Recent reviews by Snuggly Wuggums!

Rating: Neutral-Leaning-slightly good

This game has fantastic art direction. The music is worth buying the OST for on its own even if you've never touched the game. And the vibes of the whole experience are absolutely immaculate.

These all combine to make this one of the best art shows I've been to in a while.
Unforuntately, it's a video game, not an art show.

My "Recommended" here is, like many others, more of an "I wish there was a third option". The game is perfectly competent and playable(especially with friends), but let's break this down into more specific categories, because mixed feelings require more nuanced explanations.

Story:
It begins as a somewhat interesting exposure to a fantastical world that I think can best be described as "If the fey got a strange fascination with post-war aesthetic and vibes". But it very VERY quickly loses the plot. Who you are, why you're here, why those guys with guns are shooting you, etc are given only the very lightest of explanations by the very literal voice in your head who exists before anything strange has happened.
I've not made my full way through yet, but as it stands at about 12 hours, I... don't really know and don't really have a reason to care. About anything.
Normally, survival games fall into one of two camps. Subnautica, or Minecraft. Handmade sandbox, versus true sandbox. This clearly wants to tell a story with its sandbox like Subnautica, but it tries to do so without building a world, stakes, or narrative.

Gameplay
It's *fine*. It's a lot like Raft in that you're in a limited building space collecting resources as they are thrown at you. It's a survival crafter. You know what you're getting here and it doesn't really do any part of that *wrong*. Like every survival crafter, the combat is mediocre but passable. The tech progression feels decently well paced and the utilities you get are nice at helping the progression gameplay loop. The threats are minor, easily handled with stuff you get through main progression, and you're always moving forward since game state progression is tied to research completion. So the only way you can actually grind out resources, rofleemos, and gun parts is by pointedly doing nothing to make progress. Elsewise, you will constantly be being advanced automatically by doing research.

It puts the game in a weird place where it has all sorts of random elements(Gun parts, the abilities of your little dudes you find at every depot), but the only way to engage with them is to effectively mindlessly run loop after loop while doing nothing to progress your technology or train's abilities. It's not a dealbreaker, but with how many RNG systems there are, it's strange that you are more or less always working towards the end. Unless you know how progress works on the backend, you're effectively playing on limited time and always approaching the finale. Which inclines you towards just not bothering with most of those things except as convienence allows.

Cutting this off here.
In summary. It's a good enough game to be worth playing. But it's very confused in terms of what game it wants to be. It's mimicking a lot of things that good survival games do without really feeling like they understand why those mechanics necessarily exist or are popular.
It's well worth playing for the art, general vibes(chilling and playing music with friends while getting stuff done and hanging out with your weirdo quantum tardigrade fae is just cozy) and especially the music. Just don't expect it to be the tightest and most polished gameplay experience ever.

SImple, well done, solid sound scape.

The game is *exactly* what it looks like. It's like 2 dollars and about an hour of a fun little incremental game.

I have complicated feelings about this game.

In brief: Really strong first half, kinda middling third quarter, and the last quarter really ran out of steam.

I thoroughly enjoyed my playthrough with my buddies, but towards the end it started to feel far too eclectic and grab-baggy to tell a cohesive narrative when the setting and narrative were the thing that was really making the game stand out.
Item progression is good and satisfying, base building is solid, the storytelling within is good, but it just really felt like past the middle it was getting stretch. The areas were too big, there was too much farming to get specific items that were necessary progression and ultimately are just time gated by universe resets, etc. That and the story turned nonsense by the end. And not in the "oooh the unknowable expanse of reality"(though that's what was being aimed for) sort of way. Instead it just kinda felt like it had no idea where it wanted to go and then hid behind the big catchall of "it's unknowable ooooh spooky!" instead of trying to drive towards a satisfying narrative concluision for what was otherwise a fine game.

Good game, especially worth playing with friends, but my advice is that if you start to feel like the game is slowing down and feeling tedious, open up your game file and sandbox settings and bump up some values and just plow through to the end. The characters are likeable enough for the most part that interacting with them is worthwhile, as is seeing the spectacle of the locations, but it gets to be razor thin on content, so there's not much point in dawdling.

Despite these complaints

Fun little game. Satisfying progression curve with a fun idea at its core that doesn't overstay its welcome.

I mostly only downloaded to see exactly how dark-pattern-ey it was.

The gameplay seems competent, but let's be entirely frank -- this was released with the intention of making a bog-standard, customer-manipulating, battle royale shooter with a twist on the genre. It's got basically everything you might think about in terms of monetization practices for a shooter.

80 USD cosmetic skin pack front and center
Abusive microcurrency conversions and sale packages
Reminders all over to buy buy buy

It's just a vapid attempt for something that *was* kinda interesting and unique to abandon all of that to trend/market chase.

It's embarrassing before you consider the moron selling it walking on stage unironically in a maga hat and quipping like it's 2008 again.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor and *don't* support these industry practices

Let's be entirely honest here.

The automation genre is relatively niche, and if you're looking at buying factorio odds are that you already know full well what factorio is, why you're interested in it, and what it has to offer. Nothing I have to say is going to sway you one way or the other. it is *the* factory game that spawned this entire genre, and it does it better than anyone else bar none.

If you are someone who is looking at the page that has less than 0 awareness of the game, -- it's a game where you make stuff make stuff. If that appeals, buy it, give it a shot for a couple hours, and see why most people leaving reviews have hundreds or thousands of hours.

It's pretty good.

I'm sure the game is perfectly fine as a game, but the prevalence of microtransactions in a full price title from a AAA dev to sell cosmetics in a primarily single player title makes this an absolute non-starter for me.

It's a modern blizzard title. Everyone who knows what that means and cares, won't be surprised. Everyone else who will just buy whatever from their favorite companies irrespective of how that company treats them as a consumer won't care anyways.

Such is life.

Look, everyone knows what this is.

It's a bethesda game set in space. It's Fallout without the worldbuilding. It's Skyrim without the interesting locales.

However, unlike their other games, this one is intentionally populated with a lot of nothing - and what *is* there is almost exclusively procedurally generated and/or template dungeons that are slapped down at random on surfaces. After 20 hours of play, you'll have functionally seen every bit of "unique" content that there is to find in it. For those 20 hours? It's fun enough, if you can get it on a steep steep sale, but otherwise everything it does and tries to be has been done better by other games and more competently.

It's not as bad as people make it out to be, and it's not nearly as good as others say. It's a wholly mediocre bethesda game that really fails to measure up to any of its other titles in its impact, tone, or playability. If you want that, you'll enjoy it well enough.

All of that aside - after minimal updates after launch, Bethesda has decided to try pushing this paid mods nonsense *again* so they can get a slice of the pie that they create by having unpolished or unfinished games. The first bit of content released is a single mission that costs 7 USD. Fully a tenth of the cost of this entire game, for a single mission with the same level of care and polish of the rest of the game. I'd say it's comical, but in honesty it's more *sad* than anything else.

I recommend against this and other games from them. The game companies you grew up with, or spent hundreds of hours invested into, are dead or dying. You can spend your money better elsewhere on games and companies that don't spend 12 years making a game like this.

Removing my old review to update(again again).

The history of the game has been storied, but aside from baffling stumbling points it has continued to trend towards the better and stands as one of the few SaaS Live Service games that isn't full of comically manipulative dark pattern stuff.

it's hella fun at all tiers of play, very sensibly balanced in a way that rewards skill without turning things into endless bullet sponged(Except for the illuminate, but they're new so them sucking is fine until the full faction is released).

It's good.

So far I like it alright, but for starting out trying to learn things, it's very easy to accidentally leave yourself in unwinnable situations very early on by merely trying to experiment to learn how the game works.

Additional difficulty modes, or at least an option to use a simpler, more limited, deck to experiment with core game concepts would be grand.

I wish I could give this a thumbs up confidently, but as it stands, the game poorly explains itself, and easily punishes mistakes like a simple misclick with instant failure. Adding options like "Hey, if you end the day right now you'll lose!" when you have the resources to sell, etc would be rad. As an option in addition to the other stuff I mentioned.

It's...okay right now. And the dev seems receptive. I'm going to tentatively give it an upthumb and see how it goes.