NextColony Initial Impressions

The last thing I needed in my life was another game to keep track of. But I decided to give this a shot and found it wasn't too much of a time sink, especially after passing the first several upgrade levels. You can't really do very much, and not a lot happens so far, so the result is you slowly build your resources and just check on things a few times a day.

Gameplay

If you want to be efficient, then it's a pretty math heavy game. You need to run some calculations to make sure that you're not going to go over your max capacity in one resource while accumulating other resources. You also want to figure out how long it's going to take you to accumulate the amount of resources you need for whatever you want to upgrade. But once you've done all that, you can be done playing until it's time to upgrade the next thing, then you run your calculations again for the next upgrade.

In the beginning, the game was more active, as upgrading skills and buildings happened fairly quickly, as did accumulating the resources required. At this point it's taking me 8-10 hours to upgrade a building or skill (depending on the level), and at least that long to build enough resources for an upgrade. A lot of people seem to think this game is too slow, but honestly, it's just about the right speed and level of commitment for me.

UI Feedback

The game looks nice. The art is great and nicely themed. The site itself has a clean look and the aesthetic matches the theme of the game.

However, the navigation is a little clunky. It feels like it was built assuming you have multiple planets. When you just have one planet, you end up unnecessarily clicking back and forth a lot between skills and buildings. On the buildings page, it would be nice to be able to see what skill level I'm at. It was a good addition to be able to click the button to take me to the skills screen, but it would be much nicer if I didn't have to click back and forth. I'm envisioning a dashboard page that lists the building levels for each of your planets as well as the skill level in a grid type format, with applicable upgrade buttons easily accessible. Not everyone would want to consume the information this way, but it would be nice to have this option.

The top resource bar is great, but it's only there in the desktop version of the screen. In mobile, your current tally of resources gets hidden in a hamburger menu. I know this is standard mobile functionality for navigation, but your resource totals aren't navigation items, so they shouldn't be treated as such.

Other Feedback

Some of the language on the site isn't quite right in terms of US English. I know that English is not the first language of the development team. I also know that people from all over the world, using lots of different languages are playing this game. But that being said, I think they would benefit from having a native English speaker go over their copy. On the other hand, it could be argued that the sometimes cryptic nature of the instructions adds a bit to the theme. Space exploration is not a known quantity, so having imprecise instructions is probably something that would actually exist if this concept were in the real world. You could also make the point that since it's so far in the future, and we've had some recolonization, the English language may have changed. So maybe in this future "resources" is spelled like "ressources". But as an American playing this game in 2019, these are things that seemed not quite right.

I also think the game would benefit from some random events. Maybe there's a fire at your Coal mine, so production slows down for a while. Or maybe an asteroid composed primarily of copper passes close to your planet's atmosphere, and you are able to capture it, providing an unexpected boost in the copper supply. These types of chance elements would take it beyond a simple math calculations game.

I'm not sure how the game changes once you start exploring, because I'm still a long ways off from being able to do that. I'm hoping that exploration adds a little bit of excitement to the game, but from reading other posts on the subject it doesn't seem to be the case. I'm also a bit nervous about the battling module being introduced. I have no interest in marauding. I don't want to steal other people's resources or ships and I definitely don't want people doing that to me. Given how long as it takes to do anything in this game having your resources suddenly ripped out from under you would be disheartening. I just want to explore the galaxy, maybe strike up some trade agreements, and manage colonies on several planets that I have discovered. I'm hoping the game allows for that possibility as things progress, and that whales don't just take everything from the smaller players.

In Closing

Overall I think this game is a good start. I am a little disappointed at how far ahead other people seem to be by pumping money into the game. I get that the game needs to be profitable in order to continue putting out high-quality releases, but I was hoping for a bit more of a level playing field to start. However, depending on some of the decisions made by the development team, there is a lot of potential here to have a fun and immersive universe in which to explore.