Are you looking for a new colony-building sim game? In our Desynced review we’ll show you how to build the colony of your dreams. If you’re looking for a game with huge depth where you’ll spend dozens of hours maximizing your colony’s efficiency, unlocking and mass producing new materials, to thrive in an unfamiliar world, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s dive in to the Early Access release of Desynced, a strategy, automation, base-building game developed by Stage Games Inc.

In Desynced, you will have your ship damaged and end up trapped on a planet full of resources and hostile mobs. The main goal is to identify and repair the damage to the ship and escape. This is done by establishing mining facilities and conducting research on various materials found on the planet.

First, you are asked to set up a colony starting from scratch. With the use of worker drones, you begin mining Metal Ore and Crystals. With these, you’ll be able to create some basic production buildings that convert these materials into more complex resources.

As you start collecting materials, you’ll unlock the ability to research more items. This, in turn, unlocks more unique materials and allows to process current ones into various new recipes. Your goal is to make sure you have a constant supply of every material. This allows you to produce high-tier resources consistently. Then, you can use these high-tier resources to research and unlock even more recipes. In turn, these will make your production even more efficient.

What makes Desynced stand out from other strategy games, is that your main focus is to automate everything. Drones will mine ore, transfer it to a Fabricator building, convert it into Metal bars, transfer it to an Assembler building, convert it into plates, and so on. If you’ve set up everything properly, you can sit back and relax as drones will do most of your work.

However, sometimes things don’t work as planned, and even the tiniest mistake can make the whole process start to fall apart. Then, you have to go through each part of the process to find out what went wrong.

Similarly to Satisfactory, Desynced features an overall relaxing atmosphere where, once you do the planning work, you can sit back and watch your automated machines do everything on their own.

Additionally, Desynced pairs resource progression with open-world exploration. While your colony of drones is producing materials, you’re free to explore the open world and look for resources.

The world is full of various puzzles to complete and each rewards various rare materials upon completion. These puzzles are a great way to spend time while waiting for resources to produce. They are in the form of multiple squares (9 for the small puzzles, and 64 for the large ones), and you will have to rotate each properly so that the lines are connected (check the image below).

However, some of the puzzles can seem unnecessarily complicated and feel like too much hassle to complete. Especially after exploring a lot, solving multiple similar puzzles every few minutes felt repetitive and dull. For instance, in the puzzle below, you have to connect all black/grey dots to the blue line.

One of the best parts of Desynced is the amazing depth of the gameplay. There are various resources available in the open world and you can craft each of those into high-tier materials. You can also combine various raw materials to create even more items.

One slightly frustrating detail is that drones aren’t always as smart as you’d hope. Sometimes, they get stuck while trying to move resources from one building to another. On other occasions, Twinbots decide to stop using both their mining lasers for some reason. They were using them just a few minutes ago, who knows?

On the bright side, the game includes a large research tree full of unique technologies. Each researched technology unlocks buildings, drones, resources, and components that can help make your production even more efficient. Overall, there is a clear sense of progression and you always know what the next step is. Of course, this doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve.

The only game mode available in Early Access is Freeplay, but there’s more than enough content there to make it worth your while. The world is infinite and you can explore it in multiplayer. Also, Desynced supports Steam Workshop to allow for a variety of mods. On top of that, the developers have released a roadmap on the official site. Future plans include stability improvements, improved story goals, new challenges and biomes, and a more detailed story text.

With its unique automation system, Desynced offers a relaxing atmosphere. You work hard to automate everything and then sit back to watch the production process as you explore the infinite map. Starting out isn’t the easiest process, as there is a steep learning curve, but the game will feel satisfying once you become more familiar with its core mechanics.

In terms of graphics, the game manages to build a high-quality and relaxing atmosphere. It is easy to appreciate the detail on the bot and building models, plus the smoothness of the day and night cycle. In terms of performance, my FPS were stable throughout every gaming session while playing at the highest settings.

Lastly, the music is spot-on and properly sets the mood. The tunes are easy-going and mellow, which perfectly fits with watching the drones roam around and transfer resources.

Even though Desynced launches in early access, there’s more than enough content at the moment to make the game worth recommending to any colony sim, automation, and strategy genre fan.

Our Desynced review was made possible with a key provided by Stage Games and Forklift Interactive. Desynced is available now on Steam.