Sure, there's a 'deep and varied' tech tree for researching
Sure, there's a 'wide variety' of buildings to construct, manage and upgrade.
Sure, there's dozens of starships from canon and unique to this game to build.
Sure, you can recruit tons of characters from the 'verse to crew your ships.
However all these sub-systems don't actually present you any choice; you must upgrade in a specific order, often waiting until thing X over there has been updated a few times before you can even start on Thing Y, which you need to even dream about doing Z. The game helpfully has built-in links so that if you're missing a pre-requisite a handy tap will take you to the node/module/building that hasn't been paid enough attention to yet (which more often than not has two or three more things that have to happen first). But I submit that if you have to build in helpful links to navigate an intentionally byzantine progress tree, you're fixing the wrong problem.
Really, the upgrade game could be reduced to 'tap this one button to upgrade the next necessary thing', and skip all the fliting around looking for the one obscure prerequisite you've neglected and now suddenly need to pay attention to. The game knows what you need to do and the order you need to do it, and the AI 'character' who's ostensibly there to help you knows what to do next. Making the player stumble thru the miss-presented 'options' until they do the right thing is insulting to the player's intelligence.
Your characters can only advance once you've unlocked enough character-specific 'shards'.
The more rare and 'valuable' the character, the more shards you need to promote them every level.
And shards are only available via random loot-boxes; character rarity plays into how often you get a given character's 'shards.'
The first couple hours of interaction is a railroad of forced actions, which I suppose is to teach you the basics of resource management and performing building and upgrades. In practice it's as bad and boring an experience as the opening to Skyrim in terms of not really letting you do anything but look around and experience a forced narrative.
As for the ships in the game: you're presented with a long list of pretty ships, but here as well there's no choice involved. You will start with the lowlylesst bucket, acquire all the intermediate and incrementally better crafts, on your way to the end-game stuff which people are really here to play. The JJ Verse Enterprise, for example, is one of the three LAST ships to unlock in the game at this time.
Talk about putting the carrot on the end of a mile-long pole...
Flying your ships around is a pretty easy to use interface. You can have a number of ships out doing things at the same time. The problem is: objectives are intentionally spaced out so you spend minutes waiting for your ships to get where they need to go, only to tap thru a couple dialogs, maybe make a choice, then find and tap on the next destination. Otherwise ship missions are: go kill "X guys of level Y or higher," which is as old and tired as it was in the days of Everquest.
Two days into playing it, and I finally broke down and gave it $4.99 real money to give me the premium currency (gold-pressed latinum, of course) which you use to skip the in-game resource and real-time costs of playing the game. I figure they deserve some money for the effort they put into it, but I don't know how much longer I'm going to actually play the damn thing.
In summary:
- While thematically and graphically gorgeous, this game embodies all the terrible Skinner-box techniques and time-wasting design choices that game design has adopted into their paradigms like parasitical organisms; making themselves mandatory to engage with in order to play.
- There's no choice here; no freedom of expression. At time of writing, I've unlocked PVP (wheee. not.) and I expect every other player, aside from the luck of the lootbox, has pretty much exactly the same ships, loadouts and even characters.
- Really, the only things one could consider fun about this game is enjoying A) the luck of your lootbox rolls, and B) pride in sticking out the forced timers and actually building up to any level of accomplishment in the game.
Postscript:
Though I am a bit tickled about having unlocked this cutie:
