The game is not bad, but needs another year in the oven. As of now, it's too clunky and repetitive. The novelty of zipping about space and salvaging stuff quickly wears off once you realize it's always the same stuff. Also, I understand the appeal of having a retro-style isometric aesthetic, and it looks nice, but it also makes the process of placing things quite a pain, more often than I'd like to admit. The game should have been in 3D, or at very least should have the option to change camera angle. I'll check up on it in a year, but for now, uninstalling.

The game is visually beautiful, but:
• It is a stressful game of scarcity and hopelessness (even in the easy difficulty).
• It feels like working, during wartime, not playing.
• Repetitive events too often (did Exodus fleet run out of hyperium again!! Come on!)
• In many places where you should be inmersed in the imaginary world, you're taken away from it when the text refers to the software as "the game", to you as "the player", and so on.
• Not for me. I want hope, not Earth's suffering raised to the nth power, in space.

I'm sure many of you have come across reviews in which the reviewer bemoans the lack of a neutral review option. For me, Space Haven is such a case. While my experience with the game has been a net positive, it's because I'm a sucker for its core gameplay loop, and I can't, in good conscience, give it a positive recommendation in its current state (one that I doubt will change).

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First, the positive.

This game has a highly satisfying core gameplay loop: explore the sector map for asteroids and derelicts to collect resources from > upgrade and modify your ship > trade with other factions to resolve production bottlenecks > upgrade and modify your ship > repeat. The resource management and production systems are both simple enough that you can handle them fairly intuitively without the need to pull out a spreadsheet, while being expansive enough that, within the constraints of a spaceship's limited space and resource budget, there's always something to work on. I also really like that there are many ways to get materials, whether it's buying them, refining them from ore, or getting them as composting or scrapping end-products, so even if you don't get the opportunity or funds to bulk-buy what you need, you can still scrape together enough to make do. Thumbs up.

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Now the negative.

The AI in this game is abysmal. It is, by far, the worst AI I've seen in any ship building/base building game. RimWorld came out nearly 8 years ago and showed us what at least a competent base building pawn AI looks like. A game coming out in 2026 with an AI this bad is just bewildering.

What do I mean when I say "Bad AI"? It's simple, really: The AI in this game treats every single task as a discrete event. There is no task chaining; none.

Some examples:

Say you placed down a blueprint for a section of bulkhead wall. You'd think, logically, that when a crew member goes into construction mode and gets the wall in their task queue, they'll come and build the entire wall, working solo or as a team. That's not what happens. See, they don't "take ownership" of the construction tasks in an area ("I'll build everything that needs building near this spot") or even the construction tasks pertaining to a specific task group ("I'll build this wall/I'll build all the beds in this room"). No. They only take ownership of one... single... object. Regularly, a crew member will arrive somewhere with multiple construction tasks with all materials already in place, build a singular wall block or piece of furniture, and bugger off to either build something on the opposite end of the ship, or do something else entirely.

Nowhere is this more absurd than when you're putting in exterior bulkhead windows. To build said windows, a crew member will usually have to exit an airlock, propel themselves along the side of the ship to where the window needs to go, build it in a few seconds (it requires no materials), and come all the way back to the airlock. If you have multiple windows needing to be built right next to each other, they'll never be built in the same build task. A different crew member will make the trip around the ship to place down every... single... window (or the same crew member will make the trip multiple times).

Crew members also never take distance into consideration when prioritizing tasks. When you're salvaging a ship for scrap, instead of the crew moving along the ship, scrapping the objects nearest to them, they'll bounce around the ship scrapping objects completely at random, making the whole thing take way longer than it needs to for absolutely no reason.

Mining an asteroid? A crew member will get into a mining pod, pick up a mining drill from the ore processor, fly to the asteroid, mine materials, return to the ship, drop off the mined materials, and go back to mining. Perfect... except I was kidding. After dropping off the materials, they consider the task block complete, so they'll deposit the drill back at the ore processor, and dock the pod back in the pod bay, only to then, if they decide they're still going to be mining, get back in the pod, pick up a drill again, and then return to the asteroid.

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Any enjoyment I've gotten out of this game has been in spite of its terrible AI, and unless you're as much of a sucker for the gameplay loop as I am, I would not recommend it. Maybe give it a try if it goes on a very deep sale.