Difficult for me to recommend this game. The ship building, while cool, is a bit finnicky in this game.

Nowhere on the store page does it state that the "main campaign", the survival mode is a rogue-like. Your ship designs DO NOT carry over to a new playthrough. You can export them to a file or upload to Steam Workshop, but you cannot load them in Sandbox/Survival modes. Bizarre.

Thankfully there is a Sandbox mode that is pretty close to the survival mode (with certain settings disabled) with the exception of all "pilot perks" being unlocked and a bunch of extra starting building parts, which you seemingly cannot disable. You CAN disable the "forced loss" mechanic in Sandbox.

Now the problem becomes that the missions you do are just boring. They are all quite samey. It is also unclear how to complete certain missions, such as "Capture Mantas". Certain missions cannot be retried after failing, and there's no indication of that anywhere. Enemies respawn after completing a planet/mission, so you cannot clear a planet and then come in to mine the resources with a different drone.

The progression is very slow, and your build capability is very limited at the start. So it will take dozens of hours to get to a stage where you can make big ships like the ones showcased on the store page pictures.

There are also other arcade-y modes which is cool, like PvP drone battles and races (not sure if there's online multiplayer for those), where you can actually load Steam Workshop drones, but I was not interested in these modes.

In the end, this is another game in the "boring sandbox space games without solid end goal" pile for me.

There is an interesting idea here. However, the campaign is so repetitive that I got bored about 40% into it. The automation is very limited and complex to set up - setting up something cool requires so many various gates that you will quickly run out of parts (or make the drone deployment very expensive).

Revisiting this game reminded me why i stopped playing it. The drone building is to simple and dosen't really allow you to make any interesting designs. The game difficulty is more a question if you already know the answer and if have gotten the parts from the rng pool. It just breeds frustration