Screw it, I bought it and I’m playing.
You’re delivering cargo, and you must deal with asteroids both small and large, small hostile ships, big hostile ships, and neutral ships. You have no control over your course, but that’s fine because you’re pretty damned busy as it is.
Every mission you start with your cargo containers, an empty ship hull that’s specific to the mission, and a single thruster. You get a steady income of “nuts,” which is the currency you use in missions to build new ship components. Every asteroid or ship you destroy drops more nuts, which you must manually collect. I dislike games that force you to collect money manually, but this doesn’t seem like enough of a time-suck to matter.
Enemy weapon hits and asteroids that strike the ship do damage. These damage components first, and if they strike a hex without a component, can damage the ship’s hull. Empty hexes which take enough damage are destroyed and lost forever, which is a pretty big setback. You can repair components, which costs nuts, but only if they haven’t taken damage recently. So you can’t spam repair to offset enemy damage.
Weapons have fixed, very narrow firing arcs, generally just 60 degrees (one hex side). In addition to placing components, you execute commands on existing components. For lasers, the most important command is “rotate,” so it’s facing a new threat. Lasers project one hex forward into space, so it’s actually possible for a laser facing forward to block an adjacent laser from rotating left, because the barrel is in the way. This also means the placement restricts what firing arcs are possible - if the hex doesn’t have a clear view aft, you can’t rotate the laser to face threats from behind.
Thrusters affect how quickly you finish the mission, and very little else. Your starting thruster will get you there on time for standard delivery. Additional thrusters will cut your time enough so you can get the Express or Lightning delivery ratings. There are little markers for the faster goals on the timeline below the ship, and they display quite clearly how much thrust you need now to make that goal. As time goes on that number’s naturally going to climb. Generally speaking you need to spend your money on weapons first to deal with threats before you can afford additional thrusters. Since thrust is important, hexes with rear-facing hexes which can take thrusters are at a premium.
When you finish a mission, you gain credits and reputation stars. Credits is per intact container delivered, multiplied by the speed bonus. Basic is x1, Express is x2, and Lightning is x3. Credits are the between-missions currency, which you spend to unlock new components and additional abilities for existing components. You can run a single mission repeatedly and get Credits each time, so barely making it means you’re making progress in Credits.
Reputation stars, on the other hand, only count your best run for each mission. Finishing is 1 star, delivering 50% of the cargo is 1 star, delivering 100% is 2 stars. Express delivery is 1 star, lightning is 2 stars. So the best possible run is 5 stars, 100% delivery in Lightning speed. Reputation stars unlock equipment and additional missions. You can’t buy advanced equipment no matter how many Credits you have if your reputation is too low.
Weapons I’ve seen and used so far are Lasers, Missile Launchers, and Ion Cannons. Lasers are the basic weapons, can rotate, and can shoot small fast objects. Missile launchers are much more effective and have a much longer range, but cannot rotate, and can only shoot large objects. Ion cannons disable enemy ships and take down shields, which is important against the bigger ships, which have the same hex layout as your ship. There are quite a few weapons I have not unlocked yet.
Support items I’ve seen are shield generators and power generators. Both take up valuable space, so they aren’t practical on small ship hulls with few hexes, but they don’t need an exterior hex like weapons. Shield generators absorb damage much more effectively than components, and regenerate on their own. Power generators improve the damage output of nearby weapons, provided you’ve purchased the appropriate upgrades.
There are multiple types of cargo pods. I’ve seen basic pods, fuel pods, mechanic pods, and passenger pods. Fuel pods do damage to your ship if destroyed. Mechanic pods can create additional basic cargo pods, for a cost in nuts. Passenger pods must be placed on the exterior of the ship (for the view), and require an adjacent power generator or they rapidly degrade.
In all, the “tower defense” aspects are primarily the highly scripted nature of the threats on each mission, and very artificial feel of starting with almost no ship components and constantly building them on the fly. It’s really very different from tower defense games, so there’s very little “done that” feel to it. It’s really its own genre.