Recent reviews by BlueKaos

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way - bugs, crafting, and food.

Alpha means alpha, so there are bugs. Falling through the ground forever and ever. Physics collisions which cause your ship to land upside down. Disappearing entities. Viewing angles which you can't really change. Ships appearing to as though they are London during the Blitz. (But all is actually well.) Lag spikes long enough you could make a cup of tea. I could go on and on - and others will have had different experiences. But I won't be too harsh - it is still in alpha, I have every faith the major issues will get fixed eventually. Perhaps if I could form a coherent bug report that would help things.

Possibly the only core mechanic that lets this game down is crafting. Requiring all of the intermediary components to be constructed before you can build the actual thing you are trying to make just creates a lot of busy work - which isn't fun. Also not being able to construct anything yourself is a total PITA when your far away from your base without a ship.

Finally there is food... good grief, in this game I think I've eaten more in-game food in 20 hours than my family eat in a month. Every 15 minutes I have to grab something to eat. I don't mind a survival challenge, but when you're eating the weight of a small elephant at every sitting - it gets a bit silly.

That all being said - it is a charming fun game where you feel quite accomplished at every stage. the first night I played it I stayed up to 3am. And then the second night. And in a couple of days I've racked up 20.3 hours; had I not had that pesky sleep to attend to it would have been much more. I was also one of the people who played the free weekend. I was having so much fun I brought myself a copy, plus copies for my friends so we could all keep playing. We then lost five ships trying to exit Aura simultaneously; back to square one then.