Base One is proposed in this renewed era of spatial passion as a strategic / management set among the stars, but forgetting to be actually among them.
The Gameplay
In Base One we will have to build our space base in orbit around a planet with the problems that follow it. Starting with a central HUB we will expand our creature more and more to give birth to a dirt field of sub-stations divided between rooms for the crew, rooms for vital support and those of research and development.
Sub-stations are many and varied, and if at first we will notice a certain weak fantasy in them, especially in its content composed of a single object, as our research and technology proceeds we will be able to diversify them more and more with increasingly complex equipment.
Logistics, logistics, and logistics
The base resource of the station will be the electricity network, starting from the solar panels, passing through the batteries and going to finish for the users. We will always have the feeling that it will never be enough, thus finding ourselves in the cycles at night to have an important energy shortage preventing us from continuing much of the activity.
Starting from electricity we will touch all the other resources necessary to the station, such as oxygen and water, and if these at first will make us sleep quiet dreams, they will cut us forward in the game when they leave us empty pockets and with few chances to repaint them.
The main system of the gameplay lies in the logistic management of the base, which frankly we find also exaggerated. Every resource, such as heat, oxygen and water, will have to be connected to us with lines, and so also every machine, in routes that never occur. These necessary links must be made every time, without any particular logic or considerations, asking us for what reason the developers have forced us to these "line tracks", when an automatic connection system, or even better a system to demand/production without particular manual links, would make the gameplay more fluid without having to stand behind it.
The management of the crew is a whole chapter in itself. The hourly table system that makes us establish the working hours, rest, training and study of our ominis, thus allowing us to build half of the machinery while allowing them to be always used. The character and perk system is good, although some of them are really useless for some characters/classes. I do not understand the health and mood of the crew, that if we are offered a general idea of morality, it does not allow to understand, if not investigating every single member, what is the reason for the climate.
Some negative notes in the combat system, which in an attempt to add a touch of action in the game, got a tedious note for the poor manual management of the turrets that will be better, especially the first ones, let them do by themselves and spammarle at every corner of the base.
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The Graphics
The point of diamond of the whole game is the graphics, it deserves without itself and without but, the department behind its realization certainly knew how to do his job well and managed to show us it.
The design is great, the credible ships, the effects of light, and especially the flames, deserve.
Clearly aware of the work they were doing and their intention to make it a focal point of the game, the whole setting turns around it, giving us animated backgrounds that are lost between space.
Personally I enjoyed the care in detail in the various levels of zoom, a little less the animations of the characters quite standardized, but I wouldn't weigh them.
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History
History has no art, no matter how much it can be in the setting, it will certainly not be one of those that will remain, and to say it all, not in many will appreciate the interruptions of the game given us by the dialogues. It develops quite linearly and will only be a contour or pretext to what we will be called to do, which at all done is just a long tutorial until we can play well trained in free mode and put our difficulties on.
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My protest
Now in a completely personal way I want to express what I personally did not believe in this work, what I have already seen in management of the genre and that if in the past I could close an eye now I am going to throw my criticism on choices of settings more "to make cool" than to affect the gameplay.
Anyone who faces the "space" issue knows how much there are rules in space that cannot be ignored, especially from a game that aims to make us know this environment better.
The main point of my argument is that in space gravity is minimal, for simplicity nothing, therefore there are systems to overcome this first problem, you want it to be the most used rotary system, in which the space station in question is rotated to create the angular moment able to tie the absence of gravity, or some more Moroccan like all magnets that anchor at the station.
For this problem you cannot think of building a space station, in space, as if you were building it on a surface of a planet or moon.
Yet Base One forgets, and its propensity to be a space-based simulator is actually a lunar-based simulator transplanted into space. Choice that seems to have been dictated more by the graphic possibilities of a space environment than by the actual intention of wanting to create a game in space, possibility made evident by some landscape choices as containers of materials placed one above the other and left there as if leaned on a solid non-existent terrain.
This will has what ever cut the legs to the whole project, creating a beautiful space to see but not exploratable is clearly more limiting than a lunar base in which we could have sent in avant-garde our subordinates and create rover and distant bases.
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In conclusion
Base One is at the same time a good game, made even more beautiful by its graphics, the management system has high and low, but that all in all come out well though with some complexity of too. The bugs detected during the trials have been settled and those that remain there we think will do the same end. All this does not remove that although Base One is a space station management, at fact, it is not, but it would be more correctly to define as a moon-free lunar base strategic. With this we recommend it to those who are fascinated management of this setting and do not care about a physics not really truthful.
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