Recent reviews by Sickmode

Honest 160 hours review here:

Early game and mid game are absolutely fantastic, and the game is worth the purchase just for that. Graphics, survival mechanics, base building, tech and item progression, combat, quests, gameplay, are all great. You can get a good 60+ hours in a great modern survival crafting game.

What the advertising and in-game tutorials do not explain though, is that the end game is a completely different game and an entirely different level of grind and time sink. The "forced" PvP aspect is one thing, and while yes it can be annoying you can still make it decently far by being mainly PvE with limited setbacks from PvP if you know how to play like a rat. The real problem is that the overall end game requires a lot of time literally just flying around to either find resources, or to constantly build and tear down your base.

If you want to do any meaningful endgame progression, you will need to set up a base in the Deep Desert, which due to the weekly reset, will need to be torn down and re-built each week. The problem is, if you want to process the end game ores and spice, you need a big base with all the end game refineries, and those take so many materials and power/water setup that you will have to fly back and forth from your main Hagga Basin base to your Deep Desert base 5-10 times just to set up everything each week, and another 5-10 trips just to tear down your base, EACH WEEK. That means you are making 10-20 trips each week. Each trip can easily take 10+ minutes even if your Hagga Basin base is right on the edge to access the world map easily. That is so much wasted time just maintaining your ability to have a base that can process endgame materials. You cannot just build the end game refineries in your Hagga Basin base, because the unrefined spice and titanium/stravidium ores are so heavy that it would require you to make way more trips back to your hagga basin base to refine everything.

Unexplained game mechanics are another thing, for example, your Deep Desert base will take damage from the sandstorms and if you do not repair it, it will be completely destroyed, along with everything in it. Yet there are no notifications that your base has taken damage, so if you are unaware of this mechanic, you can lose your entire base and all the materials you have farmed, and all the materials it took for you to build all the end game refineries.

There are also bugs and glitches, which yes they are aware of and are fixing, but when those bugs result in the loss of hours of gameplay, it is very demoralizing.

There are simply too many un-necessary mechanics that cause you to have to grind and farm and re-do everything constantly, so it no longer becomes a game of progression, but a game of maintenance. 75% of your end game time is maintaining what you have so you can spend a little time trying to progress. You also need to hope that your server is not filled with PvP griefers. I actually got lucky and there are many friendly players in my end game PvP zone, so not everyone is out to kill me and permanently destroy my ornithopter and player inventory with a thumper, although there are plenty of those around who have also cost me hours of work.

If you have no job or no family and enjoy doing the same grind over and over, the end game might be for you. If you have a job and significant other (not even kids), you will not be able to make meaningful progress end game as your playtime will be over by the time you maintained everything. The early game is great, just stop after tier 5 and consider the game completed. Hagga Basin is the real game, the Deep Desert is an empty, poorly designed and rushed end game designed to keep people playing in an endless grind loop.