Recent reviews by [MFC]ZureaL

This was a fun, short (around 4 hours) game that I enjoyed finishing. Well worth the $3 price of entry, in my opinion. Numbers go up, things go boom.

This is, by far, the best $3 I have ever spent in my life. So much fun and the value is off the charts.

I absolutely love the building in this game and the vastness of space. It's a tough game and there's certainly a learning curve involved, but one you overcome those hurdles, this is still my favorite *craft in space game.

I received this copy because I owned the original Spatials. This is clearly an early access game and it's not complete yet. There are a lot of PLACEHOLDER things still and several "DEV NOTES" throughout, reminding them of things to finish and polish and some of the game to player feedback is confusing (I'm looking at you, "Oils cannot be delivered to this object", which drove me nuts for about an hour until I figured out that I just didn't HAVE any oils in inventory). Several of the systems are not yet complete (CHEAT-O-MATIC is pretty awesome though). That said, the in-game tutorials are helpful and the learning curve isn't terribly steep (outside of the aforementioned "cannot be delivered" part).

I finally got around to playing this last night around 9pm, not entirely sure what to expect from the game, next thing I know, it's 2am and I'm having a blast.

I'm a big fan of Dwarf Fortress and the more I played, the more I felt it's influence. Everything from supply chains (collect this resource, refine it into something else, have it made into a final product), to personal demands (a Navigator requires a room of at least 15 blocks, an officers bed, a live galaxy map, a shower and 3 decorations), to the beginings of trantrum spirals (Bob recently saw a corpse (-15 mind), Bob had a good conversation (+5 mind), etc...). I haven't found any Candy, nor have I visited the Circus in this game, but who knows, perhaps it'll be there some day. Just to be clear, there are no Z-levels in Spatials and no Mayor telling you what you can't export or what mittens you have to produce.

This morning, it hit me, it's almost as if the people at Weird and Wry saw Double Fine's failure in Spacebase-9 but realized the overall concept was good and said, "Can we make this a game? Yes we can." and they did. So bravo to you all if that were the case and even if it wasn't your goal, it resonated with me as such.

Galaxy and planet exploring is really unique in The Spatials, you start out with a couple of small but useful ships and there are several planets in your solar system to explore with resources on them (this is the ONLY way to gather resources that I'm aware of). So you send your ships out and explore and at this point, your ships crew lands on the planet and there are resources scattered in clumps throughout. Get your team to the resources, build extractors/storage (and other things later as you unlock them) and move on to the next planet. Once you have all your extractors up and running, you set up an auto pilot to go from planet to planet, pick up the resources and drop them back to your home base. You have to balance your crews sanity (by giving them enough time for shore leave), how much cargo space is in the ship, how fast is the ship and how much resources are being collected and stored on each planet. It's a really good system that gets more complex as you move to more solar systems and the amounts and diversity of whats available on a planet kicks up a notch.

There is so much more to this game from the varied flooring types (which aren't just aesthetic, they can influence your dwarves, I mean Spatials moods, I mean mind), to security systems, turrets, cameras and scanners, to ship building and researching/unlocking new tech, to finding a chef, scientist, doctor and engineer, to pirate invasions, to setting up visitor landing bays and shops to sell goods to them and task-based robot building. And that's not even all of it!

TL;DR: Early access game with things missing still to be finished. Great systems and even in it's present state, loads to have fun with and I would recommend picking it up unless you really dislike early access games. Hats off to Weird and Wry and I look forward to seeing and playing as things develop.