The Crust

Now the game has come out of its early access it's finally time to review whats is there and unforuntately I'm not impressed. To speedrun the problems: - The plot brings up new aspects that are promptly dropped; My main example would be the fact you're asked to find a new exoplanet for humanity to settle and your final techs would be for colonising planets outside of our solar system, but halfway through the game just drops that plotline and never brings it up again. - Progression feels irrelevant at times, most of the impactfull upgrades are early on in your tech tree and later techs do not do enough to feel special or warrant using them over simply hitting any problem over the head with the hammer of "Do it Harder". Prime example is your refining and smelting, you get the multirefiner within 30 minutes of playtime and never need to swap of it. Refining it off map adds more steps to your logistics chain that do not create any benefits and only tax your credits. Same with smelting, you get the Mk2 smelter and that is all the real progression you have from early game to end game. Your base will look similair regardless of the stage you are in and that's a real shame. - To tie into the previous point, the improved Mk2 version of buildings is a black box with some yellow and blue. This is the same regardless of what building you improve to a mk2 version and makes for a visually unappealing. - Several pieces of the game are straigtht up not there. The main offender here being the statistics screen which has several sections inaccesible with placeholder text in the [b] 1.0 release [/b]. So if you want to know if your production is unbalanced your best option is to unironically [i] count the production numbers along your production line [/i]. - The game banks heavily on colonists with anything intermediate or end product beyond modular frames requiring colonists to break the 50% production speed mark. But since you are incentivised to mass produce with many production structures you either need to eat the production loss and build more OR you have to massively upscale colonists which are a Pain to manage. - The end game is seriously underwhelming. You end up throwing resources at a progress bar to build a laser cannon to destroy the astroid which would wipe out humanity and in return you get a 20 second cinematic and a couple voice lines congratulating you before returning to normal... Seriously? - A good portion of the art was AI generated and was admitted so by the devs. The claim is that they then touched it up with artists but a good portion of the artwork looks overwhelmingly AI. This is contrasted by the models for the in game buildings which do look like a person made them, so it ends up making al the AI stuff even more sad to me. - The soundtrack is maybe not my taste, but it feels very repetetive and I would not be suprised if it was also generated using AI. - There is a known bug that will prevent you from unlocking the endgame quest to build the laser cannon. You cannot save/reload your way through it and savefile editing is not an option either at this moment. In conclusion I cannot recommend this game in its current state as of patch 1.0.13. If these problems were adressed then I could see this game being worth it on sale, but as it stands right now I would hold off on purchasing this game at full price.