Recent reviews by eXophobia

1) Performance is abyssmal. I changed the settings around a lot and even on lower resolution, with demanding features deactivated, with or without upscaling on performance. Even if I find something that feels playable at 80-90fps it just randomly drops down 30 in the middle of fights, or when a zombie does something quickly, or when some other event fires.

2) Graphics are .... lacking. It overall looks nice, sure. But soon you notice the details and then the list of things that just shouldn't be becomes very long. From the weird see-through hair in the main menu (typical for bad upscaling implementations), to extremely bad fire vfx, flickering lights, dynamic lights that suddenly start swirling and changing colours like disco lights, random blocky shadows and jagged edges like a 90s game whenever dlss feels like it.
Map design is no exception, assests might float freely around. Walking through the countryside near some hill, the hillside might just stop in the air instead the ground. This is not a rare sight.

3) Movement is ....weird. Considering any modern engine does that part perfectly on its own. But it's like a DeadIsland 1, the original, just even much worse because slower. Especially when fighting the level geometry on top, like the hillsides on the open maps or some obstacle that looks like you can climb it but surprise, can't.

4) Item management is awful. I love immersive huds and features. But I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how much I have of some item, trying to pinpoint something on the wheel menu to see if I can get rid of it. Considering the delays of these interactions and the sluggishness of the performance, this alone becomes a major time waster during every mission. And might even mean death, trying to pick up something, or not being able to share quickly with teammates or fighting this chaotic menu during an attack.

5) Permadeath sounds intriguing if the game remains accessible. Spoiler: It doesn't. Levelling up a character is does not happen in 1-2 games. But losing it is simple even if you count on teammates carrying you (which the playerbase eventually won't do, as with every game in this genre). You might miss the extraction by a second for some reason - still alive, but character gone. You might have to leave - leave the game, lose the character. There is no pause, so if you have diarrhea better not commit to playing a round unless you don't care about losing that character. You might do everything right, and just get stuck in some weird geometry of the map and not be able to outrun the zombies near you.

6) Multiplayer only. In case you wondered, there are no bots. There is no singleplayer option. No matter how many people, the game swarms you with neverending zombies eventually so that you won't reach extraction alone (although you may save your character in case too many team members die).

tl;dr: The game combines many of the more interesting features that have popped up over the years in zombie shooters. Has large maps with interesting objectives. And surprisingly, even a good soundtrack.
Surprisingly because the execution of everything is just so, so awful. I believe they could spend years polishing the game before it reaches an acceptable state.

Alright the devs asked us to leave a review for some boosting in the Discord. Stationeers managed to get a place among my favourite games so let's do this.


Development and communications

I've joined the Early Access quite a while ago and development has been a bit chaotic for a while. With the game being a passion project for them and growing interest from a faithful community they seem to have found a much stronger sense of direction now. The current plans for the future sound big, although I keep my enthusiasm in check since they dropped planned features in the past without announcement already.
One thing that many that followed the development may have given a wrong impression (like me) was their almost 6 months of silence. Before they used to post regularly about what's going on with the development with new stuff almost every week. During these 6 months they worked to improve the base game experience and change the terrain. It was obvious to anyone following the Beta Builds and they communicated through Discord. To everyone outside this tiny circle however the project seemed dead. At least now they came back stronger than before.


Pros

People that like building factories or are into industrial tech have a few games available today. Satisfactory and Factorio for building giant producer chains or ONI for an intricate simulation of all kinds of physical parameters to manage gas/fluid flow and heat exchange between basically everything.
Stationeers sits between those two worlds. Plays like a 1st person survival game, but confronts the player with typical engineering problems in terms of managing heat and settings up electrical and logical systems.
The game has very complex and intricate systems to explore and powerful ways on how to deal with them, most importantly anyone with basic programming skills can solve a lot of this through logic (similarly like we could in Minecraft, just more advanced).

For me personally, building up such a base, managing atmospheres and automating systems simply does not get boring. And many will certainly approve that this works well in multiplayer.


Cons

Complexity may be nice, but new players will get hit in the face by this game harder than by KerbalSpaceProgram. Starting in the default survival mode, despite the guidance systems they introduced, I doubt many will manage to stay alive. There is an urgent need for an early safe place for new players.
Controls are certainly unconventional. But I honestly can't tell anymore at this point. I'm just very used to how everything works ingame, having a hard time to imagine how a traditional inventory system would feel like.
Sounds, while appropriate for the setting might seem a bit barebones. Similarly the graphics are completely fine, but overall don't have much to offer. the redeeming factor about this is, that the performance is fine unlike other games in this genre.
Speaking about performance, I have read many times from other players that large bases and multiplayer can suffer from performance issues. But can't offer much personal experience on that other than mention it.


What to expect

So the current plans announced for the future really do sound big to me. Not sure if they will be able to deliver or if the quality of it will be sound. But I do expect that even if it's half of what I'd want it to be, it would still offer a lot of fun. For comparison we can take the rocket system, which to me personally is still a rather new feature since I never really used them. It seems half finished because the UI for it is separated from everything else and poor, while the rocket basically doesn't exist once it's launched. And yet it's a lot of fun because you have to build all the rocket components yourself and specialise it for its mission.
Among the announced features are:
Exploration and need for multiple bases with the stated goal that players should have to find ways to transport resources between their outposts. They plan to bring back rovers and add shuttles for this purpose (though I sincerely hope driving/flying control will be improved significantly for this).
Space flight. I vaguely remember they talked about wanting to make rockets boardable to fly to an asteroid or maybe start on another planet. Can't remember the details honestly and doesn't seem necessary for the base game experience in my opinion.

Demo review:
Not a big fan of most unit designs. Generally art work often seems a bit generic to me and could use some more polish to better blend together. Sound design is okay, mostly for the nostalgic factor but the music became repetitive very quickly, especially in strongholds. From the available factions I struggled to find something I actually wanted to play, because Dungeon/Underground units didn't appeal to me, Necromancy and Schism trait didn't seem impactful enough, ....

And yet I wanted to play some more. Especially in a direct comparison to homm3, I love the items and skill synergies. The alternative unit attacks and upgrades. Even more options through the law screen for passive bonuses. And while so far spell animations had been boring, I like the spell effects especially map spells. So yeah, some mixed feelings but overall not bad.

Tried the demo and was curious if they manage to succeed where others have failed in recent years.
Liked the music and UI (could adjust it very nicely to read well on my large screen). Didn't like the animations immediately but didn't play long enough to form a hard opinion on it.
And that's already the main issue: I couldn't actually play the demo. It crashes 10-20 minutes into the tutorial. Gave up after two attempts. Couldn't find a sandbox to toy around instead. Wasn't interested in the first campaign mission because it already started at the beginning how I don't have to take care of the economy.
Will probably check it out again once it pops up again in my feed or during a sale sometime in the future.


tl;dr: Not recommended because crashes consistently 10 minutes into the game.

Open weekend was very eye opening.
Gameplay could be fun and has some neat ideas. Lots of details (different weapons, skills, perks and team combinations for teams), QoL and silly features (special effects and attacks on props, some out of combat interactions for fun), not just a prophunt but a team-based game of hunters vs ghosts (with different builds ranging from solo to team-based, offensive and passive, setting traps or mobility).

As usual for these kinds of games is heavily clouded by player interaction. First couple games usually ended with the enemy team jeering various slurs in the general voice chat after the match. The only measures you can take are muting the person or leaving the game.

Cannot change my resolution. Supposedly it can be changed after switching display mode to windowed and back, which isn't the case. So the game runs in half-resolution and everything is blurry. This is an absolute deal-breaker and I don't need to think further about reviewing this game.

Glad I got to try it on a free weekend. This game may have been released years ago, but is definitely not finished.

I love the idea of it, the atmosphere, terminal stuff (I wish one could do more with the Terminal; but also have easier methods available for players who dislike it). I like having to stop and think for a moment, to close doors behind me and reinforce a position.

Not bad: yes, it's not badly executed. It could be worse. But it could easily be much better. There's a lot of basic stuff missing you would expect. Like any form of progression (there's many different weapons, but what's their purpose?), any form of specialisation (someone bringing a medkit, someone else for hacking, someone a turret - instead, everyone has a defensive weapon).

Multiplayer is the core essence of the game, yet it is horribly implemented. Host leaves the lobby? Everyone leaves the lobby now, because the migration doesn't happen. Right now is a free weekend and it's nigh impossible to find just 1 person to play the game with (I have found, in total, 4 people today and was more successful with bots).

Privacy: The game has a neat option to copy a lobby ID and anyone who has it in their clipboard automatically gets an invite button ingame. cool feature huh? That also means the game scans your clipboard every time you are in the main menu without notifying you. Cool feature!

Animations: This one puts me off the most. Most are fine and there's a even a 1st person playermodel. But your steps don't connect to the floor. Neither do those of the enemies. They just glide and slide over the ground. Come on this is just so bad, haven't seend that since L4D - who decided to go to release with that?
Adjacent issue to that are combat animations. Sometimes shooting/hitting enemies doesn't seem to have any impact - compare this with games that do it right, like L4D2 or Vermintide/Darktide.


I would consider playing it just for the coop value, missions and atmosphere. But definitely not spending big money on a half finished product. And especially not planning on getting this game just for myself.

Played it on a free weekend on 2.Dec '23. My conclusion is straight forward so I'm keeping this short:

* Great environments, only bothered by blurry textures popping in and out. My eyes are feeling strained after my first session in the game.
* Brightness is another factor. On my first mission I couldn't even find the exit of the lander because slight shadows appeared pitch black to me.
* Text in main menu and ingame almost unreadable. It is tiny and blurry. No options to change this.
* Game didn't give me any intro. Why do I need to craft prehistoric tools when landing on the planet on purpose? Surely could find out by watching some videos or doing some reading online, but I kind of think the game should tell me that.
* I started the game and immediately got the "Tutorial completed" achievement. Ok I guess? Decided to start the gunrange "tutorial". Have to walk quite far to get there. Don't know what to do. Get killed by a wolf. Respawn, walk again, pick up the weapons. It says I need to interact with something to progress, but can't find it. Die due to a storm.

These are the main points why I don't want to continue playing this at the moment and giving a negative recommendation. There are more things that bother me, they are minor in comparison but add up and don't help make a better case for the game.

Atmosphere is awesome. Fighting too, as expected and hoped. But that's already all I can say, of 6 games I tried to play, I was able to finish 1. Every other game crashed before the end.

Performance is garbage on my 2070. I can choose between 1) 40fps and less, 2) 60fps with highly pixelated environments or 3) 80+fps with fsr, which makes distance environments looks very weird. not quite pixelated, yet bad still.

Still: Would wish to play it more and see all the class progressions. But I definitely won't buy it at release for full price considering what I experienced.

Aside from the unskippable intro, unskippable best-play after each match, faster respawns than I can reload and the obvious copy-paste of ModernWarfare2 (2):

The game is lacking in basically every regard. Be it movement, weapons, viewmodel, map design, graphics, netcode, .... you think something and be sure it's at best half-assed implemented. This game has SUCH a long way to go that I don't hold any hope for this to be ever become anything else than a lowkey cashgrab attempt. Releasing a game in 2022 means it has to meet at least some standards - even Back4Blood ist more polished than this.

Full disclosure for bias: I know the developer. Steam tells me I have to include in the text whether I have received additional compensation. Yes. In form a nice flair/reward on this review and probably a free burger sometime (I did pay for the DLC myself though).

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I'm a fan, definitely! I've seen a few iterations of the game during the beta and it had some interesting quirks. But now that it's finished I haven't seen a bug yet. A bug-free release? Impossible
The pacing starts slow but stress sets in quickly as your screen fills with enemies. Hard? Of course, that's by design.

• Graphics seem simplistic at first glance. But the shading and lightning of the units are well picked and help distinguishing targets quickly.
  
• Weapons are plenty. There's a cool selection of weapons and upgrades and I honestly could think of more that would be quite fitting. See personal remarks later.
  
• Progression has a nice balance. There's enough incentive for multiple reruns not just to get better, but also to unlock starting equipment. It also helps guiding how things work without overwhelming you with everything (That's what the enemies are for).
  
• Enemies start out simple and you'd usually expect units with different behaviour. Here the behaviour comes much more from how they spawn on you in different patterns.
  
• F2P? F2P!
  
• Developer interaction. It's always great when developers communicate. Through the workshop and his Discord he took a lot of advice from player on gameplay and weapons and he checks all his channels more than he should.

• UI honestly surprised me. From a single dev I expected something much more simple. But sometimes colours or buttons lack some contrast, making navigation a bit hard. Not a big deal though.
  
• Music is scarce. I do like the looming heartbeat chosen for the background music though. And it does fit the slow speed of the player.
  
• Speed of the player. Okay so I would have expected much faster movement and a trippy soundtrack. Kind of like Neurovoider. But it also proved to be quite interesting in way as it needs more strategical play despite the large number of enemies.
  
• Limits of features. Sadly there's no multiplayer. Read personal remarks for the why.

So, knowing that Amped did this alone would be impressive enough for me but there's actually more. He created most of the game within a very short timespan of a couple of weeks and still managed to get enough polish on most aspects, while finding a nice balance (In terms of gameplay, graphics, etc). So this is also the reason why there's no multiplayer (yet?), since that would have required much more work for the release.

I was surprised that Amped is releasing this as free to play now. Considering that he traded sleep for developing this. I actually advised him to charge about 5€ (sorry!). The idea to offer a "support the dev" DLC was good in that sense. The points you get don't unlock everything at once, yet might overwhelm a new player. My advice is to play a few rounds before spending it on upgrades.


EDIT: updated tl:dr;