Stars of Akarios is Gloomhaven in space crossbred with a choose your own adventure game. I've played through the prologue and the very start of Act 1 and so far it's been great! Here are some early impressions focused on solo-play. These opinions may evolve as I play more, and I may be missing things in the rules -- let me know!
Update: Added more thoughts after finishing Act 1 at bottom.
Space Combat
The core of the game is space combat missions where your chosen space ship will fly around and pew pew the baddies. Unlike Gloomhaven's purely card-driven tactics, in Stars you will roll dice to determine what actions you can take. While some may dislike the element of luck, I really appreciate how it reduces the action paralysis that comes up in games like this. Turns move quickly -- roll your four dice (plus 1 extra if playing solo) and assign them to various available actions on your weapon, engine, co-pilot, or special ability cards. You can easily mitigate bad rolls by increasing your "stress" counter to reroll dice. You almost always feel like you have clever things to do, but the available action space is not too daunting. So far the missions have been relatively quick, typically about 45 - 75 minutes including time spent looking up rules and learning abilities. Adding more players shouldn't dramatically increase playtime because the game allows for many player actions to be done simultaneously.
Solo? As mentioned, when playing true solo you have an extra action die and there will be fewer enemies. Each scenario setup is similar to a Gloomhaven map indicating where enemies start and which to place based on the player count. The prologue missions feel reasonably balanced for solo play, however, I think it would be more fun to have more enemies on the map. Some of the ship upgrades and attacks are less useful when you are facing fewer foes since they are designed to let you target multiple nearby enemies at once. I have yet to have two enemies move close enough together to actually pull that off, but I expect it would be common with 3 or 4 players. Compared to a dungeon crawler, space is always going to be wide open, so there are fewer opportunities to use the environment to help manipulate foes. 884
This may also be because I've only fought battles in the Prologue, which probably are designed to be on the easier side.
Space Exploration
Between skirmishes you'll explore solar systems, trigger random events, and follow prompts in the story book to learn the game's narrative. This is done by moving your ship between cards that beautifully depict the region of the system you are in. You gradually build out a map, and will read in the scenario book to answer prompts that potentially change game statuses or trigger combat missions. From the prologue the story seems reasonably engaging and I'm curious about the storyline and the mysterious big bad.
The prologue does a great job of introducing you to the core concepts and guides you through a small area before opening up significantly in Act 1. Act 1 looks more like an "open world/galaxy" with a selection of story missions or side quests to pick from.
Solo? Personally, I feel this type of book driven exploration is better done by yourself than in a group where you would need to read the prompts aloud (or listen in the soon to be released app) and discuss what to do. In space exploration, all players are together on the Sparrow ship and can't split up, so nothing is lost in the translation to solo mode.
Planetary Exploration
Periodically you will have the chance to land on and explore planets or moons. This is similar to space exploration, but here all players get to split up and explore the map independently. Each card that makes up a tile in the map usually has several different actions which can be taken. Actions require you to spend some of your 4 dice (5 in solo), rolling them to see if you pass or fail a test. You have choices to make here such as deciding how many dice to allocate to a test, and in multiplayer, deciding which character has the best skills to succeed. Each action will give a little bit of story to read from the book and potentially give rewards or penalties. There are many possible actions to take, but there are rarely ways to guess which are the right ones to spend your limited actions on. This can make it feel a bit random and it is hard to know whether to just exhaustively interact with every action or to do a more targetted search.
Solo? This segment of the game feels the weakest in solo mode. Mathematically, the number of actions available to a solo player just doesn't add up like it would in multiplayer. Solo players get an extra die and one more energy. 884