I tried to like this game, I really did. I played it for maybe twice as long as I really wanted to trying to see if I was missing something, but its bad. Everything system in the game clearly had effort put into it but only gets about 70% of the way there. Ground combat for example is supposed to be tactical but at the beginning at least its most just shoot melee mobs that rush you as fast as you can. How well you do in combat also doesn't matter because you will heal up in a matter of seconds so a near wipe or stunning victory have exactly the same lack of consequences. The ship movement is a bizarre pseudo 3D mostly but not entirely forced to 2D approach and I'm not even going to get into how bad the ship combat is. It feels like 30% of the UI is missing for example trying to work out where ships are or what happened to that non main story mission you accepted and never appeared in your log. My favourite moment was watching the engine struggle to add an NPC to your party. It was pretty obvious it was doing something to an NPC and then adding in an entirely separate PC object and straining itself doing so, but then I happened to reload the game on the same spot and saw the npc version dead and visible on the floor. I know its just one bug but it really gave the impression that the dev wasn't capable of solving certain problems in the correct way and the whole experience is compromise and workaround for what he could manage and believe me you feel that through every part of the game.

I wanted this game to be good, I really hoped it would be something that captured the spirit of the old MegaTraveller games and I think it does aim for that but it just can't sustain a fun experience to actually play.

There are numerous other issues I could go on about but the overall impression is a game that looks like it is going to be good if you can just stick with it long enough to learn its systems but ultimately it never will be because every system is just not good enough to be fun.

I do feel a bit bad about "bashing" a solo dev who put so much work in over so long but I'd also feel bad not warning people like me that no matter how much jank you think you can put up with this still is not going to be a good purchase.

Hmmm.

I completed the Dauntless tutorial and got to space, just started my first free choice mission.

I am not feeling very inspired, alas. The game is very clunky and feels extremely generic and unspired - extremely procedural if you know what I mean.

Enemies in locations are a mix of random baddies who for no readily apparent reason all work together to kill me - why is a giant spider teamed up with a weird reptile ant eater thing to kill me? It is disjointed and makes little sense,

Has a lot of systems but they don't feel like they do much. QoL/Polish is not great, little issues add up to make it not fun.

Tactical engine is extremely limited, no cover or cleverness to it. No flanking. Just wait for ini, shoot/hit, wait for ini, repeat. Maybe spam some abilities. You can choose which body part to shoot at, so that nice, but it is also a little fiddly to do it, so that isn't.

Story seems very lacking but I am not far in, it may get better,

I mean it isn't awful - if you want a proc gen space tactics game I guess it may scratch an itch. It isn't really a CRPG so don't get it for that.

I may return to this and give it a bit more time to grow on me, but for now I don't recommend it.... A pity, I was looking for a kind of mercenary game where you can travel around and visit planets and have space adventures and while technically this is that it just doesn't seem to do it very well.

Not a bad game for what it is, but has some inherent problems that can affect enjoyment. I'm willing to cut the dev some slack since they are a solo dev and they never stopped working on this, but I'm afraid I'm done playing this for now. I would like to continue the main story sometime.

+ I've played a lot of CRPGs and I swear the to-hit chance is rigged or not accurate to the numbers. I can't tell you how many times in Fallout and such I would miss 95% chance to hit twice in a row. Meanwhile landing a 10% chance to hit seems impossible and I fail 20 times in a row (not hyperbole). 50% chance might as well be about 33%. However this is the first game where the to-hit chance seems accurate. You will rarely miss and it feels good. I think part of it is that for certain (if not all) weapons if you make a low roll then rather than missing you deal less damage. The big guns beam weapon for instance never appears to miss, but it seems like you do less damage the lower your to-hit chance. Special attacks don't ever seem to miss.
+ I like the concept of ground based CRPG gameplay while being able to fly around in your ship and fight other ships.
+ Tons of loot, though it can get tedious dealing with it all.
+ Gameplay options that let you customize your experience such as making the game easy or harder for both ground and space battles, earn more or less experience, buy and sell items for more or less, and some others.
+ Your skills level up based on use, which I'm always a fan of.
+ Grenades, mainly stun, are OP. Use them. Any character has perfect aim with them at any skill level and the range you can throw is huge.

- My biggest problem that hampers my enjoyment are the real long load times, even on an SSD and hardware way above requirements. The preload when you boot up the game is fine, but even with that transitioning between areas still takes 10-30 seconds. And there's a lot of transitions. Finish a mission on a planet then teleport to ship > teleport to FTL space > teleport closer to next system > enter system > fly then land on next planet. Where each > is a transition taking 10-30 seconds each. So much time spent just getting around. If the game was fast with 2 second loads tops it would be a massive improvement.
- The above is compounded by the fact the gameplay itself is slow. I get there aren't many fast paced CRPGs, it's an inherently slow system, but it's also the tedium of item management from the tons of loot you get (and you need loot to buy ships). I suppose though you could ignore all loot except the valuable epic and legendary. However you still need to salvage stuff for parts to repair your gear and to earn schematics to craft. I also suppose you can turn off gear wear and just not worry about crafting, though I think the best gear is only craftable.
- The third major problem is that because everything is procedurally generated it becomes extremely repetitive very fast. You will be fighting the same enemies in the same rooms you've seen a bunch of times already. Only the main mission is unique. So I would actually recommend ignoring the randomly generated quests and just focus on the main story as much as you can so you don't get burnt out fast like I did.
- There's still a bunch of bugs but I'm sure the dev will fix most of them in future patches.
- How this game implements line of sight is stupid. You can only see enemies if one of your characters is facing them. This means enemies can literally disappear from your view, including in the middle of combat. I get them running around a corner and then you can't see them, but they can still disappear out in the open if no one happens to be facing that way. Very annoying, unintuitive, and not challenging.
- A lot of stuff isn't explained to the player and you just have to figure it out. Like different weapons give you different movement speeds. For example you move slow with big guns, so just switch to your secondary before you move. Why program this? Adds more tedium and no challenge, to waste time switching to your secondary just to move so you can then switch back to your main weapon.
- Ship combat was confusing for me but I only tried it a few times and very quickly died. Don't try ship combat until you've beefed up your ship or you'll just lose.
- There just doesn't seem to be much variance in what you do in the game, building off the repetitive aspect.
- Mining is extremely slow. This isn't an MMO, you don't have to make it take forever to mine stuff in your ship.
- UI takes some getting used to, and some of the text is real tiny (so I imagine unplayable on Steamdeck even if it worked). The reputation window is currently unreadable even at 1080p on a monitor, hopefully he fixes it.

I'm still giving a thumbs up because while this isn't my cup of tea in the long run due to the first 3 negative points I make, but if those don't bother you then this is still a fine game. However I'd recommend a sale.

Tip: turn your experience gain to max (you will still level very slow), and reduce the cost of ships and increase the cost of items you sell. This will help a bit with the grind to get better ships, and isn't cheating because it still takes forever.