Recent reviews by Phren

Great little water management game with beavers.

An amusing enough game if you like the genre, though I'm still a bit let down by the overall balance which feels a bit off. It's a shame the combat is still entirely hands-off - even giving generic orders at the beginning would make me happy.

It is at least pretty, and the ship designer is still nicely featured. Planet management is still interesting, and I haven't tried all the races yet.

8/10
I admit I was expecting something more like Outpost... but it's not the surviving that's difficult. Base-building is deceptively simple, yet has subtleties that aren't immediately obvious - like connecting buildings to your HQ gives you free transport to them, while grouping them together gives bonuses to production but makes them easier to sabotage.

Once you start to grasp the way the competition works, though, and realise it's all about monopolies, resource manipulation and making good use of your scarce sabotage opportunities to outdo your opponents it really starts to shine.