I want to love this, but I just can't in it's current state.
Played on 0.9.2
I've played Spacethumper 1 and enjoyed it a lot, so I'll be speaking from that baseline. Starting with the good, when I learned I got to play as 3 different characters I really looked forward to it! They've all got distinct designs and personalities and bounce off each other well, and it gives an immediate fun goal of seeing how big you can get all of them. Gameplay is also expanded massively in terms of what you can do - adding verticality gives you a whole new plane to build on, and there's not just a whole new layer of complexity added with them but multiple layers with the conditionals for the generators, solar does bad underneath platforms and caves, wind doesn't do great on the ground, elevators need space, and everything needs to be powered and needs something next to it, it's more than just using the power to create them in the first place now. It gives so much more to work with and around in planning your base and how you're gonna set up,especially when including how many more structures are now 2 tile wide, some 3tiles wide! Everything added and changed gives you a whole lot more to play around with compared to its predecessor, and I was really excited to try it all out
But, the game's just... irritating, to play, at least currently. On my first save, I took my time looking around a little, doing the tutorial, reading the dialog after hitting 200, talking with the people in the cave... when I left, I found my first slime. And this is where the trouble began.
I wanted to play whilst exploring what I'd been given. Building platforms, building wind turbines on them and seeing how well they worked, trying to build elevators and, mostly getting confused why they wouldn't work (I build the elevator underneath structures), and often switching characters to give everyone a turn. Eventually, what this resulted in was getting overran with slimes. As far as I can tell, they scale almost solely by how much time has passed, so taking my time with things and playing with all the new toys I'd been handed just came back to bite me until I ended up needing to run back and forth constantly repairing what defences I had, deciding then to just give up as I was making no progress and the waves were only getting harder. Two and a half hours on that save, a full research table, some suit upgrades, and I had to leave it all behind because I felt essentially softlocked.
I tried again tomorrow. Skipped through dialog as fast as I can, swapped straight to big green, and spent every single moment trying to build up as fast as I could. This time I was able to expand enough to actually explore a little, and realized that there was a lot more in both directions I had no idea about my first time around, especially to the right. Slowly I progressed up there, expanding my operation, and I think a little under 2 hours later I felt I'd done everything I could. Full research, full upgrades, and Mark III reactors with thousands of crystals all around with Mark III miners keeping plenty in surplus if needed. My defences were over the slimes' own nests and at this point, destroying them not long after I got there, usually only needing to replace the fortified wall placed directly over their nest and a few other repairs here and there. Things seemed simple now, and after an initial scan I decided to launch the wave.
Then the countdown started. I hadn't expected a countdown. I'd expected the scan to work like the first scan and be instant, though with this one summoning a wave from both ends as I was warned of aggrevating the local fauna. I'd set up defences and a teleporter so I could handle one on one end and teleport to the other to help with the rest, and suddenly my plan was moot because the second scan works differently without any warning. My defences couldn't handle multiples waves so close together and I lost everything, and I knew the slimes were still scaled up from how long I'd been playing. Trying to start from scratch would be next to impossible as I'd have no resource generation to help build, nevermind maintain, any defences of any kind. My save was too far back for me to care, so I quit once again, defeated.
It's very tempting to start up another run, but frankly, spending every single moment trying to build up as fast as you can is more stressful than fun, and I don't enjoy the pressure of feeling like I have to knowing that if I don't, my entire base will be destroyed and recovering it likely won't be possible as the difficulty will have scaled too much. Unlocking max elasticity didn't feel like a reward for hard work to be enjoyed, it felt like a requirement to have a chance of surviving the slime waves as they continued to get harder and harder. Even just getting the dialog for new weight thresholds felt mildly stressful as I'd seen before that it doesn't pause time, only stopping you taking in energy and stopping you in place. That's not efficient. That's a hazard against my base. Sure, I want to read it, but I want to get through it as fast as possible so I can be ready if an attack happens. How am I meant to enjoy the dialog, or any of the weight gain aspects of the game, if I have to spend every second trying to fortify myself as much as possible?
I know this can be something incredible. All the groundwork is there, and there's so much to experiment with that I imagine there are a practically infinite amount of bases that people can build. It's so full of promise, and I strongly, eagerly look forward to the next versions in hopes of seeing their improvement. But in it's current state, it's just too demanding of you to enjoy playing it. And no matter how much I daydream about playing it and what I could build, I've no interest in spending yet another evening feeling under constant pressure to keep moving else I lose everything. This is so, so close to being something great, there's just still plenty of tweaking to be done yet for it to get there.
Thank you for reading. I can't wait to see what you do next!