An educational game for kids
While this game has some educational material and helps to get a jist of a space race, as a game it falls severely short. You can’t make your own path. Game feels more like a puzzle than a management game. Enemy AI seems more like a very slow milestone completion than trying to win against a real opponent. Core of this game is RNG which are rigged and extremely frustrating. It is not a game which you would want to play more than once and even then you might not enjoy the ride once gameplay rears its ugly head.
Gameplay
It is very primitive and bad even compared to equivalent games. The core issue is that gameplay built on roll of a dice which is rigged. It forces you to play around mathematical formula and percentage bias which it has in various stages of its generation.
Micromanagement hell
Gameplay comes from assigning right people for the job. However, there can be up to 100 right people for the job. All those people require attention via training and asigning them to projects. This becomes tedious as you have to constantly shift them from programs to missions. This is actual moment to moment gameplay you will be doing. A better game would have some form of assistance like a button allowing to automatically send people to be trained.
AI
It has non. AI is extremely slow in achieving its goals. You will never feel pressure to win space race. Due to how bad RNG is and no pressure to take your chances, game becomes solely about figuring right solution. You don’t even get a glimpse of what other agency is doing further enchanting feeling of a puzzle game.
Stat grinding
Most high end programs are difficult and require you to have teams with high expertise or otherwise progress might stop to a crawl. This forces you to train up your people and this is whole gameplay. Given that a failed launch actually can take a way magically a lot of reliability out of your program, it requires you to almost fully grind out parts up to 90% which is very slow.
Tiger Teams
When you go through all the trouble of assembling as competent team as possible, it still are not good enough than imaginary “Tiger Teams” which are essentially cheat code to fix any issue in launch for a lot of money. This completely undermines whole point of building your own team which only has 60-70% to fix an issue when it appears. Knowing how bad RNG is, 0,2*0,3 is just mere 6% likelihood of failure, but it feels more like 25% chance.
Interface
It is quite horrible. Big, clunky buttons. You can’t go from project screen to project reliability screen and hop to another project. More often than not, you will quit screen and will have to go through several clicks just to find a specialized screen. You have specific buttons to press in order to upgrade building or get information. Interface is as bad as it could be without actively trying to impede player.
Launching mission
It is so bad that I will have to put it under the interface. It has a nice screen showing at what stage program is. However, there is no feedback what goes wrong. Any stage can go wrong and there is nothing you could had done better. Entire screen is rather pointless and source of frustration. RNG can fail your mission at any stage and result will always be catastrophic even when it doesn’t make any sense. It is one of rare cases where game would be better without its own gameplay.
Rotten RNG
Gameplay is built upon RNG. You have to launch a program which has reliability rating meaning likelihood of something going wrong. You usually have to build reliability through research and time. However, the true issue comes from game’s pseudo-random number generator which is flawed. 80% reliability in 20 stage program launch should not generate more than 2 issues. Sometimes it could generate none, sometimes more. However in this game it can generate error after error. Probability of that happening is very low as getting 0.2*0.2 event in a row is is just 4%! However, in this game it happens a lot more often when failure happens right after failure. Some launches seem to be destined to fail while others might have just one failure. It is very rarely when you have a perfect launch. This means that game does not generate statistically random outcomes and numbers which it generates via mathematical models tend to favour low rolls between 10-20 range. This creates gameplay which requires you to build reliability towards 90% in order to have a decent chance in launching program successfully.
This creates a gameplay where you have to patiently wait until you max out research rather than having any real race in space program. Nor AI presents a real challenge either way. Difficulty levels only decide amount of funding you get which essentially means figuring out the sequency of programs which you can do.
Conclusion
Whole experience is rather tedious quick save and quick load affair. Gameplay will leave you frustrated and will force you to use cheat codes – Tiger Teams which undermine whole point of this game. There is too little historical data to learn much on space race itself. There is no gameplay to speak of. Game might be good and interesting first time when you play solely because of novelty, but it quickly becomes tedious and frustrating experience.