Yes.
Could this be because I did the first quest for the merchants, then did the rest for the mercenaries? I think I'm going to play through again and see if it takes this time.
What do I have to do to complete the game? I got all the heartstone pieces and finished the final quest. Do I have to grind down my status and do the other faction quests?
After more thinking about it, a good way to solve the problem of the randomly good/bad Day 1 would be to make the platforms up to X feet non random, but spaced to make picking a patch difficult.
I don't see how you're supposed to hit mars in 3 days without just restarting the game a hundred times until you get a perfect string of platforms on day 1. That has nothing to do with skill, strategy, or even perseverance, it's just luck. Good game, stupid badge.
The main gun is next to useless with the slow shot speed. The enemy fighters stay off the screen too much where they're impossible to hit. The drones are nice, but too expensive. The turrets are just short of useless, they blow up too easy, don't hit often enough, and do way too little damage.
With more points per kill you could actually fill out some of the turrets and upgrade the gun and drones to where they would be more useful. As it is now, the game is essentially unplayable on hard difficulty.
The text popup is very annoying. It blocks the enemies, and important messages get pre-empted by the tool-tips that I didn't need after 5 minutes. If the text were in a separate box and scrolled it would be much nicer.