Demo review 2021.04.18

This game certainly starts off on the right paw - you've got space, you've got cats, and you've got tactics. The graphics are good - colorful enough to match the lighthearted dialogue, serious enough to match the tactical gameplay. Soundtrack gets the job done. Storyline... well, there really isn't much storyline to speak of in this short demo, but you've got your basic mysterious ship + mysterious artifacts + dysfunctional crew, so it seems like it *could* be good, at least. The potential is there. Dialogue is... adequate. I like corny puns as much as the next guy, but that only gets you so far. I would be interested to see a professional writer brought on board to punch up the dialogue and help make sure the story is compelling.

The good news is that the core gameplay is rock-solid. It's obvious that a lot of thought went into this, and some good decisions were made (like "engines still work if there's no one in the engine room, just not as fast" and "moving crew to a different room takes a flat 1 action point, so you don't have to worry about accidentally clicking one pixel too far and taking extra time or whatever".) Usually a demo just tells you how a game *might* be fun; this one is *already* fun - I really enjoyed the calculations of where to place my crew members each turn for the best results as we're flying around shooting at things.

I guess my chief concern, then, is not knowing what's planned for the development process. The game is still pretty buggy and not ready for beta testing IMO, but I see that a release date 6 months out has been announced and I saw it advertised on FB. I know that these days building a bunch of hype so that everyone buys the game all at once on release day is key to getting noticed, so there isn't as much time to let word of mouth spread - but I wonder if this is going to be more of a Blizzard-style "we'll release it when it's done and not before" situation, or if (as seems to be more common these days) the "version 1.0" is really going to be more like beta testing, and the game won't actually be *good* until months after release with a lot of patching. In conclusion: the core concept, and the execution of the core concept, are both really solid, but it needs some TLC around the edges. I hope this game gets the polish it deserves to be a hall-of-famer.