I just gotta say that I LOVE the lifeform scanner. REALLY useful when playing with zombies for finding those stragglers who don't join the initial raid without massive scrolling. Makes it so much easier to just jump around the map in end-game scenarios with more than 10 colonists. As a pure gameplay mechanic, this just saves me huge headaches (try selecting a colonist on 3x speed). Also looks really cool on the aesthetics front.
I think the nano storage could use some work (would be nice to have an "inbox", "outbox" and "series of tubes" connecting them, so you could store food in the food room, shove it in an inbox there and have it move to an outbox in the kitchen)
Also, events were cool. The agent one I wanted really badly in the game and it worked great- fucker turned against us and sent a raid, but I managed to re-capture and eventually he re-joined the colony and went on to further adventures... really added some cool story elements there... this is the shit i wanna see- personality and stories to tell!
The engine was cool- I remember a similar event in Better Power or something (though that thing always ended up burning up before I could get to it), but this was much better. Didn't really notice the psycho animal effects or anything, but still, just the concept alone was really cool to start with!