Recent reviews by dougiethegookslayer

All the reviews comparing this to KSP 1 and KSP 2 are accurate. The base game is better in almost every way and actually had some effort put into optimizing performance. Mods are easier to install and manage, albeit with less selection due to the size of this community. Personally, I vastly prefer the lack of Kerbals that make KSP feel like it's made for children, but this game does come off as dry due to the soundtrack only being two songs. Staging can't be altered in flight, and there's only a single quicksave slot, so planning is even more critical. Although this does share the pause time feature of KSP 2 which allows you to almost play it in a turn based manner during dynamic portions of flight.

This really isn't a knock on the game if you just want to build and fly rockets, it does that spectacularly, but in my opinion there's still a drought of games that fill the niche KSP 2 was aiming for and this has the greatest potential to reach that. I find it very tedious making bespoke vehicles for every mission because even in the downscaled systems of KSP and JNO you need to do so when launching from a single origin planet to be efficient. Granted, JNO does have a lunar base launch pad, but the launch fees are expensive and there's no way of replenishing propellant depots throughout the system automatically. This is because even with Vizzy programs to fly rockets for you, craft physics need to be rendered, which is currently limited to a maximum of 10 km. Not to mention there's no ISRU as of yet, so passive asteroid mining isn't an option either.

Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with this if all you want is to roleplay past or contemporary spaceflight programs or create spacecraft replicas. The peak of space infrastructure as it stands is a few LEO space stations, and the construction of one is included in a career mode contract anyway. Although if you're like me, it might be better to wait for an update that allows for free exploration without being bogged down in micromanagement and mandatory optimization.

Elite Dangerous without the terrible gameplay and long travel times. KSP without the brokenness and poor visuals.