Review - Generation Exile

L. Sahara McGirt
18 minutes ago
3 min read

Publisher: Sonderlust Studios

Developer: Sonderlust Studios

Available on: PC (Steam)

The concept of Generation Exile sounds exciting: You are the Caretaker in charge of building a settlement in a starship that is humanity's last chance at survival. Supplies are limited, story choices can hurt or better your chances, and the characters of the ship are procedurally generated at the beginning of each playthrough, giving you unique crewmates each time you start a new game.

Generation Exile is a reminder that sometimes the execution of a cool concept in a game falls short.

Gameplay and Mechanics

I had a lot of hope and interest going into this game. I enjoy a good colony simulation, city builders, and management games. Furthering that with in-game choices that could affect the story also sounded great. However, the experience I got playing Generation Exile, frankly, gave me a headache.

Colony simulation and building games require plenty of thinking about resources and managing assets and production to ensure your future in the game. The problems I had with Generation Exile came down to how this gameplay is executed. The game uses hexagonal tiles, much like you might see in Civilization, for placing habs and production sites. Putting down electrical, water, food, waste disposal, and workforce production are easy enough, but as I was playing the game, I noticed some problems. The game doesn't do a great job explaining things. Which, sure, these things are often easy enough to figure out. But then, I got stuck hunting around for a specific tile I needed to place to stop a problem, only to realize that I needed to place something else first that wasn't explained before I could even place it. Descriptions were often too short and not very descriptive of what they do and where they should be placed. Specificity is great in games, and when games lack that, it can leave players feeling lost.

Now, I'm not dumb. I play a ton of games like this and have been since I was a kid playing Age of Empires at my best friend's house. Games have only gotten more difficult since then and quite a bit more expansive, such as games like Stellaris or Surviving Mars, which are both great games. The problem with Generation Exile is that it feels like they perhaps tried to oversimplify explanations and descriptions while complicating the mechanics of their game.

I also noticed while I was playing that the game needs a lot of rebalancing in order for it to be an enjoyable experience. I love a challenge as much as the next guy, but something I faced quite often while playing is that the choices made were often too punishing and left my crewmates with too many debuffs, and the good choices I made almost never gave any positive traits to my crewmates. So when I would set up actions by my crewmates, they often came out of those actions, adding onto my crisis event meter. The whole time I played, I didn't manage to fill my fortune meter a single time and experienced crisis after crisis.

On top of that, they were repetitions of the same crises. There was hardly any difference. For a game advertising procedurally generated characters who have different narratives, I sure was experiencing the same things over and over for different crewmates.

Story and Aesthetics

Now, when I'm writing reviews, particularly for games that have an overarching story, I usually like to dig into the details, but frankly, the story in this game was lacking. Sure, I'm supposed to be the caretaker of humanity's last hope, and navigating the responsibilities of that, but in Generation Exile's case, the overarching story felt more like set dressing than something I really wanted to engage with.

What Generation Exile does have going for it is its aesthetics. It has a unique style with a flair of color, which changes palette based on the biome. This part of the game was quite lovely to look at, and switching between biomes and seeing the differences was pretty cool. Scenes between characters were stylistic and interesting, and the different biomes really are beautiful.

Humanity's Last Hope

In the end, the problems I had playing Generation Exile in terms of gameplay and mechanics were too many for me to enjoy it. The game was recently released in 1.0, and based on what I can tell, it may improve with further updates. So with all of this noted, I have to say, if you're interested, hold it on your wishlist and see if a future update makes some improvements.