Recent reviews by Chesthair Ascot

Game has potential, but it's unfinished and abandoned. Early access screws us again. =(

I really want this game to be cool, but the documentation isn't the best and the frame rate is absolutely terrible.

As neat as the game is overall, the UI is absolutely incomprehensible. This is such a major showstopper that it's hard to overlook it in any context. For example, on keyboard and mouse, opening the 'x' menu requires you to use arrow keys to navigate the options (both hands on keyboard), but then once an option is highlighted, you have to quickly move your hand back to your mouse to click to select the option.

As far as the galaxy map.. This is where I quit. I still have no idea how the galaxy map is supposed to work on keyboard and mouse.

This game is cursed. It will make you feel objectively bad as a person. Two thumbs up.

This is a trashy arcade game for 12 year olds.

The rework made in Phantom Liberty removes stats from armor and makes cyberware be limited by mission progression rather than currency. This effectively makes currency useless in the game. It's a different game now, and it's not the one I paid for.

With ~230 hours in the game, I can say that it used to be fun, but the magic has been lost with gimping of armor and cyberware.

TLDR:
I'm about five hours in. It's a pretty faithful remake to the original, but I have some minor gripes here and there that I think would resolve themselves if this game receives mod support. Given that the game just came out, it wouldn't surprise me if some of these get resolved in the next few months.

Note to devs:
Thanks! I just found out about this game being a thing yesterday, and it really made by day. The quality of this remake is on the same level as the Monkey Island remake. This comes across as a product of passion. =)

Gameplay:
An indication on fishing docks as to why they're not working would be handy.

The ability to run two docks concurrently would be great, especially if I could dedicate each to a particular resource and have incoming trade ships dock at multiple docks.

When building monuments, it would be helpful to know what the bottleneck is. Eg, I don't have an easy way to answer the question of 'Do I have enough masons or labor camps nearby?'. Same issue applies to farms I suppose.

UI:
There's quite a few minor annoyances in the UI. Most things require a lot of clicks through submenus. In fairness, the devs were likely trying to strike a balance between respecting the original, and modern UI paradigms, which are currently all mobile trash. Specific gripes are below.

Setting the risk filters (like fire/collapse/disease/etc) require many clicks, and you need to cycle through all of them while looking around your entire city. The risk views are probably important enough to have their own dedicated buttons on the top-level UI (along with remove filter button). A combined risk view would also be handy time/click saver.

The trade (import/exports limit) button could also use to be top-level.

When opening trade routes, it might be an improvement to just have a list so you don't have to click on every place on the map to figure out which ones are available. (Or at least maybe make a ghost line to them or something?) I didn't realize I could pan that map around for another one up north until my last mission was nearly over. Whoops.

Also, the event notification banners feel like clicking away popups on a warez site in 1999. Note to devs: Check out how 'Surviving Mars' handles event notifications. It's not perfect, but it is better. TLDR is that it uses bubbles on the left side of the screen.

The tooltips on the building selection menu (the right side toolbar) tend to get in the way. A 'short tooltips' option that just displays the building name and cost would be appreciated, or better yet, a 'hold ctrl for description' feature would be great.

Sometimes it's hard to place buildings on tiles that are occluded by larger buildings like temples. A feature to make those buildings transparent when holding a build tool near them would be handy.

The intro videos are forced on the first launch. I wish the devs could hear how loud I was mashing esc, space, enter, and mouse click. Might I suggest moving the intro video to campaign start? It's irritating to sit through an intro that's grainy because the graphic settings haven't been configured.

Adding hotkeys to tooltips for the building toolbar would be a welcome feature.

Leaf blower is good at tickling that 'numbers get big' reward center, but some of their marketing is less than honest. Youtube streamers are provided with cheats from the developers that mask the grind that normal players experience. Want to keep up? Hope you like microtransactions.

It doesn't suck.