Astroneer (2019)

With no bugs and on a capable system, I'd genuinely be considering giving this a 5 star review. Astroneer is a survival / crafting game with the aesthetic of Outer Wilds that absolutely grabbed my attention for 50+ hours over a period of a few weeks. Unfortunately I have to give it a pretty mediocre review because:

• The Switch version is awful. It runs really, really poorly. Not only does the game itself run badly under normal circumstances but if you suspend and continue playing too many times it will just straight up crash.
• The controller interface is really bad. The number of times I accidentally killed myself or just simply did the wrong thing because of the poor interface probably counts in the hundreds. It's also just generally frustrating to do anything complex or precise due to the controls.
• The clunkiness and jankiness of the vehicles is nearly gamebreaking. The buggy handles like an absolute piece of crap. If you screw up underground while digging with a rover it may take you 30+ minutes to figure out how to recover and get back to the surface (if you ever make it).
• The bugs are really bad. There is still an issue where some items and vehicles left out will just DISAPPEAR. Having your work just vanish makes it hard to want to keep playing.

This sounds incredibly negative but I really, really enjoyed my time building up my bases, bouncing across planets and exploring. It's just unfortunate that a few VERY significant issues marred my experience. My biggest advice here would be to play Astroneer if it sounds like something you'd enjoy but DO NOT do it on the Switch. Play on a platform with more power and use a mouse + keyboard. Switch + controller was a significant detriment.

This game has good and bad things going for it. It's a nice, cute vibrant style. Worlds and stuf look nice, but theres still not that much in them. Gathering and locating resources you need is daunting, and overall its very reptitiive.

This game feels like amix of space engineers with that of a survivalcraft-lite game (Makes me think of no man's sky the way you mine in it witha beam tool) I dont think there are monsters, but you do have air, fall damage, and other things to worry about. At night it gets annoyingly dark which curtails your progress..

Essentially the game is about resource extraction from the earth.... There are a good number of raw elements you extract from the earth that can then be (well some) refined or altered in a chemistry lab. There's also a kinda dumb research component gate... where you get research 'points' for random things you find on the planet that you then scan.... which takes time. So essentialy the grind is mine, research, build, repeat.

The trouble is, this take a lot of time, and it isnt very satisfying. As you hoard more and more minerals to things you dont need, you will have a hard time figuring out how to find the ones you actually do... and its not clear what path you should really take to maximize your productivity (resulting in a bit of time wasted)

Ultimately, your goal is to build a rocket, get off the planet, and go to one that has more hazards and less resources (presumable meaning it will take longer to repeat the process) and do this about a half dozen times... Yeah that's not winning me over.

The UI is intersting and experimental and super minimal. I overall liked it and feel it works well enough for this game. I do wish there was more info in game, about the research and what you can build and what research unlocks actually do, or what size platform they must be installed on. The game also really needs ladders IMo, because the way your mining beam tends to ddig... there are going to be some huge DEEP holes, and its really not that easy to dig your way back up on a slope.

|I'm unsure who the target audience is for. This feels like a children's game at times, but its not easy (or clear) it also doesn't really have the substance to it that games like space engineers or satisfactory offer. Theres no combat. and exploration is fairly limited to discovering lootable broken space vehciles (sometimes with working upgrades) and new deposits of materials.

Its still fun for a night of cozy gaming. I really liked the way you deploy oxygen lines you have to run back to.

tldr; super grindy, slow paced survicalcraft lite game that is tedious and limited in scope of what it offers.

First of all: this game is visually gorgeous.

It is a sandboxy survival game, so it doesn't offer much in terms of history, but it is sincerely fun to play (except for the getting enough points to unlock things, a slow, grindy and annoying process), and making progress is surprisingly satisfactory.

I have played it long enough for now and it can't give me much else, but I could see myself playing it again in the future. I do recommend it.

I'm only a few hours in, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

For an EA game, it's surpisingly stable and solid on a fundamental game-engine level. I've had one CTD, and I've lost a few materials to bugs. I've also glitched through the map plenty, but that's a simple fix when the entire map is terraformable!

I would say I've gotten as far as the mid-game at this point, and I know there are quite a few advanced features I have yet to get to. That said, there is a lot of obvious room for expansion of crafting recipes, resources, tools, buildings, etc.

After everything above, I am highly pleased with Astroneer so far, and I am already a die hard fan and rooting strong for the devs to keep expanding such an already well made game.