Sir Prize の最近のレビュー

Planet Crafter is an interesting game. On the one hand, it's definitely engaging and enjoyable, on the other hand there's things about its progression system currently that make no sense. Performance is also a significant issue as you get into the later stages of the game, so be prepared.

First off, the good:

• Concept is really cool, who doesn't want to transform a planet from a barren mars-like wasteland into a lush paradise?
  
• Early game gives you plenty to do and progression is fairly well-paced.
  
• Tutorial is simple, to-the-point and explains everything you need to get started.
  
• Objectives are clear and easy to follow--I was never scratching my head on what to do next.
  
• Exploration is encouraged and is essential for progression.
  
• Once you achieve automation, it is quite satisfying.

And then the bad:

• The current progression system, while very simple, makes no sense. Advancing through the stages of terraforming your planet depends solely on your terraformation index, which serves as a sum of all of your terraforming efforts. This leads to potentially odd scenarios like reaching the "breathable atmosphere" stage without ever increasing the Oxygen level of your planet. Also, a breathable atmosphere by modern Earth standards is somewhere in the neighborhood of 209,000 parts per million of Oxygen. Meanwhile you're probably going to max out your progression at 3000 ppm of Oxygen at most. You will have a thriving ecosystem on your planet despite your planet's average temperature still being less than 1 Kelvin (one degree above absolute zero). For reference, the average global temperature of earth today is 288 Kelvin, and the point at which surface water would start melting is around 255 Kelvin. And, sidenote--it doesn't make sense that your planet starts at 0 kelvin despite that obviously being impossible and 0 pa of atmospheric pressure despite obviously having an atmosphere (heavy wind/dust storms are common in the early game).
  
• Mid-game gets a bit tedious--you inevitably arrive at a weird stage where you have mining drills producing lots of resources but no automation to deal with them. I found myself spending most of my time just running back and forth between my mining drills and my storage. True automation is only unlocked at the absolute end of the tech tree.
  
• Performance in the late game slows to a grinding halt once you have trees, butterflies, flower spreaders, and fish spawners all over the place.

Overall verdict? Despite its issues, I still recommend the game, especially if you can get it on sale. It's good for about 40 hours of content at the time of this review, and most of it is enjoyable, if occasionally a bit tedious. I really hope they revamp the progression system a bit as the game evolves, because in its current state it has some obvious issues. But beyond that, it was a fun 40 hours and I don't regret spending it on this game.

Despite improvements since launch and players celebrating the fact that this game is finally playable (think about that: we're rejoicing a full YEAR after this game's release that it's finally at least playable), this game is still a frustrating, buggy mess. It is STILL less stable, smooth, and overall enjoyable than Battlefield 4, a title that is coming up on its 10th birthday this year.

A couple key gripes (there are many, but I'd like to keep this short):

* The game still constantly crashes, freezes, and finishes rounds with an endless black screen that forces you to quit and restart the game. This is not just a me issue: this routinely happens to all my friends, often happening to all of us at the same time.

* Still some issues with character models not loading correctly, resulting in me simply getting killed by floating guns. This was especially prevalent at launch, it's not nearly as bad now but still problematic.

* Changing your keybinds is absolutely, positively aggravating. For absolutely no reason whatsoever, when you click a keybind to change it, sometimes it just... does absolutely nothing. You have to click it 69 times, while moving and dragging your mouse along the button, singing a cult chant, dancing around a circle with a fresh blood sacrifice and praying to the Flying Spaghetti Monster in order for the prompt to finally come up and allow you to enter a new key for your action. As someone who has a special keyboard that requires me to change a bunch of keybinds... this was absolute hell.

* When I drive a tank in 3rd person mode, the turret will sometimes stop rotating when I turn the vehicle left or right. So far as I can tell this behavior is completely random, sometimes the turret will spin just fine while I turn the tank, other times it locks up any time I turn. Problem goes away as soon as I go back to first person mode but returns the moment I go to 3rd person mode, and can persist for several minutes or the entire round.

* Despite allowing you to squad up with your friends, after the first game finishes, you will almost certainly get broken up and shuffled to different teams next round. To be fair, this was a problem in BF4 as well but mostly due to custom server plugins doing auto-balance. I would have hoped that with 8 years to figure out how to do it better, we would have gotten something... well, better.

* You can't skip the end-of-round celebration sequence. Really, devs? You've gotta be kidding.

* Where the hell is Hardcore?

Soo... yeah. I'll still play this game when my friends are on and we want to screw around in Battlefield and we're bored of playing BF4, but it's not something I will go out of my way to play on my own, even if I'm really bored.

Pay attention devs, this is how a proper HD remaster of a timeless classic is done.

For those who don't know, this game has been remastered a couple times over the years, and this version is based on the 2002 remaster done for the GameCube. The gameplay in this HD remaster is *slightly* tweaked compared to the PS1 original, but is essentially the same as the GameCube version, gameplay-wise.

Among a number of graphical and quality-of-life improvements, perhaps the biggest improvement is the addition of a toggle to switch from the classic "tank" controls to a more modern movement scheme. Though it is fun to experience the nostalgia of the old-school controls, there is no mistake that this is a significant and welcome improvement to the game.

Overall, if you haven't experienced this classic, now is the time to do so, and this is the version to do it with.

So tonight I spent $21.00 on dinner at a local pub and had an excellent burger. That enjoyment lasted for about an hour and then it was time to come home. I came home, and then, for a mere $4.99, bought this game had the absolute time of my life for an hour and a half.

So for a quarter of the price, this game gives more enjoyment (and for longer) than a delicious burger at your favorite spot. Not only that, but for the low, low price of free, I can play again whenever I want.

Conclusion: the cost-to-enjoyment ratio of this game is better than eating food. Stop eating and buy the darn game already.

(P.S.: If you like board games like Betrayal at House on the Hill, you absolutely MUST get this game. Even with a bunch of random people it is an absolute blast, just imagine how much fun you can have with all your board game buddies! It's the perfect way to get all your peeps together during quarantine.)

It is somehow worse now than it was when I first purchased it nearly 5 years ago.

The mechanics and inventory management is somehow even clunkier, movement is clunkier, figuring out crafting (note, this is not my first "craft and survive" game by a LONG shot) is somehow clunkier than it ever has been, building a shelter is clunkier than most other games, just about everything in this game feels clunky and unpolished.

And it's been in Early Access for 5 years. There is simply no excuse for core game mechanics getting WORSE over this period of time, without hardly any additional interesting features being introduced.

Keep in mind that this game and Ark: Survival Evolved entered Early Access at around the same time. I was placing my bets as to which game was going to become more successful and I was right, but I had no idea just how right I was.

In the same time this game has taken to introduce a relatively crude building system, a few new craftables, some procedurally generated underwater loot and an absolutely horrifying slender-man shadow of your character, the ARK team has created 4 absolutely enormous, detailed, and elaborate maps for you to explore, teeming with nearly 100 different species of realistically-rendered prehistoric animals (granted, with some artistic liberty taken).

They created a simple, satisfying, and compelling gameplay loop of exploring, gathering, crafting, building, and taming various creatures to ride and work for you, and created a storyline progression involving fighting massive, epic beasts in an effort to escape the island and learn its secrets. All of this culminates in over 1000 hours of compelling gameplay, especially when you get different groups of friends together to explore the different maps.

By comparison, I have at most gotten a couple of hours of "enjoyment" out of this game and have largely ignored it due to it still being in an unfinished state. I don't believe it will ever leave this state at this point, and it seems that it will be in development hell forever and eventually become abandonware.

If you like survival games and you like this game's aesthetic, go play ARK. It fills basically the same niche, and despite its own numerous flaws, it is infinitely better than this game ever will be, I'm afraid.