So... This is a game I will likely finish. It has good writing most of the time, A-tier worldbuilding, and proper RPG mechanics, which is a vanishing rarity.

However, this is a negative review. Colony Ship is a game with two souls, being pulled apart at the seams. While most games worth playing are greater than the sum of their parts, Colony Ship is no better, and perhaps even a little worse than that sum. It is simultaneously a game of great choices and consequence, that demands you pay attention to the world around you, and one of punishing difficulty.

These two do join in theme - it makes sense in the world, and there is a "Hero" mode to address complaints about combat, but I am not using it because the problem isn't that combat is hard, it's that it's also poorly explained and poor foundations are hard to improve. What do I mean by this?

Well, I played many punishingly difficult games, and I am only frustrated when I do not understand why I died. So let's go through some examples from the first 8 or so hours of gameplay:
There's a room full of frogs. My particularly party composition relies on triggering reactions during the "enemy phase" generally. This fight is clearly a bossfight, but for some reason reactions do not trigger on frogs without ranged attacks. I lost this fight seven times due to this issue, even though my reaction attacker was not engaged in melee - they simply didn't shoot at moving frogs, and the game doesn't have a help page for the Reaction mechanic at all - a pretty glaring hole in otherwise decent-to-good tutorials.

In countless battles, despite heavy armoring and an energy shield, my pregen main character (Cllelan) would just simply die immediately on the opening turn, because he was designed with 4 constitution in a game where the tooltip FOR CONSTITUTION ITSELF states that six is the "minimum for adventuring".

That's bad. I picked a pregen because I don't know what's important, and in Colony Ship, most of the important choices for your build are made immediately in character creation. Now, lots of games do this - Fallout, for example. But in a sliding scale of importance, Colony Ship sits to the very extreme of "character creation is important", whereas fallout errs to the side of "it doesn't matter", as there are so many levels and ways to increase, say, your base statistics, that the initial choices you make have a pretty minimal impact on your ability to turn your character around later.

Now, most games solve this problem quite easily with pregens, but at least the pregen I chose (Cllelan) has a bad stat distribution that makes a first playthrough harder by having a laughably small health pool as a talker-type character. With no ability to respec, and a large number of permanent decisions being made, this is a problem, as I'd love to move stats around to fix this, but would need to restart to do so. Now, I have fixed my character greatly with gear and level ups (which don't increase hit points), but this only scratches the surface of the problems with characters as mechanics versus characters as narrative.

I am making an assumption that the game has not lied to me, but according to the game, when a character's death timer runs out - they die. This demands two things: Consistently good play to keep characters alive, and replacements for that inevitable failure. The game has such a problem with frequent character death you get two to three autosaves as the game goes on that trigger when an encounter starts and when combat begins. I can only presume that these are to reduce frustration and mitigate a problem - there's not enough companions.

I found three in my eight hours, and could have easily lost all three if I was not reloading saves. But these are also supposed to be characters - not only is there a bonding stat that makes characters perform better for you as you do things they like, but they have dialogue and opinions. Unfortunately, while the companions probably still crest "above average" for interactivity in these types of games (well below Larian Studios games, but doing much better than the 3D Fallouts) it's obvious that there's a degree to which character writing has been pulled back because no developer can be sure any given companion will make it very far down the road, and that's a terrible shame.

The writing in general moves along a bit too quickly when it comes to it's supporting cast - less time is spent developing the characters of any location than they clearly deserve, and it's a bit too easy for characters that are clearly supposed to be influential be unheard until you're there to put a bullet in their skull. It's not too obvious usually, but the Mercy/Jonas/Braxton trio is much more glaring.

Despite this, the story around them is good, the characters are interesting... but it can occasionally feel like connective tissue is missing, and that Colony Ship in its writing skips some of the moments that makes the good, great.


Okay, one more thing - Combat. I've run into the situation a few times now where item design, encounter design, and the mechanics of combat all disagree, and I as a player am left with no answer. For example, in the infamous Frog Room, you must even the odds. However, I elected to give my Flashbangs to two particular party members - one who shoots badly, and one who shoots well. Flashbangs have two effects- they dramatically lower enemy evasion, and enemy accuracy. Because these two characters had GOOD initiative, they went BEFORE the frogs. What does that mean? My two other combat characters could never hit the frogs, because flash bangs last a single enemy turn. I ended up reloading the combat to fix this problem, but I wasn't able to simply reduce my initiative score to after the frogs (costing me a fraction of a turn forever), and the immersion-breaking act of re-arranging my inventory was only needed because the item doesn't account for that scenario, the encounter doesn't account for that scenario, and combat design (explicitly, in a steam thread) would become too simplified by the option to reduce your initiative - which speaks to significant foundational issues, if my best option becomes loading up on armor (which reduces your initiative if you're bad at wearing it) to artificially reduce my initiative before combat begins.


I will finish Colony Ship, but I could not possibly recommend anyone do the same when so many issues of design make the game more frustrating and less enjoyable than the actual quality of everyone's work would indicate.