Monday, February 10, 2020

Astroneer



A fun miner/builder with cute graphics and an engaging power management system. The first 5 hours were enough fun to encourage another 5 hours of gameplay. After crashing on a planet you begin work on a base of operations by mining for resources, conducting research on "stuff", and building various machines to process/power/construct your way to escape - at which point you fly to another planet/moon and start again with different materials. These new materials then need to be brought together with materials from other location to make even more complicated machinery and it was at this point I lost interest.

Essentially you are restarting the game in a new location, but it's a lot easier since you have access to materials from your original base. The core gameplay doesn't change as you expand and since mining/exploring wasn't that interesting to begin with, simply consisting of walking/driving around and sucking up the stuff you needed from underground, there isn't really a lot more to see and do. The lure of researching new things is deadened when outcomes devolve into "same as last tier, but bigger or faster".

Possibly a game best suited to a younger audience or a more casual one which has grown bored of Minecraft and doesn't like the look of more complex games like Space Engineers or Avorion.


VERDICT: Sci-fi themed building and mining that turns tedious real fast.

Final Word: One for younger or more casual players. Well made but quite shallow.

(game link)