Avoid game - game was left unfinished by developers and funders were thrown under the bus.

It's fun if you want to simulate trying to keep a bunch of literal violent ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ alive in space.

Am I joking or exaggerating? No I am not. I have never dealt with such mind-crushing stupidity in any game of this sort, ever. The stupidity of your citizens goes above and beyond funny and delves into the absolutely painful and rage-inducing.

I'm talking about builders not building airlocks and dying from it, Techs not maintaining their oxygen recyclers, panicing when the lack of oxygen makes them suffocate, and then dies flailing around in circles - going into a raider/monster infested derelict one after another for the sole purpose of greed; the overwhelming desire to pick up some stupid, worthless toy and dying for it in a pile of their greedy dead friends, stamping on a roaring fire the size of a house and burning to death in a huge mass instead of using the fire extinguishers directly outside and in said flaming room - walling themselves into small rooms and dying, refusing to tear down the wall to escape or build a door, Downright refusing to maintain the station, their lives, their jobs, or anything relating what so ever to order, because they'd rather bash each others brains out in some psychotic fight, or they'd rather have a temper tantrum because they need to keep the oxygen recyclers operational and they can't play with their rubber duckies.

Yes, all of this actually happens, and it happens constantly. It isn't some stupid trivial issue that appears once in awhile, it's literally ♥♥♥♥ing constant and it never ♥♥♥♥ing ends. Seeing 30 people die one after another because they individually decided to stop working/cooking/sleeping to go steal a ♥♥♥♥ing trinket from a derelict near-by, and absolutely nothing I try to do can ♥♥♥♥ing stop them (Making them security and putting the deployment icon elsewhere, making them builders and trying to make them build, ANYTHING BUT DIE IN THAT ♥♥♥♥ING DERELICT ONE AFTER ANOTHER FOR YOUR STUPID ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥).

Again, this isn't funny. It goes beyond funny. It's unplayable. It's literally ♥♥♥♥ing unplayable because you're actually trying to manage severely mentally disabled humans and aliens in a ♥♥♥♥ing space station. If they don't kill themselves from suffocating, greed, or just random senseless violence and fighting, the almost constant raider attacks (that eventually culminates to a literal raider fleet, for no reason what so ever) will kill them.

The best part is apparently the developers took the money and ran, haven't been doing anything with the game, ban people who point this out or mention it on their forums, and are making new projects/♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the nonexistant money.

This game could be really, really good if the crew wasn't so ♥♥♥♥ing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and suicidal. If they were competent and HAD PRIORITIES like ANY LIVING CREATURE WITH SOME SENSE OF SELF-PRESERVATION, the game would be good, REALLY good in fact. As it is right now? No it's unplayable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

Maybe some modders can take it over and fix it, do anything with it, I don't know. But by default this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is awful.

Having bought this game on early access, I truly wish I hadn't.

It's not finished, it's never going to be finished, feel a lot like I got screwed over on this and every other Double Fine Production game that I bought.

Don't waste your time or money on this unpolished turd.

It is a shame that the developer abandoned the game in a half finished state, claiming that it is now the community's privilege to finish a product they expect you to pay for. This game, while fun, is buggy and incomplete and certainly not worth the asking price.

Double Fine continues the tradition of taking your money and not finishing their games.

To start off, i'm more neutral towards the gameplay factor, but i have to give this a negative rating for the fact that DF just abandoned the game when they saw it progressed to slow.
But here's the gameplay review, if you're still wondering if you should buy it or not :

The game's idea is wonderfull imo : build a base in space, maintain it and welcome new colonists into it while fending off raiders and managing the jobs the citizens do. The way they did it was not bad at all, simple drag-build controlls and assigning the different areas by a simple click of a button and design the interior as you like with various props. Easy. Simple.
But the thing that made the game bad is the fact that it's unbalanced, buggy and just unfinished.
The A.I is pretty bad in prioritizing their tasks, and with the new mood system there is just no way of keeping them happy, even if you furnish every room and give them their favourite jobs. they all eventualy get depressed and start fighting over nothing, which screws up the whole base and delays tasks as they recover in the sickbay.
The gameplay is refined for an Alpha at the time, but there was no change in it whatsoever when it went to V1.0 .

I wouldn't recomend the game to someone who disliked game-breaking bugs and dumb A.I , but if you just like building a base and dont mind using mods to fix all of the vanilla game's problems, it is worth buying whenever it gets on sale.
But otherwise, i sadly can'r recommend it, sorry Double Fine, but ya kinda screwed it up here.
4.5/10

Wasted My money:

Turrets have too short of range
Enemies outside of their ship have just as much health as the ships do...why?
Sometimes the lights of the base do not light up when you come back online

I chose the perfect sector 22-31 where the crime rate was supposed to be extremely low, after a few minutes of playing I get swarmed with raiders.

The game was designed with minimal resources as this game has no goal other than sandbox mode and build until the raiders come to destroy you. And if you do manage to thwart off the ridiculous amount of raiders, when you build a decent sized base I got a raider message saying my base was too large and I got swarmed by soo many raiders that even with my base being completely built with turrets on everyother outside block on my base that even this wasn't enough to kill those raiders.

Eventually the game AI will always destroy you so very un even programming.

There are not many options to customize your base with
There are upgrades but you have to find the plans to them on derelicts

Besides raiders in between those raids you have people parking their so called ships on your base and you eventually have to continually play cleanup where you kill the people aboard, select and highlight their ship and try and dismantle it, and once your done finally clearing away their junk it seems another NPC wants to park their ship on your base where it become permanently attached until you tell again your workers to disasemble it.

It might have had potential if the game designers decided to spend more time polishing it and expanding the way the surfaces interact...as in raider ships come in at some wierd xyz angle that looks goofy and unrefined.

Anyways there is more I can complain about but I would rather throw money at a hole in the wall.

-----Do not buy it unless your addiction to buy stupid games and crossed yet another questionable line.----

Lovely concept and could have been great, but it was never finished despite it's 'released' status. :(

While initially fun and full of promise, this base-building game quickly turns into a frustrating mess. As a fan of the genre, I'm generally willing to look over minor flaws in base-building games, and when I first fired up Spacebase DF-9, I'll admit I let the excitement of building a space-station get the better of me. Now, countless hours in, I find myself pinching the bridge of my nose in frustration and dissappointment everytime I boot the game up.

The game begins by mousing over an imaginary galaxy to find an area to establish a new space-base. While I dreamed of building my own Deep Space 9 or Babylon 5 at an optimal location, I found that I needed to spend 5 full minutes dragging my mouse around the galaxy map looking for an ideal location. Rather than allowing the player to set start parameters, the designers force you to hunt the 2D galaxy map for 4 varying starting conditions, consisiting of generally unclear parameters. Sure, levels of mining materials, a threat level, and a proximity to a warp gate seemed to make sense since I was a sci-fi fan, but through different playthoughs, they had only small differences. The final and fourth parameter, Magnetic Interference, remains unclear. This is because none of these parameters are ever explained, even during the tutorial.

Once the game begins, regardless of the parameters selected, the player has but a few minutes to build a basic base before the three astronuats supplied run out of air to breath. They must be assigned tasks, which, at first are dictated by necessity, and later by NPC prefence, which is shown via an assignment screen using varying degrees of happy and sad faces.

The problem with building a basic base is that your resources are so low, no matter what world parameters you set, that you need to be near absolute barebones. There is very little room for error. Of course, once basic resources, like air, food and the ability to create building material are met, a player can always expand, and sometimes with ease. But, this is where bugs, even in version 1.03 begin to appear.

I've had my start point pressed up against materials which have made it extremely difficult to start a base. I've had one of my 3 vital NPCs get caught on what little terrain there is at the start. NPCs get caught inside fully constructed rooms until you place a door, which usually isn't bad, unless you go pet your cat for 30 seconds and then look up to find everyone dead.

Or, in my last three games in a row, which inspired this review, have NPC's get stuck in terrain that was under construction, rendering the game a death sentence. Since there is only one save, this requires a new base, which in turn requires mousing over the 2D galaxy for 5 minutes to find starting parameters...

Once a player has a basic base up and running, the game begins to punish it much too soon. Incoming asteroids, disease, incoming asteroids, raiders, incoming asteroids, and NPC incompatibilty all appear just a 4 or 5 rooms into the base. Did I mention that incoming asteroids will hit your base and ALWAYS target vital systems?

Once a base is established, NPCs start getting sad, angry or upset. They all have demands. Nobody knows how to please those demands. I even doubt the developers know. I have never found a correlation between the limited items I can place and NPC happiness. I try to supply them with, say, Monitors. What do Monitors do? I have no idea. Are Monitors cosmetic? Do they increase Happiness? Do they decrease stress? No one knows.

In summation: The game works. It does some basic stuff. But, I get so frustrated everytime I bring myself to give the game a 8th or 9th chance than I'd rather watch watch seconds tick by. Furthermore, I'd like to say that my faith in Double Fine is rattled - a company that once did no wrong has now done wrong.

When I get a full refund from Double Fine for Spacebase DF-9, then I'll consider buying another DF game. I don't care how great the guys developing Massive Chalice are, they're from the same studio that scamed me out of 25 bucks.

25 dollars, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't much. But there's alot of things I could've done with that 25 dollars, first thing that comes to mind is buy a case of mediocre beer.

Now when I buy a case of Budwieser I expect certian things; I expect bland taste, I expect to get a mild buzz, sounds like a pretty ♥♥♥♥ty use of 25 dollars right? Here's the thing, I was never promised anything more.

Lets expand on the beer analogy: instead of Budweiser, DF is now the brewer. DF promises me a pretty nice brew: nothing amazing, but something well worth my money. Having heard DF has produced some quality brews in the past I buy a case from the affable salesman. I take the case home, eager to try a fresh new flavor from the brewer I've heard so many good things about; then I open the first bottle. ♥♥♥♥, this bottle contains nothing but ♥♥♥♥ and ♥♥♥♥ fumes; disgusted but still hoping to at least drink my initial disgust away I open another bottle..........more ♥♥♥♥. So the evening rolls on with me opening up bottle after bottle of DF's ♥♥♥♥ untill the whole case is gone in the midst of my now pungent apartment I realize: that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at DF scamed me.

I storm down to the storefront where I bought the not-brew only to find the signs down, the windows shuttered, and a note on the door: closed due to lack of customers.

That's the best way I can think to describe my one and only transaction with DF, they sold me a case of ♥♥♥♥ and said the reason the ♥♥♥♥ was ♥♥♥♥ is because not enough people bought their ♥♥♥♥. So I hope you fine folks at DF can understand why the next time someone asks me to spend my money on one of your products, I'll tell you to shove your product up your ♥♥♥.

While the game in its current state is relatively playable it is sadly unfinished.

The UI is rather clunky and unfinished. The AI even more so.

There doesn't seem to be any dynamic events other than meteor strikes and random raiders which given the basic nature of the AI means that a lot of your personnell will be left dead and dying on the floor. There was no effort put in to making the Random derelict encounters anything other than a randomly generated set of rooms to be a "starship" or chunk of space station and they pop into exisence randomly on the map sometimes popping in attached to your base.

All in all it is a stable game which is sparse and empty that will hopefully be completed by mod teams into something a little more robust.

However this only serves to prove that Double Fine missed the while point of what utelizing early access is for and clearly started this project with the hopes of funding it exclusively through EA rather than making sure they had the capital to put out a product.

For the price its going for you'll get a better deal by either waiting for Starbound, Planet Explorers, or Space Engineers to get out of alpha and into beta.

This game and its developer single handedly turned me off to early access gaming.

I'm so sorry - even now with 1.06, read some episodes:

- Tried the new tutorial, how to play; got to the explore derelict task - but the derelict never appeared :-) :-(
- Started a new game and despite in a sector with "low" threats, there were plenty of hostile ships chiming in from time to time.
- I was expanding my base; suddenly I got hails from friendlies. Two new ships/buildings appeared; one docked in the middle of a room building operation leaving it inaccessible; the other docked on a wall that had a ship engine. I could access the latter by cutting a wall and tearing down the engine to free the main entrance, but the former still inaccessible.
- There's a dead raider lying in the room to be the second reactor room. I can not build a power generator since the raider blocks it - seems bodies just don't disappear. I also have a floating dead astronaut in the middle of my bar; he was killed when the room didn't even exist.

I've spent hours in the game but only got frustration out of it - whatever progress I made, disappearing floor tiles, stupid AI, bugs, ... ruined it. Maybe I should finally uninstall it - I'd have had fun with it if it had been more mature.

Double Fine slapped a "1.0" sticker on this game and abandoned it. Whilst I appreciate that there are times that an Early Access game may not deliver all of the promised features, this game received a small fraction of those features proposed.

But this is a game review, not a review of Double Fine's business practices. So how is the game?

In short, the game is a mess of buggy AI with barely enough gameplay mechanics to sustain more than a couple of hours of play. The character morale system is horribly half-baked, and the game is little more than a series of repetitive busywork tasks.

That Double Fine now has it's greasy mitts out for Early Access funding for Massive Chalice barely a month after abandoning DF-9 is an insult to all of those people who put their faith in the company.

Never again.

This game is based on a really nice idea. It's just not completed yet.

Let's start out with management. Since the tiles you are working with is not directly underneath the stuff you're actually building, it's impossible to know if you're for example deleteing just this room, or also deleting the wall for the next room, which would mean all of the oxygen sucked out of your base.

Another thing is, that you can't move citizens around. This means, that you'll have to wait with (for example) destroying a room, because there are people in it. It can also be annoying, when you know theres a fire in a place, and you just have to wait until somebody discovers it. Even having the rooms alarm on won't help you. People only notices fires (and mostly also intruders), if they accidently walks into them.

A third thing is bugs. There are bugs everywhere in this game. One bug happens when you have an intruder. You then mark the intruder with an icon saying "kill this man". Even if all of your citizens are security guards, they can just be standing, looking at the intruder destroying all of your reactors, and they will first react, when he actually starts shooting at them.
OMG thats annoying.
Another bugged thing is the chamber between the base and space. Here you have two doors, that are never ment to be opened at the same time. Despite that, i've had a whole base killed twice, because the doors sudenly opens at the same time, and everybody is sucked out into space or suffercated. I've also tried people just standing in this room with the outer door opened, waiting until they die, and the door closes again.
AHHHHHHHHH

This is just some of the bugs i have tried. Tough i've restarted this game several times now, my best play has only been finishing my base, and starting to make research, when some stupid bug has happened.

If DoubleFine made this game 10 times more solid, i would definetely think it was a good game.
But unfortunately for everyone, this game is totally ruined by the crazy amount of bugs and poorly crafted tools in it.

Unplayable and inexcusable


I payed the $25 dollars for a game I cannot play. Graphical glitches and bugs make the game too difficult to make even the most basic bases.

I have verified and reinstalled the game multiple times, modified the boot config.cfg file (posteffects turned off in windowed mode), but still the issues remain. I have a computer within the required specs and do not have issues with any another games.

DF should provide a full refund because they did not deliver the game as promised. Failing them to do the right thing by their customers, Steam should at least provide store credit since they profited form the sale of game that was never finished in good faith.

A promising alpha abandoned by a normally stellar studio. As it is, it's buggy, unfinished and barely playable. A waste of money.

A game with great premise, unfortunately incomplete. Yet somehow deemed "feature complete" with no more development coming. One of the few early-acces failures.

I purchased this game, dispite reviews that suggested it had a lot of bugs and work ahead of it, with the assumption that the game would grow and upgrade as it slowly made its way out of greenlight. Well, that's not the case. Double Fine decides they can't keep working on the game and they leave it filled with bugs and glitches. This is the type of behavior that destroys developers and wrecks the credibility of steam greenlight. I'm so disappointed, this game HAD a lot of potential. I'd only buy completed games now from this developer.

This game is nearly unplayable. The AI for the citizens is useless after a certain they refuse to do any work so it stagnates and every one dies. Other then that the interface requires a lot of getting used to not to mention the tutorial is next to useless for learning the actual game.