Recent reviews by LtKillPuppy

200+ hours, plus a lot more on the Epic version back during the early updates. Was in the game since the first closed beta.

A lot of fun, a very detailed world and the game looks gorgeous. Building a factory in 3D is pretty neat and has lots of interesting challenges to complete.

Lots of small things for a player to discover and that's really cute!

Now to the bad things. The game has a really disappointing ending. If you're paying attention, you'll figure out where the story is going in the first 10 hours of the game and going all 100+ hours to the end just adds nothing to that. No new revelations, no twists, etc. The game also just ends. You complete Project Assembly and then all that is left to do is maybe grab a few achievements that you missed along the way.

The post-1.0 update is much higher quality in visual fidelity. I really welcome that, but it also meant that I could no longer play with my friends online -- after about 20 hours, the game was really laggy for me as a host. And I have the most beefy computer/best internet of all my friends.

Little re-playability. The game doesn't give you much in the way of "stats for nerds" so you can fine-tune your factory or bump the numbers. So once I beat the game I had no incentive to keep playing with my factory. I didn't 100% the game but I don't feel like I need to.

Some sort of post-ending tasks would be nice. "Good work on Project Assembly. Now send us 10,000 turbo motors!" or some other randomly-generated task.

There are the different starting points on the map, but as someone who has been around forever, I've built bases in all of them.

Overall, this is like a more casual-oriented factory game that's fun, but it is a bit of a let down the hardcore nerds.

Unfinished EA trash.

Unfinished EA trash.

Take-Two put a lot of money into this game, it barely made 1/6th of that back on EA release, and the dev studio keeps having high churn. (And is now completely gutted.)

This game will never get finished, and I doubt Take-Two will want to revive this. Another IP to add to the discarded pile.

Kudos to HarvesteR and Squad for being the only people who made any money off this entire KSP2 project.

100% this
why
why did i 100+ hours
help me

This game is a love letter to cats, hope, and our future.

I don't even need to ask if anyone involved in this project had a stray come into their lives and change their world. And perhaps, even save them.

After beating this game I went to pick up my cat and hugged him. He disliked it, but that's okay.

I replayed this game and it hits me just as hard today as it did back when I purchased it at launch.

Plus, all the bugs I had at the launch (such as crashes during scene switches) have all been fixed.

Don't want to say anything about the game itself in case I spoil it, but if you enjoy existential and thought provoking science fiction I would highly recommend it. The game drips with thick emotional atmosphere and the occasional cheap jump scares, but it doesn't diminish the plot or impact.

I also love that the game (like PREY, the 2017 version) gives you several important decisions to make which ultimately do not get resolved as part of the plot; You are left to your own imagination to figure out what impact they had upon the world. That's the sort of engaging thinking exercises I wish more games would give me.

Overall, love Soma. It sounds great, still doesn't look too bad in 2021, and IMHO is overall one of Frictional's stronger horror games.

Yes. Profitssss.

Not really recommended.

Not too interested in giving a deep review so here's the short of it:

* Been playing the game for a long time. It gets updates, and there's been a lot of improvements. But sometimes only incrementally improves things with the updates.

* Combat heavy game but combat is a slog. Enemies are absolute bullet sponges (even on easy) and I require end-game weaponry to even feel like I have a chance. FPS gunplay is really basic and ship combat mostly amounts to strafe-gunning. You get lots of guns but only will use a few as the rest aren't as effective.

* Building ships/bases works pretty good, never had much issue with that.

* 3D spacewalk mode is absolutely an uncontrollable mess. You'll only want to stand up in space when in an artificial gravity field. Fighting in zero-gee is just not fun at all.

* Planet/solar system is nice and expansive. I don't remember what alpha version that was added in, but it definitely made the game feel more open.

* VERY unstable. Tends to crash, and usually takes your save file with it. I've lost nearly all of my saves due to crash or the saves suddenly just stop loading (causing a crash mid-load). NOTE: I am being told this is an issue with my computer. Maybe it is? I don't know, I don't have issues with other games. So take this critique with a grain of salt perhaps.

It's an okay-ish SE/NMS clone that I think is a bit too ambitious for the developer's standards, but I wouldn't recommend placing a lot of time in the game as it will not reward you.

Astroneer is a slickly presented game and has a very cute, simple building system which is fairly easy and intuitive to pick up. But ultimately, it leaves me feeling hollow and wanting more. When it isn't frustrating me with its world and physics which feels half-finished.

As a crafting game, I find it's not hard to max out your technical tree and build everything the game has to offer. From then on your goal will be to unlock these alien artifacts that are present on each planet (and moon). But it feels like a glorified fetch-quest tacked on to give the game some kind of ending. I only bothered to unlock the gates on the first starter planet.

I never unlocked the master gate at the heart of the world, because digging down to the center was just too tedious and time-consuming. You wander endlessly large caverns with no idea of where to go, and lots of outcroppings and walls in the way. It doesn't feel organic or like I am really exploring, and this has been a problem with the game since its debut. (I have been playing since it was first released to Early Access.)

The game suffers from severe third person control-itis. It wasn't as bad in the prior Early Access versions of the game, where the terrain was quite smooth and gradual. But the new terrain generator tends to create lots of deep caverns and debris-cluttered landscapes, and all of this is unpleasant to navigate with a camera that refuses to swing completely up or down (or takes a long time to swivel around when I need to see what's behind me).

There's a sliding mechanic, where your character will "shield-sled" down hills which is cute and fun at times, but it will also lead to many frustrating deaths as you accidentally bounce off walls like a pinball. You also lack tools for easily traversing deep heights, or scaling near-cliff like mountains, unless you want to just dig it all out by hand. As I mentioned with the gate at the heart of the world, it can take a very long to do this. Exploring doesn't feel fun, it feels like a real chore. None of the tech you unlock really assists with this.

Speaking of navigating terrain gen: There are rovers to help you traverse the landscape, but that's assuming you can get the rovers to drive across it in the first place. The rovers are very buggy physics-wise, and I often found myself hopping out and connecting/disconnecting rover trains or digging (or filling in) ground underneath their wheels in an attempt to nudge the physics engine into working again. In those cases the rovers refused to move, even though I could see no obstructions are all. Compound this is lots of discontinuous terrain which means stopping frequently to deal with it. Assuming your rover doesn't get stuck mysteriously, etc.

There are random items littered across the world that you can find and unlock, but I never found any of these to be useful. There's supposed to be cosmetic items you can unlock, and I presume it has something to do with the gates -- but I never felt the urge to really go after any of these items. There's coop but I never even bothered to convince my friends to buy this game and join me, because what content it does have would then be split between my friends and there'd be even less to do.

There are also weird performance hitches; It's been claimed that the terrain system and tethers and whatnot are more optimized, but I can really tell on my beefy system that it's really struggling at times, particularly when saving or when you move rapidly between terrain chunks.

And that's where I sum up the game and finish the review: Astroneer is a cute exploration/building game that seems to just thinly scratch the surface of each genre that it takes inspiration from. The final release feels like they took the EA design and just tripled it in size in order to give you more randomly generated terrain to wander over, and a bit more items to build.

Can't really recommend the game.