Astro Colony

The clunkyness sucks away all drive for me to play the game. Maybe if this is your first factory game and you do not know better, you can enjoy this. If you played Factorio or Satisfactory, you will hit a brick wall of clunk. You will ask yourself questions about how to split items on belts, which is not explained. The idea is interesting, but the user interface requires you lots of buttons or different pannels and tools and different key combinations. This game could learn a lot from satisfactory, where the UI experience is smooth and enjoyable and even adds to the character of the game.

I've been enjoying Astro Colony quite a lot. It still needs a bit of polish here and there, but the core gameplay is solid, fun, and genuinely interesting. Instead of feeling like just another factory-building game, it brings its own ideas and mechanics to the genre, which keeps things fresh and rewarding to explore. One thing that really stands out is the developer. They're very active on Discord, regularly answering questions, listening to feedback, and interacting with the community. That's becoming increasingly rare these days, and it's great to see a developer so invested in improving their game. If you enjoy factory-building and automation games, Astro Colony is definitely worth checking out.

Flew colony into a black hole. Got the respawn point far enough that I kept respawning in the black hole and kept dying. Great fun.

Some thoughts about the game after playing a while. In short - the game is too casual and too easy for people who like factory games, but too complicated for casual players. That's why the target group is so small. The developer is a great programmer and designer of models, graphics for such a project is VERY good, but probably he needs a person called game designer who understands what people want. Also, music is very simple and does not meet modern standards. Never underestimate the music in games - it plays the same role like in movies. People who play complicated factory games want challenge no matter how hard the game rules are, and a purpose, like make a huge Dyson sphere on multiple stars in DSP, or reach a final goal in Satisfactory. Look at Valheim - on sight - so cosy, but so brutal inside, but so many people play it, speedrunners, restriction self-imposers and so on. What we have here - just for example - grappling hook - i consider it just cheating because i can easily go to any planetoid just grappling asteroids on my way, no need to discover space craft and just place gold miner + titan + uranium miner everywhere and safely return home. Infinite output of factories…

This one is scratching all the right itches... Space sandbox, tech progression, automation, stimulating graphics, bit of a driving narrative, not too grindy... My major complaint is the controls - they're on the clunky side. For example, [Esc] inconsistently works as a "get out of whatever menu/mode I'm currently in", and will ultimately bring up the in-game menu - annoying when you're just trying to clear an active tool. Also, there's no hotkey for "transfer all inventory", and "transfer all of one type" is [Ctrl]+[click] rather than [Shift]+[click], which seems atypical compared to most crafting games. Some of these annoyances can be remapped, but not all. Still a definite thumbs-up from me!

The game offers no immersion. You play the role of a camera moving here and there without gravity or inertia, you also happens to need oxygen from time to time. Asteroid crash everywhere around you without consequence. Storms are smallish clouds wandering around your base and doing nothing. You capture a somewhat bigger asteroid with a sort of tunnel, a beam pulls the asteroid, but you need to build the same tunnel on the asteroid to connect it. You can access the inventory of any machine from hundreds of meters and carry an infinite amount of stuff. The bot that spews out the tutorial bips every time you pass near it if you don't follow its instructions, however, if you are too close to the bot, you can read its instructions. Some operations are particularly annoying. For example the machine you are point at become transparent. You have to deactivate the modification menu to see the machines properly, but then the interface reverts to showing you transparent machines and you must again right click on your mouse. I spent too much time right clicking. As usual in these games, before building a machine, you move and rotate its blueprint. But the blueprint is bright white, the input a…