UPDATED FOR 0.8.2
better. you can now defeat 3 of the (at least 7) faction leaders. of course, unlike SM1 you can't really do much with them after capture other than scripted encounters.
the girls with the new AI gen are all the same look (tho you can alter skin colors and such), but the author did say he's not done with it. and you can now at least have missionary sex with your slaves.
no pregnancy yet tho, and no indication the incubators will ever exist in SM2. if true, might be nice to state that in dev notes or something.
the pics with the offending misshapen digits are still present.
the lab is still mostly useless.
also, the memory issue is still present once you control a decent amount of the galaxy map... which is far more difficult to read and navigate than in SM1, possibly because of how many more individual worlds exist on it. and I'm really missing the scrolled out you can see who controls what by color view, since clicking on each world to see which worlds to attack can be both painfully tedious and sometimes mistake-prone.
interestingly, I noticed now it's not just memory getting nailed - CPU takes a big hit as well (not compared to how much CPU is available, mind you, but compared to how much anything else uses).
more fun to play than the previous version - by a lot. still not as fun to play as SM1, and after conquering the 3 factions everything just becomes waiting for more content.
wish I could rate Alpha 0.7.3 Public at a 3.5, but given what's still missing a 3 will have to do.
the game is definitely coming along. but it's still very incomplete.
there is now a working (once you figure out how) galaxy map. cool. you can even capture one of the faction leaders now. well... you can wipe their faction out. you can only capture her if you're a patron - otherwise she's paywalled.
but...
there is still only one sexual interaction (no positions - just yes sex or no sex), and it doesn't do anything in terms of stats yet. so you can interact in that way, but all you're doing is seeing the (same) animation to no other effect.
not sure why, but the slaves assigned to the master suite and decoration don't seem to show up there for me - ever - like the ones in the dairy and brothel do. forgot to explicitly check the club, but don't remember ever seeing any in passing there either.
there are a few extra options after installing some of the lab equipment, but not everything you install allows you to do anything with it (such as you can open a dairy, but I have yet to find any lactation hormones or DNA changing stuff no matter that I had every piece of equipment installed in the lab). and there's no incubators in this game at present... not sure if that's intentional.
the AI now used for a majority of the event art... is AI art at its worst. meaning more than an appropriate number of malformed digits on hand and feet... and one of the pics shows misshapen legs as well.
and while there's a fix implemented for the memory leak... it doesn't do much once you defeat the impertinent faction leader bitch. after that my game started doing the... oh, you wanted me to do something when you clicked on that button or space? tough. well... maybe if you wait a couple minutes. and no, that's not a system limitation on my side. it was fine until then, and looking at task manager I can see that it used about 5G RAM while my 18 open Chrome windows used around half of that.
all in all a vast improvement over the previous version, but still not really a playable game yet. hopefully in the next release or two. I still enjoy playing SM1, and continue to hope that SM2 will one day be as or more enjoyable.
