Recent reviews by (>")>somethinghumble<("<)

Wishlisted this title after seeing a streamer play it. The combat looked fun and varied and the gameplay overall as well. Have sunk 20 hours into since getting it on sale and its a mixed bag but overall worth playing. I'm obsessed with the group mechanics of being able to play as each of your members and how they form social structures for getting all the things done. People come and people go, sometimes in a splash of blood. Worst part of the game for me was the crazy "curveball" settings that turn the game into an arcade mod, doing things like making zombies into bombs that blow up and kill you but the follower AI doesn't understand this so it rushes into melee and then your follower is dead. :/ But this is easily fixed by turning off or tweaking the curveball system in game. Bugs are the other plague of this game. You can tell the developers do not play their own game, in 20 hours I've seen these bugs: falling thru the ground when exiting vehicle or changing characters, follower menu completely nonfunction until restart, mission to help survivor with supplies but the survivor is off the map completely inaccessible to the player.
Honestly they need to debug the game before they release it to the public. It makes them look like amateurs putting out unfinished work.

After 35 hours of play I can tell you that this game is a mixed bag. Can't recommend it because it is SO broken. Dialogue is pretty bad sometimes, story is lack luster, characters are a bit flat, custom bike skins but cannot change clothes ever even in torrential rains or inches of snow. Lots of awkward transitions as you show up to your objective but they want it at a different time of day so the camera pans to the sky and you watch as the sun flys by and then your character does the thing, over and over and over again. Kinda broken gameplay there fellas. The worse bug I've found is trying to rescue three hostages kneeling on a rope bridge, killed all the bandits but there was a horde hibernating in a cave below which gave off an enemy warning on minimap, so I couldn't ever rescue the guys they just wouldn't stand up for me. saved and loaded and the horde was still there but the guys vanished, aka the reward for doing the mission. This has happened twice before but only with a single hostage that refused to be rescued even though no enemy can be found remaining anywhere. Really ruins the experience. Could have been a good spin on the Red Dead Redemption type gameplay, but feels like they released it about 30% complete. It's passable and the combat is acceptable once you turn off the aimbot helper. Combat felt challenging on hard mode when the game begins but after you hit level 15 or so your character feels pretty overpowered. Would like to see a survivor mode version of this game that requires food and drink. The story here is very linear even though there are three big camps so far that each have missions for you. Still just forced from one zone to another along their storyline, instead of it feeling like the player is in control of where the story goes. Replay-ablity is what you want, and a player driven storyline would essentially be very different each time you played through.
And whats the deal with collecting ears... seriously don't they know there are TWO ears on each of these heads...

super clunky.
part of the tutorial is running 2KM to a trader...
one of the jobs from the trader is find a box that doesn't exist. or spend 30 minutes digging and running out of breath to find the buried objective... arg.
Better zombies that DayZ which is a backhanded insult as their zombies are complete garbage and haven't gotten better in 10 years.

Latest patch is unbalanced. Aiming and shooting is ten times harder and now forced reduction in ranged even with scope. But not for enemies who can take more than two shots of the best ammo without dying but can kill you in one second with two shots of their spray and pray gun while running. Ya fkd it up guys. This is what happens when the devs don't play their own game. big oof for zievert

Eventually you set up a base for all the loot you find, right? Well I was exercising my dude so much in my home base in game that I started exercising at home to match my avatar. Never had a game do that for me. Lot to learn about discipline and endurance, bettering oneself over time in a wonderfully cumulative way. Lot's of applicable lessons for IRL. I lost long lived characters to a bug, pushing a backwards facing zombie twice made him scoot directly behind me where he got the attack bonus and a lethal oneshot bite through the best armor. :/ Another one due to invisible zombies at the top of stairs, and another to a horde of zombies behind a closed door in a tight space. Life lessons.

Terrible starting experience. Game gives Nvidea error when started that must be closed in order to open the game, every time. Game has very laggy, very basic star field with random irrelvant names when you start, every time. Game starts new players in an environment that will kill you as you look though the options menu, normal and survivor. Game doesn't accept mouse clicks, you must hold down mouse1 for over a second just to get through menus as well as in the gameplay slowing everything down and making it unclear why a simple click doesn't work. Terrible for beginners. Game doesn't have any story and you just start out with a large amount of advanced, non-intuitive gear: jet packs that kill you because you used them, gun that shoots laser, bizarre life support that makes no sense. Your jet pack and your ability to run are both considered life support, but breathing is not. Food is not. Water is not. Maintaining life support is confusing at first and not intuitive. The player is required to manually open multiple pages of inventory to find and figure out that the specific resource must be selected, dragged to the life support icon and dropped. There is a "quick" menu for manually recharging your gear every minute that has gestures to scroll past and other options that impede the selection of the most basic task you must preform manually or your character dies. Why doesn't it just automatically refill as needed? Why doesn't your ship refill your health bar like it refills your environmental hazard protection bar? Saving the game seems unnecessarily complex, can't just save and quit if you get a knock at the door. Nope, either you must abandon your character to die, or be in a location that does not kill your player, or be in a location that allows you to perform save, or else you're going to be loading an autosave from who knows how long ago.

Top notch single player base builder exploration game. Feels smooth and polished for the most part. What really floated my boat was being able to play the mini game of avoiding consuming animals while getting the plant based garden setup. Animals are friends not food! :D

This game allows new players to place thrusters in the oxygen generator slot, AND power it on burning all the fuel in seconds. This game allows you to use the mostly used thruster to launch into space. This game tells you nothing about getting to the other planets. So frustrating to keep getting stuck on the dumbest things. I spent hours looking for copper in this game. My google searches are all "astroneer can't find X" with X being a long list of every item you need in this "game". If experienced gamers have to google every little thing just to make any progress at all it means you've failed.

The camera control! ARRRRRG. It's like fighting a toddler for a melting candy bar. It's all over the place and half the time you have no control and can't see what's happening. This happens often when you have to go underground and the roof is always right over your head. Impossible to just see where your guy is sometimes and he's always centered. I want to love this game but it's just killing me.

Horrible starting experience. The basic things on the first landing just don't work right. Can't print from the first printer. Can't find the starting material clay. Clumsy and clunky click mechanics. Have to micro manage every single oxygen tether stand because they all get placed just outside the range needed. No snapping. FML

They got the buttons all wrong! Thank Gabe you can switch them. TAB is inventory, not Q. Q is for quick switch and since there is only one gun in the game and it also acts as a secondary inventory. R is for rotate, duh. The use button is E not F. I mean come on.

This game is difficult for all the wrong reasons. They tried to get slick and sort of merge your backpack and all items seamlessly into their 3D world, but it backfires horribly. Moving your mouse just one pixel off the weak snap can send an item flying backwards. Sometimes objects just fall through other objects and you have to struggle with camera perspective or disassembly of your base to get the item or else it despawns completely.

One of my favorite little games ever made. No pressure. No attacking or defending, just personal growth, basic economy, finding coins and loot. Climbing to the top, cruising around for fun, digging up holes. The fun never ends, until it plays out after 30 minutes or so. I revisit it maybe once a month for a quick playthrough. So fun.
Minus one star because it promotes killing non-humans for profit. While technically vegan because they're just digital, it still advocates for the practice of treating animals like commodities which they are not, for the same exact reasons that we are not. GG

First person shooter meets tower defense traps. Cute storyline. Addicting gameplay. Fair replayability