Mars Horizon

Mars Horizon

Iniital Review 12.4 hours into Mars Horizon®

Update since initial review at bottom of review.

Second update December 2022 since initial below that update.

An update beneath an update… that is like four wall breaks. Mind blown!!!

  • Graphics are fantastic

  • Smooth operation and easy to follow learning tutorial

  • Not for under age of 12 years old, bit too advanced for under this age.

  • Few small non game breaking bugs, grammar, and what not. Nothing to get excited about.

  • FPS runs fine on a modern machine 2012 or better. Older and you may have some issues with processing of the information or video being smooth.

Real player with 71.3 hrs in game


Read More: Best Management Education Games.


Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This is easily the best manager I have played in a decade.

However, a warning up front. This is not readily obvious. Not, because the game starts outright weak. Instead, it seems to deliver exactly the underwhelming gameplay one learns to expect from indies nowadays. You build a rocket, you fire a rocket, and sometimes it rains. Everything hangs on the roll of a dice. Which makes the space missions look like a lackluster mini game.

Here’s the good news. It gets better. A lot. I just ended my first (short) campaign after 65 hours by landing a crew on Mars. While doing so, my palms were sweaty, because up until the very last turn I wasn’t sure I would make it. Magic question: When did the last manager make your palms sweat?

Real player with 67.8 hrs in game

Mars Horizon on Steam

Interstellar Transport Company

Interstellar Transport Company

Excellent:

Theme. The game brings this out very well. It really feels like you are running the company that is responsible for the interstellar expansion of humanity. The visuals work well. The planets look cool. The ships have fun names. The line of ships you get going from home, out a colony, and back looks good. It is satisfying to see the progress as a colony develops. It feels like you are working to established permanent homes other worlds.

Strategy. You have a lot of choices. You are always deciding what ships to buy, what they should carry, and what route they should take. You usually have options that are either “cheaper and better now” or “more expensive and better later.” You always have “things to work on.” You can choose where new colonies will go. You can tinker with current trade routes to make them more profitable.

Real player with 324.3 hrs in game


Read More: Best Management Economy Games.


This will be a bit of a long one. But I can’t help it.

On the surface I absolutely love everything about this game. I have turned back to it many times trying to make it work. But it just feels like the fundamentals of the gameplay is not working quite right with what the game is trying to be. And I always end up leaving a bit unsatisfied.

The game is about humanity colonizing the solar system and later going beyond. That’s what got me real exited about the game. But that is not what you are doing. You are there to make money. On the surface this is great.

Real player with 85.7 hrs in game

Interstellar Transport Company on Steam

Astero Inc.

Astero Inc.

Beautiful game. After the first hours of game, feels very addictive and funny situations with the characters and gameplay. It maintains tension at all time on the asteroids! Highly recommended

Real player with 50.0 hrs in game


Read More: Best Management Singleplayer Games.


The game felt fresh, fun and challenging. If you skip the tutorial you will suffer punishment, but you will feel acomplishment as you make your way through the game and master it step by step.

Real player with 7.8 hrs in game

Astero Inc. on Steam

Space Station Tycoon

Space Station Tycoon

After the Recent update of the Raiders and new riftgate. I decided to make a quick review on the understanding of the game… Times for events are as followed. Police scan once year Feb or March, Raiders will come every 5-7 years these you can’t bribe and will require more firepower to get rid of. Pirates can be bribe but can drop cash and items. Aliens will only attack for your Research points so spend wisely and each time you can spend.

Early game this game is a real grind. Hard mode w/ events on. Don’t build anything you can’t afford to loose. The bathing house is one of the highest profitable building 20,000 a month in revenue when full upgrade but cost 15,000 to get your hands on 1. Everytime i try to rush R&G sends a asteroid to destroy it. GAMEOVER. So piece of advice start small and grow small. 2 docks are find early game. Then focus on BILLBOARDS 1 cafe, ___then swap this for a bar. Then you get into research .

Real player with 31.4 hrs in game

a fun, simple game. there is not much combat. and once you start going, you get going. a lot of reviews are complaining of mechanics that are really … not that complicated?

Income - your first priority should be to reduce upgrade costs. don’t build faster than you can afford. Even starting at 20,000, build 3 dock stations and let your money generate and as you can, buy upgrade materials and reduce upkeep costs for each building.

Research - start research with upgrade cost reduction and then move to increased research - you will not have any more problems once you max both of these out

Real player with 12.5 hrs in game

Space Station Tycoon on Steam

Cosmo’s Quickstop

Cosmo’s Quickstop

This is my GOTY 2021, and frankly it isn’t close.

Cook, Serve, Delicious, except it’s a 3D runaround with Among Us Tasks, except it’s a decidedly charming and hilarious time, except it’s SO HYPE. What is otherwise a very solid and enjoyable experience is cranked up to one of the most surprisingly awesome skill expression games on the planet (or off of it.) An amenity upgrade system that both requires and greatly rewards playing with all of your options and finding what setup works best for you, and an excellent variety of tweaks to the formula and post game content, combine to give this game way more replay potential than I’ve ever had from something in the same genre. What was literally an accidental stumble-upon one night has turned into one of my top 5 games of all time, in the span of a week. I cannot recommend this game enough.

Real player with 53.6 hrs in game

I have been waiting for this game to arrive since it said was coming out in 2019 after searching for coop games so I am glad to see it finally out. The art for the game immediately drew me in, and could tell it would be a great co-op experience.

After now playing for only 9 hours, I will say they poured love into every fibre this game and polished it well for the release as I have yet to encounter an issue. It is fantastic for a couch co-op game, while not as frustrating as overcooked can be while still leaving me overwhelmed in chaos.

Real player with 45.2 hrs in game

Cosmo's Quickstop on Steam

Signals

Signals

This is the game for Vibing!

Its super chill and the perfect for winding down.

The music really sets the mood of the game and the next thing you know you know, you’ve lost track of time and its time for bed. The controls are intuitive and the shortcuts become muscle memory, navigation works well and the UI is clean.

First play I sat there and completed the campaign mode and am now ready for getting those achievements in “Run mode”. Campaign helped to learn how the economy works and gave some backstory to the “signals”.

Real player with 10.8 hrs in game

I really wanted to like this game. I don’t like combat games, or games that test hand-eye coordination. This has a lot to like for somebody like me. The problem is the interface. There’s no decent help. I passed challenge #1, but couldn’t pass challenge #2. So I tried the run mode. There are three icons at the top of the bottom bar. I can’t repair the portal until I have all three resources, and I can’t even figure out what the third resource is. Whatever I do, it stays at zero. It might be titanium, but I’ve three three runs and checked every planet and I can’t find any with titanium. And I can’t find a way to get advice. So I’m done.

Real player with 9.0 hrs in game

Signals on Steam

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager

I almost let the most prominent Steam review here dissuade me from buying this game. It’s a shame that one so well written review completely misrepresents what this game accomplished and what game it really is. The reviewer really missed the point, or else it was before some updates and long since invalid. The game and its developers deserve better.

Puzzles just have one solution. This isn’t a puzzle. But it is much like chess, and there’s lots of ways to lose at chess when your opponent wants to win. Learning chess is fun, even if you never ascend to learning what the masters tell us: the number of openings with which you can plausibly win against a competent opponent is rather finite. Is chess still fun to play even when I don’t know the game that well? Yes it is. And if chess is a deal breaker for you, should you really be reviewing strategy games?

Real player with 146.2 hrs in game

This isn’t a game for everyone, but it certainly is the one for me.

In Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager, the player takes on the role of the administration of a space agency. Either NASA or the Soviet Space Agency, usually in competition with each other, or a fictional conglomeration of the two as the Global Space Agency (GSA). The goal, of course, is to land on the moon before your competitor, if playing NASA or as the Soviets–if you’re playing as the GSA the goal is simply to land on the moon by the end of 1973. Playing as the GSA replaces interagency competition with short term objectives set by political higher-ups, with give a small boost if achieved, but a moderate penalty if ignored. If a sandbox is desired with no pressure or competition, that is available too for all three agencies.

Real player with 121.3 hrs in game

Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager on Steam

Cosmonautica

Cosmonautica

Minor good part :

  • The idea space ship management is kinda ok, you can be pirate, you can be trader, you can be transporter, you can be smuggler with kinda good gameart.

  • The random generated appearance of the crew is good… but need more base model, I found like total 8, 4 for human m&f…or maybe more…

Minor bad part :

  • Sometimes missing UI sound fx.

  • Crew sometimes gone missing.

  • Crew sometimes idle too much.

Bad part :

  • Boring at traveling, you almost do nothing here and the thing make it worst is the traveling time is long enough to make me think “jir, what the hell am I buying this game for?…” (you know a few seconds different is too long for game with nothing to do).

Real player with 26.2 hrs in game

SimTower meets Privateer

Interesting combination of game elements in a manner that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. Interesting range of ships (but needs to be bigger and include more classes), the commodity model is reasonable (albeit rather basic), very similar to the Privateer model of base types, except that this game allows for bases to be multiple ‘types’.

Crew recruitment and requirements can be counter-intuitive and frustrating, especially with limited options at each base and the need to build up a large crew over time. I would have thought that having a crew that eats different things would lead to better harmony as they’re not all competing for the same subset of the food supply (but that’s me I guess).

Real player with 24.6 hrs in game

Cosmonautica on Steam

CyberHive

CyberHive

I had some fun dissecting the game and there are some good parts in it, but overall can’t recommend it for the actual gameplay.

The short version is that the entire game revolves around one ressource, Energy Gel, and running out of that ressource is the only thing that kills you. Here’s some math to illustrate why that doesn’t work out very well:

1 bee requires 18 Gel per turn to live.

1 bee gathers 100 minerals per turn.

2 bees are needed to turn those 100 minerals into 50 gel.

So 3 bees, who need 54 gel per turn to live, produce 50 gel.

Real player with 6.6 hrs in game

8/10 - my expectations were low, but i was pleasantly surprised by the game.

So the game is like xcom’s base management, but with a “Missile Command” mini game instead of crew combat part and heavy resource management. Also, each “room” has it’s own cute bee-girl. And the story line starts slow, but goes very intense towards the ending of the game.

The game is mostly bug-free (except for the characters who are bugs themselves, lol), but i’ve encountered a couple of small issues and reported them to the devs.

Real player with 3.6 hrs in game

CyberHive on Steam

Fleets of Ascendancy

Fleets of Ascendancy

Terrible UI. Seems to be broken. Unplayable.

I have a short playtime because you can only get about 3 minutes into the game, but I might be wrong. Here’s a list of thoughts:

  • Tutorial seems to be a JPG image with red text written on top of the screen to “explain” how things work. This tutorial is incredibly vague and leaves out basic information such as “some weapons fire auto, most fire manually.” How do I fire manually?

  • Nonexistent feedback on the effectiveness of any weapons or even if they’re doing anything at all. The same weapon would fire sometimes, and other times it wouldn’t. No idea why.

Real player with 0.2 hrs in game

Hi,

the fact that you care is a plus.

I am a little old/dumb to try to understand new concepts.

So to catch me (or kinds of me) you still need to polish the GUI.

More simpler. It is still cumbersum to play.

As i understand you want to make a simple clicker, deep tactical little strategical game.

For that the gui must change for every single ship (even if they all have the same).

I still do not get the point on how to fight:

My advice click 1 ship, screen opes for config. give attack order with right.

Real player with 0.2 hrs in game

Fleets of Ascendancy on Steam