About Base Battles:
This is the best looking space station management simulation I ever played. But here the praise already ends. After a wormhole appeared near Earth, a large colony ship is sent through it. Most of the ship is destroyed, but some parts do make it out on the other side, and you are in charge of building and maintaining a space station there. The first missions tell your struggle after the arrival. The missions are quite simple – you are told your mission objectives, and as long as you follow those orders you succeed. Many of the mechanics of the game are disabled. Episode 2 tells the story after the arrival of the second colony ship – this time fully intact and with lots of ressources and colonists. The missions are far longer now, but you still just follow the mission objectives. I have not reached the third (and final) Episode yet. You build modules to expand the space station, collect ressources (or buy them), research things like… a treadmill, manage the power lines and wonder why you have a day and night cycle in space, build sofas and drink dispensers and watch helplessly when noone cares to construct the new module you have ordered. There is a lot of micromanagement, but many things appear to be completely useless. There are so many details, but they are not really implemented well. I mean, you can make the activity plan for each crew member for the whole week for every hour and tell them when to learn, train, work or rest! They all have an individual name and a ton of character stats – but since the game didn’t bother to explain them I didn’t bother to read them. The AI orders you to put plants in the rooms to make your crew happy, while it forgets to mention that the oxygen supply has run out.
