Randomness, randomness and more randomness. I felt while playing this game that I wasn't so much actually PLAYING the game as just sharing the Orion Trail experience, because from beginning to end, the game is basically pure luck. You choose from random sets of crewmen presented to you, to give you certain stats, and that's about all you do to influence how the session goes. I mean, you can pick your path in which systems to move towards, and whether or not to stop at certain things, I suppose, but it's not much of a choice, because in any given thing, you have no real control over your consequences.

There are no upgrades to purchase to make you more likely to succeed. Your crew's stats can go up or down at a whim, as random events between nodes tick these abilities up or down with no input from you. The time honored tradition of visiting tombstones from previous playthroughs on games like Oregon Trail is doable here, but even doing THIS can cause an utterly random stat raise or decrease. Even what skills you use during a particular incident is entirely random most of the time; You can push up and specialize in a particular stat only to be presented with an event that doesn't allow you to use that stat. Even the -rewards or penalties- can be randomized in many events.

Perhaps in some games, all of this randomness wouldn't be a problem. Orion Trail tries to allieviate things a bit with its quirky and outlandish dialogue, and it works for a time. However, said dialogue runs out too quickly, frequently recycled every playthrough. Given you need to play through the game multiple times to unlock the content... this is a rather serious thing. Also not present is any sense of fairness. On any given random event, no matter how good you are in the stat, you have the chance to critically fail, and the critical failure events are so harsh that just one of them can completely break your run, often completely exhausting a vital resource. Critical successes, on the other hand, while certainly nice, do not give you things on quite the same scale. Furthermore, it's almost impossible to recover from a critical failure because your rewards are often given randomly as well, and you can't just complete events that'll raise the thing the Critical Failure took from you, because the opportunities are just not given.

All and all, I'd go as far to say that the game is 100% Pure Luck in whether you succeed or not, and there's not enough dialogue in the game to make playing such a ludicrously random game worth your while. Stick to FTL for your starship piloting dreams.

Randomness, randomness and more randomness. I felt while playing this game that I wasn't so much actually PLAYING the game as just sharing the Orion Trail experience, because from beginning to end, the game is basically pure luck. You choose from random sets of crewmen presented to you, to give you certain stats, and that's about all you do to influence how the session goes. I mean, you can pick your path in which systems to move towards, and whether or not to stop at certain things, I suppose, but it's not much of a choice, because in any given thing, you have no real control over your consequences. There are no upgrades to purchase to make you more likely to succeed. Your crew's stats can go up or down at a whim, as random events between nodes tick these abilities up or down with no input from you. The time honored tradition of visiting tombstones from previous playthroughs on games like Oregon Trail is doable here, but even doing THIS can cause an utterly random stat raise or decrease. Even what skills you use during a particular incident is entirely random most of the time; You can push up and specialize in a particular stat only to be presented with an event that doesn't allow you to use that stat. Even the -rewards or penalties- can be randomized in many events. Perhaps in some games, all of this randomness wouldn't be a problem. Orion Trail tries to allieviate things a bit with its quirky and outlandish dialogue, and it works for a time. However, said dialogue runs out too quickly, frequently recycled every playthrough. Given you need to play through the game multiple times to unlock the content... this is a rather serious thing. Also not present is any sense of fairness. On any given random event, no matter how good you are in the stat, you have the chance to critically fail, and the critical failure events are so harsh that just one of them can completely break your run, often completely exhausting a vital resource. Critical successes, on the other hand, while certainly nice, do not give you things on quite the same scale. Furthermore, it's almost impossible to recover from a critical failure because your rewards are often given randomly as well, and you can't just complete events that'll raise the thing the Critical Failure took from you, because the opportunities are just not given. All and all, I'd go as far to say that the game is 100% Pure Luck in whether you succeed or not, and there's not enough dialogue in the game to make playing such a ludicrously random game worth your while. Stick to FTL for your starship piloting dreams.