izigame.me

It's a thumbs up this time, because I was having consistent fun, but there are caveats.
This game's biggest strength is that it doesn't play like most other "city builders", because different things are important here. Sure, you get to build a bunch of stuff that costs a bunch of resources that you need to collect using a bunch of other stuff. But in order to do it well you need to commit to... time management. The absolute most important parameter of anything you do is "how long is it going to take to get there". Science ships travel around, obviously, but so do mining and cargo ships, and even the little delivery robots inside your station. It all takes time and it can throw your resource balance out the window, because deliveries generally take more time than actual production. So then in turn, for example, station layout matters, because it can make deliveries much faster.
They leaned heaviliy in that particular direction. Station layout is essentially inventory tetris. You place buildings on a fine-grained grid, but unlike most other city builders, the buildings here don't play nice. They come in lots of various sizes, and it's common for you to be just one tile short of being able to build something. You can (and will) rearrange your station, because tearing down a building refunds all of its resources, but it still takes time to deliver these resources to the stockpile and then to the new construction site. And then there are things like specializations, i.e. a sector of your station gets bonuses for having a lot of the same thing inside it, and that encourages you to further optimize the layout.
This actualy is a nice and refreshing challenge that doesn't feel unfair, except for a few things that do, but I'll get to that in a minute.
On top of the station building layer there's the solar system view, and it's like a simple yet interesting RTS, for the same reasons. You can move your station (or should I say - mothership) around, if you really need to, hence some actual strategy to picking the right spot so that the delivery routes are as short as possible. There's this neat progression in the game where in the beginning you have nothing and squeeze every last bit of efficiency from your station, but then gradually the station begins to work better and better, and you start to run surpluses. Your attention shifts to the space view, because you now have a dozen ships and you have to keep an eye on them, lest they decide to deliver from too far away.
And then on top of that there's the story, which is deliberately delivered by means of glimpses and vignettes that you need to piece together on your own. There's some solid backstory in there. Someone took worldbuilding seriously and had a whole chain of events figured out. Then they decided they're never going to tell you anything that a corporate space station manager wouldn't be told, and leave you to collect the evidence on your own. Like, one of the first things the NPCs say to you in this game are fancy phrases like "self-similar space" and "genetic conatus", and you may ask what the hell does that mean, and you'll be stuck with this question until the end (I won't tell, because spoilers). It's very "love it or hate it", because it demands effort where most other city builders don't, but I happen to love it.
And now for the caveats. There are a ton of situations where the game silently expects you to know, understand or do something, but never gives you as much as a hint. For instance, if you have more workload than workers, they go into overtime, and overtime causes (lots of) accidents. You don't want an accident, they're extremely punishing. Every single accident in my playthrough happened because a station's sector went into overtime and I didn't know. I didn't know, because the game doesn't push the information about your workload vs. workforce balance. The information is there, but you have to piece it together, and it just slipped my mind all the time. Then there's an accident, and the best thing I can do is reaload an autosave.
It's the same thing with the learning curve. I had to restart the campaign, because my first station was struggling to keep up with growing requirements. That's because the game didn't tell me about specializations. If you don't specialize, it gets that much harder, and I simply didn't know what specializations did until I accidentally got my first one and said "whoa" because the bonus was so large.
Same with the story. The story events are technically mutliple choice, but the choice consequences are entirely arbitrary. On top of that, they kind of never give you a full picture. If you pick the option that gives you best resources (as you would in a resource management game), you often miss important story bits. Conversely, learning the really interesting bits often involves getting your crew killed, which is strongly penalized (you can even get a permanent morale penalty for that). If you're wondering why this game's rating isn't higher, I'd bet it's mainly because of this. Either you get lucky and accidentally pick the right strategy in the beginning, or you keep stumbling from one thing you don't understand to another.
Same with mundane tasks like travel routes. You can't set a waypoint, and a ship can only take the straight route, which may go through a danger area that will get this very ship destroyed. It's not even a gameplay issue, just bad UI. Lots of that kind of thing in here.
Long story short, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there, but it's not very accessible. At times it felt tense and wonderous, at other times tedious and frustrating. I had fun, but your mileage may vary.