The Last Starship

I played Prison Architect from the same studio before, so this game kept popping up in my notifications. Finally I bit the bullet and bought it. I must admit it was one of the best decisions I made.
Pros:
1- Very engaging gameplay
2- More than one way to play it; go wild and spend hours or days in creative mode to build the best ship ever, or just dive into the story. The choice is yours.
3- Regardless of which mode you play, you determine your play style. Either be a cargo boss and ship stuff all around, rescue people from dire situations, construct a factory of a ship, or jump onto the hostiles guns blazing. Alternatively, mix and match as you wish.
4- No two gameplays are alike. I restarted the game several times, and it evolved in a new direction based on my experience and knowledge each time.
5- You keep learning. There is always a better way to do something, so you need to keep planning for it, be it combat, manufacturing or shipment routes.
6- Industry tree is clear and satisfactory. You can figure out what you need for which material and where to find it in a few hours.
7- You can design your ships and publish them on Steam, or just subscribe to published ship designs to add variety to in-game ship types.
Cons:
1- Still in Alpha (Alpha 11 was recently release as of this writing), so lots of stuff is still incomplete, especially the stories.
2- Rotation mechanics of the equipment is primitive; I yearn for "flip" option in adition to "rotate" to align the outputs of my refineries and chem labs (pretty please?)
3- You can't go back to the previous sector, which is a big issue for me. Sometimes I jump to the next sector only to see that it contains little minerals and metreon, which was abundant in the previous system.
4- Contracts sometimes get assigned to systems that are not properly spawned. This seems to be somewhat fixed in Alpha 11 but the systems may still be off the sector map. However, this can be fixed by carefully editing the save file. Still a nuisance.
5- Habitation cannot be removed/reduced.
6- Editor needs a semi-transparency option so that I can see where I'm editing.
7- Science tree is underwhelming. In my opinion, there should be LOTS more to research and manufacture. Ability to discover/trade/steal indostry recipes is a must.
8- My biggest pet peeve: you can't sell/fire crew! So if you hire a scientist and complete the rather short science tree, all he/she does is just hang around. Or if you decide to downsize and get rid of your guns, there's no simple way to fire your weapons officers. Same goes for crew if you decide to go for automation and suddenly have too much crew. This should be fixed.
9- Last but not least, a multiplayer mode can be very good. I'd be happy to exchange materials with a friend or fight the baddies as a team. Not sure how feasible this idea is, though.
All in all, a very original game that can keep you entertained if you like this type. Highly recommended, even though it's still in early access.

Great concept, and for the most part well executed (considering it is in early access). This review mostly focuses on constructive criticism, but the devs definitely did a lot right with this.
Pros - Lots of customization and a 'factorio-esque' feeling when designing ships. Physics are simulated so adding mass to your ship comes at the cost of maneuverability. Missions are fun (although currently limited), and the flight/maneuvering feels smooth and intuitive.
Cons - Early access so some minor bugs and incomplete features.
To the developers, just a few constructive notes I had while playing for things I noticed as of 12/28/23:
Current Gameplay:
- The ability to reassign missions to a different ship or abandon certain side missions would be nice.
- Orders should be applied to each ship individually and not to all ships in your fleet. Having to disable drones for the full fleet just to FTL jump for one ship without leaving them behind seems like an oversight.
- More of a personal preference, but having the starting system as a 'safe zone' would probably be more enjoyable. Maybe even just 'defend the station' missions might be preferable to the scheduled raids. Having to get my ships with no method for self defense out of the system (or clumping them together with my mining station) every 10-20 minutes makes progressing through other systems feel like more work than it is worth. It is difficult to get more than one ship really heavily armed early on so bringing it back to the starting system to fight off attacks constantly was a bit of a headache. If this feature is a biproduct of certain missions then more transparency on that would be preferred.
- A *lot* of details are unclear even after the tutorial. There is a ton of stuff that is left to the player to just stumble into and figure out, which can be good for some things, but for core functionality it might be helpful to expand. For example, the purpose for a lot of items or resources are unclear until you collect or buy them and actually experiment with them. Maybe a 'help/index' page with a full appendix of items/resources and their uses + descriptions would be good to include. Also things like repairing through the shipyard menu or the maneuvering menu weren't immediately obvious in my opinion.
Bugs:
- I noticed sometimes even after doing repairs my ship will still smoke. I have tried the shipyard 'repair all' as well as letting my drones repair hull but cannot get it to go away.
- Active mission will occasionally disappear out of the contracts menu.
- Undocking while transferring materials between ships causes the crew to bring everything to the door then back into respective cargo locations.
- 'Insufficient storage space' alerts tend to fire off sometimes even when I do have storage space. This may have something to do with my drones not able to drop materials because the drone port is full, but if it is that is somewhat unclear.
Future 'nice to have' recommendations (aside from obvious more recipes & more missions/story):
- 'Task queue' interface for crew to see and reorder tasks on current ship as well as a 'cancel' option
- Targeting preference during combat and mining. (focus targeted ship/ore vein over other in range)
- 'Sell All/Transfer All' button
- Tiny planets or meteors to be purchased and used as storage or manufacturing hubs.
- Different markets per system (different item availability and sale prices)
- System reputation and option to attack neutral vessels
- Appendix/help screen as mentioned above (I understand this would be a headache to put in so it probably belongs here)
- Random encounters (FTL style encounters possibly)
- Energy routing (option to cut power to something like logistics during combat for example)
- Weapon and hull upgrades (maybe docking at a shipyard to buy these or something)
Hope that helps. Over all great concept and lots of fun. Excited to see the official release.

Pros: A good combination of building, resource management, and combat. Playable and enjoyable, but not complete (hence Early Access).
Cons: One year in and alpha 8 is the latest release. Expected the game to be further along in development.
Recommendation to Devs: commit to making monthly updates, even if small, it shows that you are actively developing the product.

Personally don't understand all the comments saying there's only 2-3 hours of content. For me at least, a lot of the game is creating your own content - experimenting with different types of ship (be it logistics, industry, combat, mining, etc) and trying to build your supply line, for a start.
Love the different gamemodes too. Industry Mode was a great challenge in terms of figuring out how to organise my ships so I can build everything I need to automatically. Escape Mode flipped that on its head within the first hour - suddenly I had 100 passengers and my "old faithful" CO2 scrubber couldn't keep up anymore.
Yes there's bugs, and you'll find your weapons no longer firing and get absolutely destroyed by a tiny fighter and ragequit. Definitely a more funnier bug that, when all those passengers from above died, the contract stayed in my list to haunt me til the end of time, reminding me every day of my mass manslaughter. Yes the contracts/minerals/ships are all the same - but honestly 24 hours in and, for me at least, it's still pretty fun to play. Can't wait to see what the next alphas bring.

This game is already far ahead of where Prison Architect was at this age. If they put half the work into this as that, it will wind up being amazing. It's already pretty fun just to explore the game as it stands today. There's more than you would expect for a game this early in development.

Really good game. FTL on drugs. Highly recommend. 10/10 on and game that still in early access.

This game has so much potential. I'm eager to see it's growth as a game. Only critique so far is having to use tactical mode, sucks. It pulls you out of the impressive and fun to watch game play. Please let me move and shoot without having to make everything green!

4/5