Although I keep changing my mind about how much I personally like the Dyson Sphere Program, there is one thing I can say without hesitation: this is an impressive job. Despite being new to early access, it already has an extremely broad set of features and the kind of extremely ambitious premise that you would dismiss as an impossible dream if it had not yet been implemented.
That premise? To create an interstellar industrial empire, on a scale where you can capture whole stars and put them to work, like those poor dinosaurs that Flintstones would imprison in their appliances. But large galactic oaks grow from small acorns, and this absurd work begins with a single mech, walking on a spherical 3D planet.
My first impression was this: here is the great guy from Total Annihilation, and he broke into a Spore game, to intimidate some stupid worms (I think Planetary Annihilation would have been the most appropriate comparison at that time, but I never played much, so Total Annihilation vs Spore was).
True to the TA form, I made my mech geezer step on it, disintegrating rocks and trees with my hands and building mines and other things with the accumulated matter. Then, the game started taking me to the conveyor belts, and to the production of arbitrary hubs that worked as research points, and it hit me right away: it was a Factorio-’em-up.
Well, that is simplistic on my part. It is already a little out of date to say that a factory game should automatically be like Factorio. But only because Factorio was successful enough to generate a whole subgenre of factory games that mimic it to a greater or lesser extent. DSP borrows widely from several – most notably Daddy F himself, but also the runner-up of the Satisfactory genre, and the most divergent Astroneer.
There are more esoteric influences that are still clear – the semi-automatic trade routes of the Anno Series, for example, and of course Total / Planetary Annihilation, with the big old robot. Hell, Spore is not even a silly comparison, given the way his progression in the game sees his industrial operation increase smoothly by orders of magnitude in scale, from planetary to interplanetary to interstellar.
My point is, if you understand the essence of Factorio, you already understand the essence of DSP. And if you like the idea that all the other games mentioned have a chance to play together and have babies, chances are it will appeal to you. It is by no means a collection derived from looted mechanics, see – and even if it were, there is enough originality going on with the sheer audacity of the DSP’s scope to deserve it for a certain amount of yoinking.
But no: to be fair to the Youthcat Studio developers (I really love that name), their game makes some innovations of its own in addition to the things it borrows and combines the strengths of many of its inspirations. Stacking, multi-layer conveyor systems, for example, are intuitive to use and far less nightmarish than Factorio’s 2D spaghetti hell. Or, at least, they are a different kind of nightmare, a little more fun.
It is equally fair to say that Youthcat has also made some innovations. The inability to rewire keys, for example, is a little strange, as is the frustrating one-sided system imposed on a building’s rotating footprints. To be honest, the entire UI was full of minor irritations for me and I would be happy to see it revised. But hey – these are exactly the kind of problems I usually expect with an early access release, so it’s hard to deal with.
Looking ahead to more fundamental issues, I think I felt that the DSP technology tree looked a little dry, overall. Clearly, I felt strongly motivated to get to the interstellar and mega-scale late game, but that was not an immediate motivation. Especially for a new player, the DSP keeps you stuck on the planet for an almost frustrating time. And while you wait to emerge from the chrysalis of your initial gravity well and take flight like a majestic space butterfly, things can start to get a little mechanized. The tech tree starts to look like a series of boxes to be checked and – perhaps because I’m a little exhausted at Factorio recently – the creation of manufacturing lines for research cube things took on the air of a task before I wanted it.
But it’s probably worth emphasizing again: I’m a little exhausted at Factorio now. Since this game gets so many hints in terms of pace and core systems, it’s no wonder if my judgment of it was affected by a little overflow. If you’re hungry for factory fun at the moment, and you want it on a level that allows you to play with your own stars as fuel, I would have a hard time thinking of a reason why you shouldn’t try this game.