First, the good. The story seems interesting as far as I have gotten. 2 or 3 sectors so haven't finished. Influenced by classic scifi like The foundation series by Asimov. Visuals are good,its pretty. Sound design is good. Combat is decent so far.

Now for why I can't recommend the game despite a lot going for it. 75-80% of the stuff that happens just happens. It works like a slot machine; your only decision is whether or not to pull the lever then whatever happens happens. I hate slot machines, and I think casinos should be illegal. But I digress. There is no skill with a slot machine. It isn't really a game in my opinion. A game lets you at least try to use skill to navigate through a bad roll and get a neutral outcome. A slot machine is just a fancy and psychologically manipulative spin on rolling dice. Its very passive overall, since you don't actually do anything but pull the lever. Too much of this game is effectively a slot machine you passively observe to see what happens. That isn't fun. Its annoying. If these rolls included minigames you could with practice use to overcome bad rolls it would be different. Too little of this game is actually a game.

The fun part about roguelite games is feeling like you have some influence or effectiveness despite the RNG. This game royally mucks that up the farther you advance and on higher difficulties. It is neither fun, nor enjoyable, relying on RNG to save your run, especially if you are doing quite well early on. If I could refund, I would.

I love the core concept of this game and when the developers say "inspired by Dune and Foundation" they sure do mean it. The writing, tone, and atmosphere are easily the best parts of this game and if these devs had just written a book, I would have loved to read it.

The whole thing falls apart in the gameplay though, at least for me. There are basically two types of activities: ground missions where you assign a commandos and one officer to scavenge resources on the planet and space RTS battles.

Right off the bat, I'll say the ground missions are terrible. They are basically a slot machine that runs automatically with little to no interaction from the player except deciding when to extract. Basically, the way it works is, there is a linear series of skill checks on the planet your officer has to pass, or else the team might get injured and/or die with each failed check. These skill checks are pass/fail (either the officer has the skill or they don't) and are things like "subterfuge, fight, piloting" etc. But these skill checks have no context behind them. Why did the ground team need to pass a piloting check to avoid combat? Was there another way? What does piloting even mean? Did they bring a ground vehicle to help them out? Why are they fighting? Did they encounter mutants or something? Why couldn't they do something else instead? The answer to all of this is "I don't know". You're not making choices, this isn't an RPG. So if your officer has no piloting skill, you can't say "wait, I find a way to use speech instead" so it just feels totally arbitrary. I'm not sure how you're supposed to know what skills you should have brought ahead of time. There is a way to purchase "intel" - which isn't actually intel, it just adds a bonus skill to your officer. But there are 9 skills, and the officer only has 2-3 naturally, so it doesn't help much. Its like they wanted to make a pseudo-RPG system, but then watered it down with worker management. It doesn't really mesh well.

The space RTS battles are a little more fun but ultimately still pretty half baked as well. All you do is send out a number of units at a time equal to how many squadron slots you have unlocked, and these are basic A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A unit types. Not a whole lot of flavor or variety. Positioning really doesn't matter much, and the units don't have special abilities you have to manually activate or anything. You can recall a unit to redploy it after its healed or bring out a different type, but this never worked for me, they just got shot dead on their way back to the ship. I only really call this an RTS because that's what its clearly trying to be, but its so simplistic and dull. They should have just committed fully to being an RTS and included workers, resources, tech trees, etc. A space version of Starcraft or something would have been really cool. Alternatively, it could have been a turn based ship vs ship combat kind of thing like in Rogue Trader. But its like they took the worst of both words and as a result the combat lacks an identity.

That's pretty much the core issue with this game, its trying to be a rules light, low budget indie version of many different genres at once and none of them are really fleshed out enough to be interesting or satisfying.