I'd give it a neutral rating if I could, leaning on negative because of pay to win stuff. I'll edit my review if my opinion changes.
TLDR:
Bad = There IS pay to win, slow start, hardly any social aspect, tedious galaxy map, ai art/voice (pisses off some ppl more than others)
Good = Decent looking ui, good access for info for 'solo' aspects like building stats, potentially active gameplay at your choosing, solid foundations for what could be a really good game

Despite people saying this game has no Pay to Win, it does. You can pay to get +1 Fleet Slot by buying a Command Center subscription (Like £4.59 a month). Fleet slots are very important, its basically being a tech ahead, and one of the big bonuses of the Warlord is having that +1 to fleet. I particularly don't like having Fleet Slots locked behind a pay wall because it is the most active aspect of the game and how you interact with the galaxy. It is like if you had less bullets in your gun in an FPS. Definitely don't approve.

The game also has that slimy money to ingame credits thing going on. You know where you can't buy stuff directly, you have to buy ingame credits and the more you spend the better deal you get on said credits. To put it in perspective, 100 Credits for £1.37. 500 Credits for £4.59. 1100 Credits for £8.49.... Eww..

The game also starts extremely slowly. The tutorial has you waiting minutes to get to the next stage, with the final stage being like 40 minutes of waiting for something to complete. It also felt very lackluster, and I had to go to the Discord to ask around to get real guidance. Once you do know what you are doing, you are locked into the class you picked in the beginning before you knew what the playstyles even looked like. You can switch.. but you guessed it, it costs money. Think having 1 free swap just makes sense, or a longer tutorial that shows you the playstyles so you can then pick your class after knowing what you are getting into.

Its taken me like two days before the game actually had an active component rather than me just clicking on upgrading a building, waiting and coming back way later (boring af). That is when I unlocked anomalies, which been pretty cool, turning the game from a proper log off and come back hours later into a more idle clicker kind of game where I can dial up the intensity by my own choice.

Basically, you send out probes to adjacent systems, those probes will find if there is an anomaly, and then you can send a ship to investigate. Whilst in practice this isn't complex, the act of just blasting probes everywhere, watching them reach their destination, getting a little ding noise and then being able to cash in on that anomaly creates this little mini game where you are actively involved, which these types of games never normally have, being completely passive. This aspect of the game is however locked behind Fleet Slots.. and now you see why having any pay to win related to Fleet Slots is super lame.

Fleet slots working as they are also means you don't really get to try a variety of strategies because all 'active' gameplay elements compete for the a Fleet Slot, so you are always going to specialize and prioritise how you use said slots. Exploration stuff uses Fleet slots, mining fleets use Fleet slots, going to ruin someones day with a warfleet uses Fleet slots. I think at the very least, mining should be its own thing. I don't know. As it is, everything to me seems too constrained and tied together.

The UI looks good. Most things seem to interact in a way you would expect. Information is easily accessible, like building names being hyperlinked so you can go see exactly the stats they give for example. However, key information from the galaxy map seems to be hard to access. For example I want to see what systems are occupied, how occupied they might be, what system has a Station (spawns on game startup, important for controlling a sector) but from what I can see, I just have to go click each system one by one, tedious and manual as hell. The best you can do is leave a note based off a planet, which is not enough. For a game that is about being an MMO, not being able to see which area of space is roughly occupied is really annoying. Also, if you want to do loads of anomalies, you will be going around probing a system every 4 hours, but you can't tell at a glance what you have already probed. This means you are just continually clicking systems one by one. Lame. On the flipside, theres a button to check Allies and Trade Hubs, which work great. The galaxy map just needs to present more information to not be so tedious to use.

Unfortunately, I don't really get what the point of the game is. There has been zero social aspect to the game. There are people around me, some share my system, but there isn't much reason to communicate or do anything. You need to build up to be able to start to specialize to start having incentive to trade with others and stuff, but when you walk in there are already established alliances everywhere who have a headstart. Are players who join later just always gonna be the underdogs and at a disadvantage?

Oh and yeah, the game has AI art everywhere. I don't SUPER care but a lot of the art is that ai generated kind of passable art but when you look at it is just ai slop. Also the ai voice for research is... really bad. It's a ai doing a womans voice, but like trying to be an actual human. Just.. change it to a robotic ai womans voice, please.

Overall I'd say the game has potential, things work, maybe the social aspect gets ironed out as more people join, but like, if anyone has played Travian or any of those kind of pay to win trash games, I don't really have faith that this game won't start to cash in and become pay to win slop at some point, given it already has pay to win already. I can just see new players getting continually fisted by those with seniority who also drop money on the game.

It's free. I don't regret trying it. Would I recommend this game to a friend? No. The + fleet cap and slimy credit currency system just feels ominous like the game is destined to be one of THOSE credit card swiping games we've seen a thousand times before. I'd love to be wrong, this type of game should be perfect for me. We'll see with time...

brings back the old days of these kind of MMO's before companies tried to monitize everything and becoming P2W wallet games over anything else. Sure, it has a few things in it's store, they need to make money off Something to support themselves after all, but it's so far all minor things and reasonable prices.

The games well designed and seems deep enough to enjoy for a good while. I was able to pick it up and play without any tutorials or guides without issue, so if you're familular with these types of games, you should khave no real issues. the Guide in the bottom left though can be quite handy to learn all the finer details to really know what you're doing though. I'm enjoying the game quite a bit and am looking forward to playing it long term as long as it stays the course.

I genuinely enjoy this game and have spent many hours playing it.

Initially, I encountered a very frustrating bug: after completing both the Daily and Weekly Pirate Hunt quests, I was unable to claim the rewards, and the quests eventually disappeared from my quest list. Given the importance of progression in the game, this was extremely discouraging.

However, after reporting the issue, the support team responded very quickly, investigated the problem, and resolved it. Their responsiveness and professionalism significantly changed my perception of the situation.

The issue has now been fixed, and I appreciate the team's commitment to helping players when problems arise. Because of this positive experience with support, I am updating my review and can once again recommend the game.

Thank you to the team for their quick assistance.