Recent reviews by Tankh

If you ever played Peggle, this is a really fun variant of that gameplay.

I mean it's probably really fun even if you haven't, but then you know more what it's like!

Excellent expansion to an already excellent game. More of everything. More ways of doing everything. More planets to do everythihg on. Learn and relearn new and old concepts and automate the heck out of it.

Also, omfg elevated trains!!

Fun and very cozy vibes. It still lacks a lot compared to RimWorld, both in terms of challenges and just amount of content.
I only played one colony. Sometimes I played on very slow speed and relaxed, other times I fast forwarded a lot on max speed. After 43 hours I'm at the end of year 4 and have unlocked everything and feel kinda done with the game, but I also haven't really tried a different starting scenario and setting.
Took a while to figure out food preservation works. but after that it seems nothing can ever threaten the food supply anymore. The cycle of people having to use the bathroom and using this for fertilizer for crops is interesting and works pretty well overall.
Each clan member has some personality and there is some social interaction, but there is a lot more going on in RimWorld that helps create more interesting and unique "stories" and situations. The mood in this game is mostly dependent on good food + free time + doing fun tasks/avoiding boring tasks

If you:
...like RimWorld and similar games, and you are enticed by the look and feel of the images and videos of this game
...are fine with no big threats/challenges/raiders (fire is a mechanic but I never had issues taking care of it)
...don't mind that it seems to be very slow to grow the clan with more members

then I would recommend it

But if you:
...want a lot of replayability (losing is fun etc.)
...want challenges and enemies to fight (wolves exist but didn't seem to pose any real threat)
...want very varied biomes (like RimWorld with everything between jungle and ice sheets)

then you should probably skip or at least wait until release.

This game is best learned by failing. It has immense replayability.
It's like Dwarf Fortress but much easier to get into, and on a smaller scale (no 20 new immigrants to quadruple your popoulation every year). Each colonist is valuable (except Gus, that ♥♥♥♥♥♥ won't haul...)

Play in different biomes for different challenges. A temperate forest was too easy? Try starting on a tundra in winter.
-50 C, no way to grow anything more than maybe a couple of days in summer, and even the wildlife ♥♥♥♥♥ off during winter because it's too cold, so nothing to hunt. But hey, at least your food won't spoil while frozen!

You may be forced to send even your worst shooter out to hunt and it might just end with:
"John accidently shot Mav in the arm while hunting, and then it became infected and because Mary the Pyromaniac accidently burned down our medicine supply the other day we couldn't help him recover very well and now Mav is doomed but at least he has a healthy liver which will help with John's inevitable Alcohol binging induced liver damage.
Oh yeah, and we had to eat Mary's favourite dog to survive winter... actually we might have to eat Mav now too.

*2 days later* ...and Mary.

Oh ♥♥♥♥ Sammy failed catastrophically while operating Johns new liver and killed him by cutting both his legs off, and then he went mad from seeing the corpse of a dead colonist and wandered out to the -40 degree wilderness and took all his clothes off... Well I guess I'll start a new game"

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ A+ game. Every Alpha patch brings many new features (like the caravans this patch A16) and loads of mods in the Steam Workshop on top of that

Don't be scared off by the "Early Access Game" tag. This game has been staying away from Steam for years to get a good product going before even appearing here. The dev team has steadily grown in a good pace during this time. They have good contact with the community, both through forums and IRC, and also through weekly blog posts (Friday Facts) where they discuss something they've done during the week or plans for the future etc.

It is extremely polished. Very rarely will you ever find a bug. It's one of the very few games where if I come across something behaving very weird and buggy, I know that if I just sit down and thing long and hard about it, I will eventually figure it out, and so far it has ALWAYS been myself messing something up.

The gameplay itself has that classic start-with-nothing-and-gather-resources feel, but soon enough you'll learn that crafting everything yourself eventually gets slower and slower. So you build assembly plants to do it for you, and you feed those factories resources from Transport Belts using Inserter Arms. And you build automated mines to extract the raw resources needed and smelt them in an array of furnaces.

You start researching and unlocking new buildings and resources and expand your factory. Eventually that small iron ore field you started with is emptied by your exploits, but by now you have researched trains and automated train systems, so you find a new remote iron ore field and set up a mining outpost connected by a railway system.

Don't forget to defend your base though. Aliens don't like the pollution from your steam engines and oil pumps.

Should you still ever run out of things to do, there's loads of mods as is commonplace for a game like this.

Oh, did I mention there's also Multiplayer and Nuclear Power?

This game WILL teach you orbital mechanics, for the simple reason that it's fun!