Recent reviews by flacidmember

Good

Almost 350 hours later, playing nothing but Stationeers for 6-8 weeks.
This is the best engineering sim I've ever played.
I put off playing it for a long time, because of the 2 hands system - which I still consider to be very tedious, but once you get over that, it's a very addictive and replayable game.
The scripting language in the game is very easy to understand and start using - much easier to use than the logic chips. You can watch a few videos on youtube and you'll have the important stuff figured out. You only need to understand about 20 arguments to start automating your base.

The game does have a very steep but rewarding learning curve. It took me about 50-100 hours to feel like I was starting understand how everything works.

It's taken me 350 hours to feel like my first world (the moon) is mostly complete and automated. My next world will be Mars, but for now I think I should take a break and play something new!

Anybody who loves Satisfactory or Oxygen Not Included, would like this game.

286 hours in 3 weeks...

Turns out there's no way to play privately with just your friends. You have no choice but to play in public lobbies. I have no interest in pvp and whilst me and my friends might try to enjoy the pve side of the game, I've no interest in being some pvpers play toy.
This is such a widely requested feature and yet it's not available.
Refunded.

Considering how much of a cash cow this game is, at more than 2 million copies sold, with it's £21 price tag and graphics which surely require a minor fraction of work compared to most games of today...

I'm not unhappy with the game, I knew what type of game it would be before I bought it, and thoroughly enjoy these types of games.

What disappoints me is the fact that it is surely a cash cow to the designers/publishers, and despite this, there are tonnes of areas to be improved upon. So much money is being made from this game and yet it seems there is still so much work to be done to improve it.

I saw a message some forums about a new campaign being designed more than 9 months ago, and yet, I still don't see any campaign missions other than the tutorial.

I avoided buying Factorio for about 6 months, because I already knew without playing it, that the price versus the cost to develop, was ridiculous... and after seeing all that's missing from the game, i'm even more disappointed in the price.

The concerns i'm raising don't in anyway reflect on how fun this game is, the game is fun, it's very well designed and addictive.

It bothers me that despite making more money from this game than many famous titles that cost millions to develop, they can't even re-invest a decent portion of their profits to improve it!

As much as i enjoy playing Ark...

I've never had a worse experience installing and updating a piece of software, as I have with Ark.

Anyone thinking of buying and playing Ark for the first time, be prepared (even with a 300mb internet connection and 500MBps nvme SSD) to suffer 1+ days of downloading and installing.

The unpacking/installing method used by Ark, is archaic!

I just suffered 8-9 hours processing a 23GB update for Ark. After it finished, it started right from the beginning again, so no doubt i'll have another 8-9 hours to go before it's done.

Don't expect this game to download at your bandwidth capacity and don't expect it to install anywhere near your SSD read/write speed. It's a complaint hundreds, if not thousands of people have made.

0MB download occurring
0MB disk

The game just sits idle doing nothing on the installer, and the download just randomly drops to 0MB.

I've not had this problem with any other games on Steam.

It's really worth noting, that the negative reviews for Atlas come mostly from its initial release which I've heard was a total disaster. Apparently it was quite unplayable.

Just like on Ark, you'll find the popular/populated official servers are full of greeding people who hoard land that they don't need or ever plan to use. So as any player worth their salt would do on Ark, join an unofficial server for better experience with a better community. When I first started Ark, I played official, and I almost requested a refund. Unofficial servers are the way to go.

Me and my tribemate played Ark for quite a while and now we've moved on to Atlas (since our server cluster is hosting Ark and Atlas, we got to stay in our community). We've been playing under a week but so far it's been great. We've barely seen any bugs and any we did see, weren't worth noting and didn't effect our gameplay.

Anyone who plays and enjoys Ark, would love this game. It takes various aspects of survival which have been lost in Ark, and revitalises them. It really feels like a survival game and it makes teamwork an enjoyable experience. We are both very much solo players, but Atlas has inspired us to expand our company/tribe and work with other people.

The game has a long way to go and much more content needs adding before it can be called a finished product, but as it stands, and for the price, its completely worth it.

The most hilarious reviews I've seen, is people complaining that it's impossible to survive and they just keep dieing no matter where they go or what they do... These people seriously don't understand the concept of survival games. It's a steep learning curve in the beginning if you haven't played Ark before, but it's satisfying when you eventually reach a stage where you're actually surviving, and then thriving.

If you like survival games like Ark, then I'd suggest you ignore the negative reviews. They're either no longer relevant and have been fixed... Or they come from people who don't really get how the game works.

Ark is massively successful and the basic concepts of gameplay in Atlas, are the same. Atlas will, in time, be equally successful as Ark.