Colony Ship: A Post-Earth Role Playing Game

« Colony Ship is a true spiritual successor to The Age of Decadence. »

« Colony Ship has flaws and is definitely not what I would call the most accessible RPG ever made. Still, suppose you have experience with the genre and like good tactical turn-based combats and plenty of exciting choices in a fascinating setting. In that case, this is definitely a game worth considering. »

« A Deep, Gritty RPG That Scratches the Explorer’s Itch Colony Ship surprised me in the best way. Few modern RPGs manage to evoke that old Fallout feeling of stepping into a world packed with things to discover, but this one absolutely does. Every area hides something worth investigating — a story fragment, a hidden path, a faction angle, a skill check that opens a new route. Exploration is genuinely rewarding, and the game kept scratching that explorer’s itch from start to **** writing is sharp, the dialogue reactive, and the overall story shows a level of creativity and world‑building that’s rare today. You can feel the care that went into every encounter and every choice.Combat is another highlight. The turn‑based system is deep, tactical, and absolutely capable of standing next to contemporary titles. Gadgets, positioning, and build choices all matter. Some players say it’s easy to get stuck, but I finished the game on my first run using one of the premade characters with only minor tweaks — on normal difficulty, the way it’s meant to be ****’s not perfect. NPC portraits repeat too often, which breaks immersion a bit, and a few areas feel rushed or less fleshed out compared to the rest. The three major factions also lean a bit too far into caricature **** despite these flaws, Colony Ship delivers a dense, atmospheric, choice‑driven RPG experience that’s increasingly rare. If you enjoy exploration, strong writing, and tactical combat, this one is absolutely worth your time. »

« I am nowhere near as thrilled as most other reviewers. Don’t get me wrong, I somewhat enjoyed the game, and exploring the environments was more engaging than in most RPGs I've played recently. But that’s where the positives end. If I once said that Outer Space was the worst game I ever finished, then Colony Ship is officially the worst CRPG I have ever dragged myself through to the end.Vince from Iron Tower Studio has repeatedly complained about his games not selling well enough, often mocking "casual" players for finding them too difficult. Well, there’s a difference between making a hard game and ruining a game so much that the overall UX feels like working in SAP.Managing the inventory is pure hell. For example: you have the inventory open on the "All Items" tab. You switch to a filter with only a few items, and you’re suddenly staring at a blank screen because the game doesn't auto-scroll to the top. You have to manually scroll up like an idiot just to see the items in that category. Want to buy twenty medkits? Get ready to click twenty times, because you can only add them one by one. During trading, you don't even see the total transaction value clearly because the money is instantly added/subtracted from your stash. I honestly can’t remember playing an RPG with such a poorly handled inventory in the last thirty years.Then there’s the camera—forget about rotating it. That wouldn't be a dealbreaker if the levels weren't designed so poorly that you literally can’t see parts of the room behind walls. The lack of rotation is also incredibly annoying in combat, where it's sometimes a struggle to click the exact tile or character you need because something is blocking the view and you’re forced to hunt for a specific cluster of pixels.Want to remap the few control keys to your mouse (like loot highlighting or quicksave)? Forget it, the game doesn't support it. Have an ultrawide monitor and think a three-year-old game might support it? Ha, ha, ha. Everything just stretches nonsensically, and the camera occasionally gets stuck in a permanent zoom. Party navigation? A constant nightmare of getting **** on obstacles, including furniture, your own companions, or static corpses. Some parts of the map are simply inaccessible for no visible **** for the difficulty: the game offers two modes—Hero and Underdog. Hero is supposed to be significantly easier in combat. You can choose from three pre-set builds or create your own. Since I gave up on this studio's previous game due to its difficulty (yes, I’m that "mocked casual"), I still wanted a challenge, so I chose Underdog with a pre-set "Talker" build. This combo was relatively playable, and honestly, this build is the only one that makes sense because social skills like Persuasion or Streetwise only work on your main character—you can't use your companions for **** problem is that you have to hyper-specialize. Most skills level up by using them. But then you encounter a door that can be opened via Lockpicking OR a terminal via Computer skill. By choosing one, you level it up while the other stagnates. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't get Lockpicking past level 8, while Computers hit level 10. As a result, certain areas remained locked for me until the end of the game. For the same reason, I got to one "ultimate" implant after twenty hours instead of two, simply because my build didn't have the required skill level for a specific dialogue at that exact moment. Even if I leveled the skill up a minute later, the dialogue could not be ****, the UX was atrocious, and the difficulty, while manageable, was tuned in a way that **** the joy out of the experience. Surely the story makes up for it? Well, not really. The premise is original, and the game supposedly has over 10 different endings, but... the dialogues are barely branched, they are short, and frankly uninteresting. I found the side quest writing so dull that I eventually just started "pro-clicking" through them. I tried three different endings—there wasn't much difference between them, and none felt ****, a message for Vince: Your games sell poorly not because they are "too hard," but because they are technically abysmal. The difficulty actively hinders the gameplay, and while the story idea is original, the writing is so dry that it just isn't fun to play. »

« Age of Decadence was good, but this creation of the Iron Tower Studios is simply magnificent! »

« The immersion in this game is zero. I can't even describe exactly what the problem is because generally the game ticks off a lot of my checkboxes, but the implementation doesn't make it any fun to play. Locations are unnecessarily fragmented and often cause a black loading screen when passing through a door, even though no new area is entered. The connections between locations are confusing. There are too few clear landmarks to identify the area you are in, everything looks kind of the same. The world feels static, the story is told exclusively in dialog. Exploration is rarely rewarded, as there is little to explore beyond the intended story paths. The combat system is fiddly and doesn't feel well-rounded. I had to quit playing after 3 hours because it felt so awkward. Quite a disappointment. »

« I played around 10 hours so far and I find this game extremely immersive, with a great dialogue system where my character intelligence and skills play a great part. The graphics are endearing and the game is quite hard and tactical. »

« Great story, terrible combat system. Has some great writing but all that means nothing when combat system is atrocious. »

« Sorely disappointed with this game. In a way I feel like poor sales and uneven reception of The Age Of Decadence (TAOD onwards) prompted Iron Tower to release a simpler, more accessible game. In doing so, they not only betrayed almost everything that was good about their previous game, but also failed to achieve their new creative goals. THE PLOT Unlike TAOD's plot, it's very simple and boring. It rehashes various social, political, economic and theological ideas and tropes that you've seen a hundred times before, and does so in the simplest, most non-nuanced way possible. Throughout the game I was expecting some kind of interesting twist, for example, that everything you've been told about the ship's past is actually not true, or at least has been greatly distorted over the years. Or that the ship has actually already reached its destination, except that nobody knows it because of everyone's ignorance and the malfunctioning of the ship's systems (like in the film Pandorum). But no, what you see is what you get. Yes, it really is that simple, plain and boring. THE WORLD The worldbuilding feels very artificial and improbable. The area you start in, The Pit, is actually pretty good. There's a lot of points of interest, a lot of NPCs you can interact with, a lot of different quests, both combat-oriented and dialogue-oriented. Hydroponics is a lot less packed content-wise, but it still feels organic and fits into the overall picture of this fantastic world. However, things start to fall apart very quickly once you reach The Habitat, which is supposed to be something of a capital of this ship. Before you get there, you keep hearing about how it's the best place to live on the ship, a place where there's no rats or famine and no wild west criminal activities, where everything is not run down and the machines still work like they're supposed to. So you get there and... It's just empty. Like, literally. Huge town squares, wide avenues and parks filled with little more than vacuum. There's hardly anyone to talk to, much less anyone with anything interesting to say or a quest to give you. The quest density in general is just pathetic compared to The Pit. This giant, sprawling urban area, itself divided into several separate sub-areas, has barely a handful of quests, most of which are just boring fetch quests. After you leave The Habitat, the game goes back to smaller areas and hubs where it definitely feels more at home, but even after that it's still very uneven and lacklustre for the most part. The heart of the ship, where its engines are located, is hyped as this mysterious industrial location governed by mutant cyborgs. You go there, and there's like three interactible NPCs, two rooms, and one quest, after which you never have to go there ever again. THE VISUALS Just like TAOD, the game looks painfully behind the times. If this game had been released in 2010-2011, I guess the graphics would have been considered okay, but in 2023? Yeah, it looks very basic. I personally couldn't care less about the graphics fidelity, but the design is equally lacking. Hydroponics is arguably the most visually interesting area of the game, thanks to the wild jungle and all sorts of organic growths. Everything else looks like generic sci-fi environment presets grabbed from some free website with no texture or personal touch added on top. Everything looks bland and you will never stop even for a moment to admire the scenery. THE GAMEPLAY The gameplay consists of two parts - combat and interacting with the environment/NPCs through dialogue options. The latter is laughably easy if you invest at least some points into charisma and dialogue-adjacent attributes/perks. Once again comparing it to TAOD, where I literally invested zero points into combat skills and put all of them into diplomatic stats, and I still couldn't win all the arguments and half the time had to find alternative routes of completing the quests. The former has a little more substance to it, but not by much. The combat is fairly easy most of the time if you keep updating your armor and arms and stack up on stimulants. It becomes a chore after a while. There's nothing in terms of interesting tactical layouts where you'd have to find your enemies' weak spots or use environmental effects or anything like that. 100% of the time it all comes down to war of attrition. Thanks to healthpacks being dirt cheap, once you've killed everyone on the battlefield, you can go about your business right away. There are no post-combat penalties, no long-term effects, nothing. SUMMARY I was expecting The Age Of Decadence in space, but what I got instead was Shadowrun Returns in space, with boring quests, sluggish combat, few to no interesting NPCs to talk to, an ambitious but ultimately shallow plot, large amounts of lore that don't amount to anything, and poor graphics and design. »

« Followed its development on Steam since early release version - and it met good expectations. Made me read Orphans of the Sky - game loosely based on it, well, Heinlein`s book was finished and 3 nights and never felt sorry for reading it; as for the game - on underdog setting its harsh and unforgiving in combat, feeling the dice roles as in D&D games, yet enjoyable. Liked the writing - i liked it well enough in The Age of Decadence, but here its much more polished and pleasure to read the text. they still adding content - which is good, may be it felt rushed towards the ending - but generally developers kept good communication with community all the way thru, fixing bugs and polishing the game; nothing is perfect and possible to find faults in case of nitpicking, but for small company - they did well and deserved high marks. »