. [h3]Technical information[/h3] I mostly played game on Linux, which runs fine under WINE, but seems to have serious performance issues in the late game. In a large solar system and after some activity, an auto-save that would have taken about a second in the early game can take up to a minute, even with an SSD. I don't know whether this is an universal issue or due to WINE (it's possible that my full 64 GB of RAM is not being utilized or that some other optimization problem is preventing full functionality). Although there are other games like X4: Foundations that similarly suffer from performance issues on low-RAM, non-SSD systems, it seems like Cosmoteer does not adequately solve these issues yet. My theory is that the game has a replay log that doesn't get truncated until you switch systems, which can lead to extremely long save times. [h2]Should you buy it?[/h2] All in all, it's really fun and very creative. There are also lots of mods and custom ships in the workshop, especially for a game that's still labelled "Early Access". In it's current state, I would not pay more than $15 for it, even then being a stretch facilitated by my love of the game's genres. Having said that, I would probably finance reinforcements to the development effort if I were capable, as it shows good promise. If the game sounds fun and you can get it for less than $10 on sale, [b]you should take the deal[/b]. Similarly, if you buy the game in a discounted bundle with games such as Nimbatus (similar concept: build mission-based drones) or Space Haven (similar concept: build, explore, fight), you will probably have a good time.

Game is one of the best games i ever played. Anybody who likes management games will be adicted. For me there are just 2 downsides: Graphics: Many might love the style but i am not realy a fan of pixel art. Lenght: At the current point there is not enough content. It has great potential and i am confident there will be more in the futur :)

Very good core concept. Fun game. In its current state it becomes a little repetitive towards the end of the "campaign", but I know the developers are working on it.

I said hey, that looks like a cool, chill game. 9 hours later it's 5am, my sleeps f***d for the upcoming monday, and I've barely scratched the surface of "ship go boom" simulator.

Absolutely addicting mix of design and combat / exploration. You can even just use the built-in ship designs if you lack creativity, or want a helping hand. Once you understand efficient ways of modules that you can quite easily put together like lego, the game takes on new game play. great game, absolute unit.

amasing game fun mods great build system great game play it you got 100 puzzle peices so get buildin

Incredible! I often forget about it being early access. I love it, the multiplayer is a little stuttery at times but being able to design your own ships and use them in game is amazing. It could do with being a bit more fleshed out with some more diversity to the available missions and maybe some more interesting career paths to give you more direction in a campaign. Ultimately though I've spent who knows how many hours making ships and testing them against one another and in just enjoying the game. The soundtrack is canny too!

Great game, similar to Rimworld in a lot of ways (and you don't have to buy a fuck ton of DLC.) Runs well, and is very fun!

upside: fantastic game, great scale, nice music downside: developer is a single guy, so content updates are very rare

A great game focused around optimizing 2D ships. It continuously gets great updates, it's cheap, it runs well/is small, and is fun.