Recent reviews by Mirror | ɿoɿɿiM

I played about 50 hours and realized I'm not actually having fun.

• There aren't really any choices that allow role-playing in this RPG. Most quests have one path. A few have an optional thing you can do. Nothing you do seems to have any impact on the world. I don't understand how this aspect seems to have regressed further from Fallout 4 after there was so much criticism about it.
  
• The writing is pretty bad. I'm not sure how you make discovery of alien artifacts and an organization dedicated to exploring the universe boring but they managed it.
  
• Exploration is severely handicapped by the procedural generation. There is really no feeling of discovery when every planet has the same few repeat locations evenly distributed across its surface. When I see "Abandoned Robotics Facility" in the distance on an isolated planet it should spark some mystery. Why is this hidden out here away from everything? What's the story behind it? Instead it's the 50th Abandoned Robotics Facility I've found and there is no logical or story reason for it to exist where it does.

I'm just going to stop there. I agree with a lot of others' points about outdated tech, excessive loading screens, etc. but frankly none of that would matter to me if I were more invested in the story. Unfortunately, I'm not.

I'm a big fan of the series but unfortunately I can't recommend this one. It seems like they keep getting lazier with these games instead of improving. This one doesn't add anything over the previous installment except more "combat" which is the worst part. 50% of this is just buying ingredients to make the required health potions and poisons so you can click to kill enemies and there are far too many of them.

Astroneer is a very fun sandbox game that doesn't feel completely finished.

You can easily invest quite a bit of time exploring, gathering resources, crafting and improving your base. The various planets' environments are interesting even though there's not quite enough to differentiate them or make the "difficult" ones actually feel challenging.

Much of my motivation for playing came from the need to improve my base, build higher tier upgrades, and organize the resources I had gathered. As you can see I spent about 60 hours doing that so I'd definitely say Astroneer is worth the money. However, once I had the highest tier of everything I had no reason to keep playing. The "end game" content is lacking/tedious in my opinion and the terrain tool is not powerful enough to make creativity a primary objective like it can be in Minecraft.

The Lab is a great introduction to VR. It's a collection of 8 high quality minigames that give a glimpse of what's possible with the vive. Some of my favorites (but really they're all great):

• Longbow - an archery game where you defend a castle from invaders. They seem to have perfected the controller feedback and I forgot I wasn't holding a real bow at times.
  
• Xortex - A wave shooter-type game. Normally these bore me but having 3 dimensions to move around in makes it very fun.
  
• Robot Repair - Portal humor!
  
• Postcards - Similar to Destinations. Visit real places 3d reconstructed from many photographs.

Cool mechanic but not cool enough to make an entire game out of it.

Hex grid + one unit per tile = buy this.

Pros:
- Slight improvement in graphical quality.
- Matchmaking system makes it a bit easier to join games.
- You can control bots on your team when you're dead.
- You can get skins for your guns.

Cons:
- I'm worse at it than CS:S.
- The gun sound design is terrible in my opinion.
- Graphics and other changes don't really seem to be a big enough improvement to warrant a new game.
- Matchmaking system means it's less common for people to have a "favorite server" so there seems to be less of a sense of community.
- You can get skins for your guns.

Would I recommend it? Eh.... I guess.