Destination Ares

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.

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 s…

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. :)

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.

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.

Lacks basic tutorial and legibility. Hostile to new players.