Base One confronts players with the trials and dangers of sustaining a space station located in deep space. From attacking Pirates to maintaining the basics such as food, oxygen, and power, every aspect of a living and breathing starbase can be imagined in this space survival simulator. From developers, Pixfroze, and publishers Blowfish Studios and Gamera Game, comes an interesting take on the space frontier and Space station management simulation.

Your journey begins in the campaign mode after a devastating event leaves you and your fellow colonists struggling to rebuild your starbase, and the majority of your fleet has been destroyed after venturing into a mysterious wormhole leading to another galaxy. You are tasked to build and maintain a starbase from scratch and establish a beachhead for future colonists to relocate to this new galaxy.

Starting your journey towards a fully functioning base, it is highly recommended that you start with the tutorial and progress along with the campaigns for newcomers, as it will slowly introduce the many challenges that may occur during your time developing your starbase. Jumping straight into a custom game becomes overwhelming due to the considerable amount of micromanagement that is required, from keeping track of resources, research, and even simply tracking how power and oxygen are allocated to each module. If you forget to keep track of even one aspect, it may force players to restart the level, or even go back to previous levels of the campaign to freshen up on how to succeed in this intriguing simulation.

Communications and base defences play heavily in another aspect of the base’s survival. Fending off pirates and incoming asteroids needs to be considered, but slapping a gun turret onboard is not as simple as it sounds. Every module attached requires another connection of logistics, ammo, and even ammo production. All of this may seem overwhelming, but for determined players, this creates longevity in gameplay and requires keen foresight. For those expecting a jump-in and jump-out gameplay style, you may want to look elsewhere, as a quick 20-minute game can spiral into 2 hours. Though I can’t say this is always a bad thing.

The game’s fondness for detail is impressive. Zooming in to each module and seeing all your little astronauts crafting away, or jumping into their spacesuits to build a new module is an impressive sight to see. Even the game’s skybox around the space station is impressive. Watching the gas clouds and space ships flying past will potentially cost you some time.

The game does have its share of small bugs that I came across that can be fixed with a little patch, but one big thing that made me frustrated was the drifting of the screen. When using the arrow keys to navigate the map, it would not stop drifting from the last direction I was moving. When trying to build or focus on a single point the screen just wouldn’t stop moving. I would occasionally have this happen during gameplay, particularly during the tutorial. I also encountered issues while trying to build or deconstruct a module. The progress of that job would just remain stuck, and resulted in me having to restart the whole mission or reloading a save game to avoid it. As I said I hope they fix these in a patch, but besides that, the gameplay of the game is perfect for lovers of space-based simulation games.

I was also given access to the game’s first DLC that brings players to a whole new section of space, and it’s definitely for more advanced players that have an already understanding of the mechanics of the game. You are greeted with new characters and new objectives to accomplish. Besides that, it feels like a solid continuation of the main campaign and should only be played after you have a grasp of the full game and its mechanics.

Base One is a superb and visually stunning game, but the game mechanics seem a little cluttered and complicated at times. I know that if we consider all of the possible situations a space station may encounter it really would be extremely complicated, but micromanaging every aspect is something that may be way too complicated for many players, and let’s face it, a real space station would have more then one person performing the tasks.

Even the custom mode doesn’t let you have a little freedom without having to micromanage the basics that are learned in the campaign, and that takes some of the fun out of the gameplay. It would be great to see a free build mode that lets you just build away without constrictions. Base One has a lot of potential but it gets in the way of itself at times.

Written by: Simon Hayward