Recent reviews by 64bitrobot

Stationeers is actually just an engineering cram school disguised as a game.

Anyways, it's also a lot cheaper than engineering college, so, worth.

Update March 15th
I was playing this game and did some napkin math. I've been playing this game for 7 hours. I have gotten to the point of copper. I have finally researched nice looking airship hull wooden pieces.

I would love to build a nice wooden hull ship. Except I have gotten unlucky and found no Pneumatic Cylinders so i can't build a sawmill on my ship. This means I need to find a sawmill at a ruined structure. I need to drag the logs to that structure one at a time to process them into a limited number of planks, each processing requiring fuel. Roughly 2/3rds or such of a fuel cell. I then need 3 planks to build a single floor hull section. And even if I'm getting 3 planks per log, which I don't think i am, i can't remember...

The game does not respect my time. The design vision the developers have at this stage does not respect my time. I understand why the idea of having specific metal large pieces to build pieces could be cool. I love the idea of finding big pieces. But progress gating behind random chance is painful. Just let us melt them down into coppy, then let us smelt them back into the piece we need. At least then the 20 rotory braces I found wouldn't be useless.

This game needs a head designer who understands players and systems and right now they don't have it.
Update February 28th Accumulated Patches
At this point, there have been several big patches. The most recent patch addressing the most recent reason i stopped playing the game. I had reached the point where you needed to craft kits in order to research buildings, which required kits to build it. Or some nonsense like that. This has been addressed by removing the need for kits entirely and also adding the much beloved quality of life of building things on your ship from yours ships inventories.

I leave my review as a 'not recommend' however, for a handful of reasons. It still needs time to improve, and while the direction is looking good, I still have some fundamental concerns.

My complaints now sort into two main categories; minor annoyances like goats existing near you spawning the fight music, not being able to chill on your ship for a minute without something spawning, the lack of pause in a single player world, and things of that nature. The thing i most hope gets addressed, and this is not an easy fix, is enemy spawning. Currently, enemies just... appear, in a radius around you, for no particular reason. They just spawn because a survival game needs enemies, and this is just a regrettable thing that doesn't suit the narrative very well. The other thing is that ship combat, especially for a solo, is entirely ineffective, meaning the best way to fight enemy ships is to jump upon them and just swing your sword until it explodes.

The other category of complaints is that while the direction of the patches is good, it's my belief that a lot of these changes and fixes are things that should have been caught and fixed before the game entered early access. These feel like fundamental aspects of the game that could and should have been found in playtesting, and while I'm glad the Devs are listening and responsive, it does not fill me with confidence that these are the sort of issues we're facing.

Update February 3rd Large Patch
This patch addressed a lot, not all, but a lot of the things I pointed out in my review. Crafting is slightly less tedious (not as long to make parts), combat seems to be tightened up, The most annoying bug of the W key not working is fixed

The patch doesn't fix everything, but it gives a good feeling towards the velocity towards EA. I'm cautiously hopeful things will improve. Though the game does still feel balanced around multiplayer and not nearly as tested around singleplayer.
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Needs more time in the oven, honestly.
The airship game curse continues; While the theme is fun and the building isn't terrible, the early game feeling of raft and other survival crafts carries with Echoes. You're plodding along trying to gather enough things to build basic materials.

Even writing this review is tiresome. You spawn with the most basic of a ship. It has a rudder and a helm, which you can't even craft, so make sure you don't destroy it. Your first goal is to gather enough materials to get a sail crafted, which will let you slowly explore elsewhere. You will search desperately for stone, fetch wood, plant fiber, and metal from the air, and continue along until you realize you can open your map and find the location you're supposed to go to.

You'll be surprised multiple times by enemies that spawn out of nowhere and attack with poorly telegraphed attacks that seem to hit you before the animation goes off (thanks single player server architecture causing desync on my local machine.)

Anyways, there's also input issues, oftentimes if you're moving down a hill you won't be able to jump, and sometimes your W key will just... not register for a good few seconds after using the glider to jump in the air. You'll rubber band when using the glider sprint, and struggle to feel like you're moving fluidly.

When the demo for this came out, I was incredibly disappointed, I think I played less than 10 minutes and lost all interest. I had hopes the early access would address some of those issues, so far it hasn't. I'm hoping that things improve a lot.

Oh right, building the hull of your ship doesn't pull from storage containers on your ship, and to craft individual pieces, you need to hold down the craft button or spacebar for several seconds per piece, and you'll have dozens of crafts to do. It quickly gets exhausting.

Anyways, it needs a lot more time, it needs a UX specialist to play and change the whole flow.

I'll update this when it's ready. It's not ready yet. Not even close until a lot of these issues areexamined. Playing is a chore right now, especially fighting movement input

I have some complex feelings and ideas about the way this game moved its motization. I have some thoughts about how I'm paying for quality of life to play it on steam. I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to support the game after changes that have been made. I made my choice to pick it up for 20 bucks. I'll have fun. If it all crashes and burns, that's fine, it was $20 for a game.

Edit; changed to not recommended. Not because I dislike the game, but because all the people who don't want to buy a game they already bought into deserve it.

A bit short, but fun for $3

Great little puzzler to eat your hours away. I don't have much more to say which isn't along the lines of "chill vibes and watch number go up". I for sure don't regret the buy.

Nice and simple for a free hour long game.

I basically lost 3 hours to this without realizing. It's chill. It reminds me a lot of that potion game that had a similar style that came out a while ago. It's basically just chill out, experiment, and have fun. A few early access nagging points, like the fact some recipes have a placeholder 'CRAFT' image instead of the final sprite, but otherwise seems like a really chill way to spend some time.

Quick edit: I wouldn't say it's worth it at full price, but for a sale price it's a great grab.

Honestly wild how much I enjoyed this game. I almost hate how much I enjoy it. It's such a basic idea/dream/fantasy, but that's probably what makes it work so well. There's no real challenge, but that just feeds into the enjoyment. You buy stock, sell stock, and ramp up as you get access to more and more items.

Full price is fine, but sale price is even better.

Full disclosure time, I haven't played 1.0 yet. Picked this up a day or two after it hit EA because I liked the demo enough to give it a shot.

Been a while since an EA game left me feeling burnt, but guess that's the risk of the system. Being able to enjoy "The game as it is" doesn't seem to be a good defense when they actually change it. I'm sure I'll probably like 1.0 well enough, but based on the evidence, sure seems like it won't live up to what it could have been.

So why am I giving a thumbs down review? Being real, it's because if you look at the news and updates, the most recent is from November 7th, which at time of review is... exactly 3 weeks before this update. You know what's really off about that update? "This video is no longer available because the uploader has closed their YouTube account."

Nah, fam. You only do that if you have something to hide. You're closing the youtube account which is hosting your exciting, finally arrived 1.0 release?

I'll be kind and say game development is hard, things and plans change, and so forth. Doesn't make it less disappointing for those who bought the game. And doesn't change the fact that there's no real room for trust left with the dev.

Wowee. It came out of early access.

Best part of the 1.0 update is straight conveyor mode. That's all.