Astronomics

Developer: Numizmatic

Release Date: Coming Soon (Early Access)

Top-down action and space exploration meet asteroid mining automation! Command a faithful crew of bots and get to work in the asteroid belt. Impress your employer, upgrade your equipment, fight off pirates and save up for that ticket to Earth so you can finally come home… for the very first time.

Astronomics isn’t your typical automation game. Where often you would expect to build from a fixed base outwards, mining ores, constructing and optimising your structures, in Astronomics, we bring the factory to the asteroids.

This game is all about collection. The more resources that we collect, the more one time use machines we can build to speed up collection. The more that we then collect, the more we can bring back and sell. The more that we sell, the more we can upgrade our machines to speed up collection, and so on.

The overall goal is to buy a ticket to earth, which is gradually done by taking a percentage of our earning. These are earned through expeditions. As the player, we get to take a look at asteroids that are close to our base spaceship (space base? base ship?) and make our choice which ones to deplete based on how much time they will remain within the radius of our reach.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but I particularly wanted to highlight it as it has a satisfying loop. My favourite part of automation games tends to be the beginning, with the task of getting established. Once things progress, they can sometimes become too complex or too stagnant for me, both of which inevitably cause me to lose interest. Since in Astronomics you are always visiting new areas, you get to do the beginning part over and over, with the progression from manual labour, to commanding an entire workforce of robots.

In Astroneer I enjoyed driving around collecting scrap. In Sea of Thieves I enjoy sailing around collecting treasure. This is a game about collecting, but this time with tools, and I will be keeping an eye on the development through Early Access and beyond.

Demo Length – 50 mins
At a glance
+ Expedition based gameplay.
+ Growing your team feels satisfying.
+ Going to new spaces and making priorities on the fly.
+/- A slow start (for me this made upgrades feel very valuable but won’t be for everyone).
+/- I didn’t have many interactions with Pirates so I can’t say how balanced is feels.