Startron

I'm absolutly hooked, this game is fantastic! The ascii graphic is an artistic choice, but very nicely done, i love the intro screen with random planets. For walking in stations (which is 3D), i set the graphic to chunky, this makes it less detailed but less annoying, also i disabled 3D shading, because that makes those ugly, vertical black lines. The game is much deeper, complex and detailed than it looks and i'm sure, with their few hours playtime most of the other reviewers never saw them. First you just flying around, learning the basics. Later you makes a mining -> refinery -> factory production line to get some cash. You mine resources and buy them to repair your ship, you buy ship addons to make your life easier (but you need a place where they can install them!). You will find black holes, binary systems, [spoiler]lost colonies[/spoiler], etc. Sooner or later you find out there is a story in this game and you lost in the details. There are [spoiler]warring factions,[/spoiler] [spoiler]pirates,[/spoiler] [spoiler]space creatures,[/spoiler] [spoiler]ancient and forgotten places[/spoiler], [spoiler]super weapons,[/spoiler] [spoiler]terraformers[/spoiler] and [spoiler]probab…

I love this game, I just wish everything wasn't hardcore death mode. There's no manual saving, and with the randomness of the game, it's entirely possible to get soft locked while out traveling by some random system on your ship breaking and not being able to repair it. When this happens, you have to start your game over from scratch. Starting over is fine on short play games like roguelikes, but on a long play game where you are building up an empire across many stars, it sucks losing all that progress because your ship breaks down in a system without a station with a parts vendor, or running out of fuel in a system without any way to purchase fuel. Just remember dev, not all of us want to play hardcore mode. A manual save system would be nice.

Despite only having barely over an hour of play time, and despite this game's version being quite far from 1.0, I wanted to drop a review to help boost the algo. I'm blown away by the ambition of the dev. The game is basically sci-fi Dwarf Fortress but with graphics that includes both 1st person and various zoom levels of 3rd person. Given how active the dev is, I'm torn between wanting to explore the game now vs letting the dev cook up a more complete package first. Even if the dev were to abandon this game today, I'd still recommend any indy game connoisseur to poke around it for a little while due to how novel and intriguing it all is.

Startron takes me back to the good-ol'-days of the early eighties, with eight year old me playing Super Star Trek on my uncle's Commodore PET 2001, only with colour and surprisingly chill vibes. There's an emphasis on construction and building up your own little production-line bases, at least so far, and I've really been enjoying the whole atmosphere of the game.

gave it a quick test before work and had to immediately close it, I knew for a fact 10 hours would disappear in the blink of an eye! cant wait to get home and try it later!

Great game. I really hope it gets expanded further.