PULSAR: Lost Colony
Worth it · Multiplayer · 2021
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $19.99.
- Length
- 18.4h
- Value
- $1.09/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel HD 5000 (Shader Model 3), 10 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
The co-op open-world space sim where everyone has a role! Pilot the ship. Reroute power. Launch nukes. Explore alien planets. Research new talents. Work together to find the Lost Colony! ...or just deliver some biscuits
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $7.99, set in November 2025. 62 discounts in the 11 years on record. They run about 40 percent off, roughly 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 13 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 2 percent on value. It is pricier than 91 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 96 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Avorion ($24.99, scores 85) beats it on value, while it beats StarMade ($14.99, scores 15).
This site sampled 560 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 19 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 490 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 169 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 50 percent of the 293 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 18.4 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 75, 4.1 times as much.
The drop-off
22% start to 16% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
21 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Like if gMod was bad and space and also not like gMod at all, more like a Roblox game disguised as a normal game
Very close to being an incredible game, BUT The ai crewmembers are dumb as hell. Crappy pathfinding, unable to navigate many missions and situations There seems to be some sort of huge bug with saving and loading. Talent points disappear, and are unable to be re-spent unless you travel to one of the re-spec points. Very annoying if you aren't close. If you defeat a boss and die before saving, when you reload the...
I love this game but it is lacking in content. there is a ton of mechanical depth in the systems of the ship that makes spacefaring feel daunting and interesting. it has a lot of different ships with different rolls. it falls short in out of ship gameplay. This game has a key component to make the best space ship sim game with its ship mechanics but its not quite there with the rest if its game play, I however...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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PULSAR: Lost Colony scores 75/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/252870/pulsar-lost-colonyThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 16, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.