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Recent reviews by Kitet

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5 people found this review helpful
206.7 hrs on record
Bought after I saw 'Let's Game It Out' Youtuber wreak havoc in this game. I thought 'it has to be fun since he committed so many hours to it'.

Bottom line - it wasn't as fun as much as I thought it would be. Nowhere near, in fact. It takes exorbitant amount of time to do anything. Most of the things you do is edit terrain (well, in simpler terms, dig for resources, mostly downwards). But terrain editing is impaired. Digging down is still easy, but It's very hard to achieve desired surfaces and very easy to destroy one's own work. imagine spending an hour flattening out immediate area that would host your base and accidentally destroying that flatness by missing a click on an item lying around you wanted to pick up to your backpack. It's the same key/mouse combination but reversed order. Brilliant, I tell you. Not to mention how some tools work needed a lecture on some fan-made wiki. I'm no Einstein, but I don't remember a time where I couldn't figure a game on my own.

You can build a base, gather resources in the field and move them to that base to do something with them. You move on foot or later use transportation for moving things. And here come most of gotchas - you can build a mobile platform, heck, even a whole base, but when you go to another planet and return, you'll have to dig up your mobile things from under the ground. If you don't do it immediately, you'll have to go deeper every time you travel between planets. I made a choice to do whole-mobile bases and I was constantly digging my stuff up. That made up almost 50% of time I spent on this game.

After a while I was only playing to get every achievement... which, in the end, wasn't possible, because there are no public servers to join, but that's not important now. It took over 150 hours to do these achievements. Since I like to complete my games, I wanted to do it, but it was painful. After all, game has no goal except doing achievements. You have to set a goal yourself. Otherwise you'd buy the game, launch it and put it away after an hour or two.

There are missions but you can opt not to do them. Most of the rewards are things you can make yourself anyway, except for two blueprints that are quest rewards only. Some other rewards are measly amounts of Bytes (blueprint unlock currency) which you can make more of and faster by setting up a research platform, preferably mobile. 99% of rewards are totally pointless. I'll admit doing mission chain involving creatures early, at least partially, will allow moving anywhere without having to constantly be tied to oxygen generating equipment, stationary or mobile. This is at the cost of 1/3 of inventory space, but still.

Game has automation, which is not needed to have any achievements nor to get to the 'late game'. You can set it up and use it, but I didn't want to waste time I didn't need to, expecially since it isn't fun and isn't needed. I do love Satisfactory, but Astroneer doesn't deserve any time from me to do a fab of any kind.

I do not recommend anyone to buy this game - those who like space survival can buy other, more fun games.
Posted June 8, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
149.7 hrs on record (33.0 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
Not bad, although at this stage of development it has low replay value. I have 33 hours only waiting for the end. I see myself spending at most 10 hours more. I could speed this up by building more and more things, but I'll see about that. Still, I had fun.

I could compare this game to Planet Nomads. Story is different but the general play is the same. Planet Nomads has some room for creativity and has vehicles, while Planet Crafter is just slapping structures anywhere you wish on the planet with not much care required. At this point it's way more laid back than any survival-building game out there. Again, I still liked it. Hope for more content in the future.
Posted April 2, 2022.
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3 people found this review helpful
0.0 hrs on record
I got this for the scenario. I started playing Frostbite, but I got stuck. I deem this DLC has broken scenario and I will describe why I think so, expect spoilers.

I play slow. Whatever I do I check multiple times, prepare, climb every ladder, go down every hole. My RPG spirit takes over and makes me do it. So then, after walking wherever, going about finding hidden stuff and then doing some building, I decided to progress the story and I found out some underground structures, which I earlier saw from afar shining with lights in the dark, are no longer powered. I used grinder to enter such structures and then I found out I could not progress, so I had to build power generation for them. Then, scenario tells me I have two ways to progress - one is to retrieve some 'item' from top of a mountain, which was a two-blocks structure, but I already grinded a key block of this structure, a timer, so it was pointless and impossible to complete. The other way was to press some buttons and destroy part of the fab I was in with explosive. This explosive was set to detonate using a timer. I've already grinded that timer also, because when I see one I suspect a trap and I grind it if it's set to do something like detonate a warhead. At this point, my scenario could not be progressed, because I haven't a slightest idea what would trigger completion - exploding warhead, pressing a button or triggering that nonexistent timer.

Another thing was I saw some building parts for the first time in SE - safe zones. I thought they would prevent me from grinding away at the grid but they didn't. Some audio message played at some point, hinting at inability to enter a grid by grinding but I was able to do it, so they either don't work or once unpowered and re-powered, they lose the effect.

So to summarize: If you go too slow, you'll have to deal with key grids with depleted batteries and reactor fuel, and if you grind scenario grids too much you'll get stuck. I wanted a DLC with an interesting scenario, I got this crap I'm unable to finish and unwilling to start again in the near future.

BTW: I don't think weather is supposed to change from sunny to bizzard in a split second.
Posted February 10, 2022.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
1 person found this review funny
13.8 hrs on record
Warning! Spoiler-full review!
Game can be summarized in 2 sentences:
1: You start from asteroid, grow by absorbing other stellar bodies to ultimately become a black hole, then big bang and start it all over again, with one pass potentially taking as low as 20 minutes or your entire life, whatever you wish.
2: There are some tasks, some more time consuming than others, built around the little substance mentioned above.

That's all. That's the game in it's entirety. If there were no tasks it would be just a physics engine test. I don't remember how I got this game but I regret whatever I spent. Instead I could get a bag of toffee candy, which would make me way more happy and last longer.
Posted August 18, 2021.
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No one has rated this review as helpful yet
127.8 hrs on record (100.4 hrs at review time)
It was great. Took me 100 hours to beat it but I choose to do some grinding in order to build bases left and right. Can't say there was a moment I thought it's tedious. I had pretty decent fps, which is brilliant, considering how some other open-world games stutter nowadays whatever I do, like No Man's Sky. There were 3 or 4 bugs in 'unexpected behavior' category, which resulted in a minor material loss each but there weren't any that would ruin my gameplay. Music was average, not enough tunes to fill the silence without being repetitive.

Anyway, I had great time. I wish anyone the same.
Posted July 24, 2021.
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11 people found this review helpful
16.0 hrs on record
Well, I beat this game in campaign mode and 100% completion in 15 hours. Honestly I bought it thinking I can experience something new and maybe learn about train stations, but in the end I only got to feel for all the janitors out there cleaning various public infrastructure. I didn't learn anything. Here's why - in this game, 90% things player needs to do is clean. Pick up trash, turn any damaged devices into trash so they can pick it. After that clean the walls, clean the floor. The remaining 10% are some tasks specific to particular train stations that make this game less mudane. After first three locations I was already tired of this game, but since I saw that each station can be completed 100% relatively easy and in predictable time, I thought I would do it so no one can tell me I hate-review the game after only playing it for 3 hours. Bottom line is the game stops being fun pretty quickly and becomes a chore. I should mention there was one station that required to clean toxic waste, it differed somewhat from all the others... but the TOXIC barrels had RADIOACTIVE warning signs on them, that's NOT QUITE the right symbol.

Aside cleaning, players can furnish the sation as they see fit. There are guidelines as to what kind of item one needs to place and where so there's some bit of freedom.... BUT if one visits some toilet and needs to replace some equipment, one can see how the pre-existing (not removable) parts differ in size to what the player has at their disposal. It's quite impossible to renovate properly if you can't fit the parts in their rightful place. This put me off, but there's more. Stations have certain style and players are inclined to follow it, because it would look awful to place PCV seat bench next to the mahogany one with cast or hammered legs. That is if a player can. Unfortunately stations are equipped with devices that are unavailable to the player. One can't replace damaged or defective part because it doesn't exist in the shop. When I saw this I practically stopped caring how and where I put anything, I just wished to get to 100% and be done with the game.

Money. Player gets it, and if they don't do something deliberately outrageous, like purchase and immediately sell items in the shop repeatedly (yes, items sell at the percentage of asking price) one can't go bankrupt. There's also nothing, aside from the station furnishing, to invest or waste money on. After first two renovations I didn't care how much money do I have or how much I spend. I started the game with 5000 and ended with 540000 or more. No janitor makes this much. And this game is nothing else than janitor simulator, it just happens to be train station janitor. I don't mean anything bad by that, I just want the thing to be properly labelled.

Tools. One gets to upgrade any tool they own using 'stars'. Stars are awarded for completing renovations. In other words, Stars are the secondary currency. Pretty lame, if I'm being honest, because in the real world one doesn't need a diploma to buy a mop, one just needs MONEY. Whoever got the idea of buying the proper tools with something other than money should rethink their career asap. Anyway, back to the Stars - one can get from 1 to 5 stars per station, so from the start one knows how many stars there are in the game. The resulting thing is that one can't upgrade all their tools when they want or when they have money to do so, they must do that when the developers allow them. It's ridiculous. Moreover, when I got to upgrade the last tool, I COULD NO LONGER USE IT. That's because I finished all the stations that actually needed tools. That's right, one can upgrade the last tool after finishing the second to last station. The last station is just for furnishing and doesn't require any cleaning. There you have it. Long Live STARS!

I was also annoyed by the segregated thrashcan whose entrance can be pretty easily clogged by weirdly placed trash, leaving the inside empty. Thrash thrown in the thrashbin gets glued inside and can't be moved, so one should be extra careful when arranging items inside. OR don't use the segregated one.

The technical side deserves praise though. I found no bugs, no hangs, no crashes, everything was working smoothly. One can't call graphics revolutionary, but it's aproppriate and doesn't hurt the eyes. If anything, some textures feel flat, and that's all I could pick on. I wanted to write there's practically no atmospheric effects, but then there was the snow level when I saw some fog and maybe snowdust on the mountain slopes, so that comment went to the bin. There are effects, just very scarce.
As for the music - it was aproppriate. Light and pleasant, if it wasn't there It would get annoying rather fast, so I was content with it. Only thing I would like in regards to the music is for the game to have more of it. There are not enough tracks for player to not get the impression of repetitiveness. SFX deserves only short comment - it was also aproppriate. No glitches, no unnerving sounds but nothing too fancy either, so that's all I can say.

So the final word - I won'd recommend this game to anyone except to people wanting to experience how it is to be a janitor, who occasionally tinkers with trains' undercarriages. That's all the game is, really.
Posted October 12, 2020. Last edited October 12, 2020.
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A developer has responded on Oct 13, 2020 @ 3:37am (view response)
5 people found this review helpful
6 people found this review funny
3,331.7 hrs on record (968.8 hrs at review time)
Not worth a review. I played nearly 1000 hours only to stumble again and again on the small things, inconveniences, annoyances and finally bugs. I will probably play some more, but today, as I finally thought 'I HAVE to play', not that 'I WANT to play', I decided to write few words about my experiences. I have no VR and play with no mods whatsoever, so read with that in mind. I want to stress that fact because apparently mods can make one's live easier, but hey, this is a review of the game and a picture of the dev studio, not the community.

Aside from bugs, one has to constantly learn what doesn't work. You'd think you can put your crap into a box and return to get it, only to find that the box is there but it's contents were lost, this kind of thing. That you discover a place only to find it later being 'unknown building'. It's tiring after a time, I'm surprised for how long I put up with it. I guess there was something else I wanted to do that made me play and play still. Finally there's nothing more I want to do and I wish no one else has to pay for a trip to this masochistic adventure. Unless they like that sort of thing, whatever.

Setting aside all the annoyances, there comes the story. It is a mixture of technology, myths, mysticism and magic. Many times I felt it's on the level of a low-grade japanese light novel or web manga. Fortunately one can just click through and ignore it. I tried to play once ignoring the story completely from the start (i.e. not going to do what the initial quest was about, repairing the crashed ship and all that) but the story adjusted to my actions and again forced itself on me when I acquired another starship, so yeah, wasted some hours for no reason.

Finally there are bugs and they are long standing. Surprising is the fact that devs release content updates but are not willing to fix bugs. Unwilling? or maybe Unable? both ways is bad anyway. I reported myself 25 bugs during 4 months I played and out of that fixed were 2 (two). Things like game exiting in certain situations or plain hang for no reasons are still there, so be warned. Some don't encounter them, some do more than others, especially AMD Radeon owners (like me).

So that's it. I had my intermittent times of fun, I mostly fought to do things the way I want but was bitten by the game, got hyped then disappointed, you know, the standard... or is it?
Posted August 14, 2020.
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1 person found this review helpful
21.3 hrs on record (5.2 hrs at review time)
It's a long time since I was able to immerse myself in a game and just plainly gape my mouth at the beauty and detail of the world I got into. This game is one (if not the only one) of the few I played recently that:
  • I hadn't noticed any bugs,
  • I didn't wonder why does it stutter or randomly lower fps,
  • I wasn't forced to mute sound or yank headphone jack off from my PC,
  • I didn't have to ponder how to progress because a scenario locked itself somewhere or a goal did not get achieved despite checking out all the requirements,
  • Hasn't eaten all my and my neighborhood's RAM just to display start menu,
  • I didn't eat supper because I got too immersed.
This is extremely important, this list. There's no pleasure in gaming if you just get distracted left and right because of some stupid game behavior or its programmer apparent incompetence. Recently I was somehow plagued with new and old games that fulfilled at least three points of the above list in their affirmative version. It's horrible, I thought what has this gaming world come to?!? These were almost all the games on Unity game engine and either got me frustrated or ragequitting because of this. I'd like to send their developers a "Look! this is a properly made game" postcard with the picture of theHunter on it. That's my whole comment on the technical aspect of theHunter: Call of the Wild. It seems flawless. I would kiss all the devs if they were women and there was no pandemic going on around.

Now the hunting - I know nothing about it. Zilch. I decided to purchase theHunter because it popped up on steam discount as an open world game bacause I played other open world games. By the way, Steam client devs seem to be thinking that if a person one day wanted an apple he/she would want an apple everyday from now on... certainly not a banana, for a change... Anyway I was full of negative expectations about theHunter and worry if I'd ever be able to hunt anything, but after first launch and some awe at the scenery I thought to myself "All right, I'll at least be able to wander around and soak in the not so unfamiliar surrondings, together with sounds of nature". After a while I was positively surprised at how easy it is. Some woman gave me instructions through the phone (she's in-game woman, not my acquaintance IRL), and here I was taking down my first deer. I need to point out that I hate the hunting in real life and so called "hunters" too, including rangers, but I will play the game. Much so that I hate war and violence and people who commit or instigate them, but I still play FPS or war-strategy games.
Apart from hunting itself and ability to wander about, I like how almost everything nature offers in the visited area is described with more or less detail in the ingame encyclopedia. You track a deer and you can open encyclopedia and learn few facts about it. You can also learn about the area (reserve) and fauna that inhabits it. Also along with knowledge you get to hear various animals talking, not only the "game" as they call it, but birds and insects too. Weather sounds need a mention too - wind and light rain sounds are beautifully complementing stunning visuals. From the learning perspective I hope sounds of the fauna are truly and accurately reproduced, I wouldn't know. They DO sound beautiful.
I find the perk system weird though. You level up as a hunter, like a mage in some RPG. You also get skills/perks with experience... I wonder about that. I understand gradual access to better / various equipment though, which is a feature too. Anyway, important thing to take away from this rant of areview is that the game gave me only positive experiences, except at the menu - ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ follows:

What I HATE about theHunter (or rather their developers / producers / piblishers):
  • Despite being Swedish studio, has American style EULA with stupid "publisher reserves the right to take away the game from you", I think this won't fly in EU, dudes, vide Microsoft's case, but we'll see. I feel somehow insulted though.
  • Needles pushing of DLCs in the form of "You don't have required DLC for this content" messages. If I don't have then don't show it, damn you! I accidentally switched the reserve to another by clicking some left arrow and I was presented with this tasteless message until I scrolled through all the reserves until I got back to the original one. Bleh.
  • That's all but i needed to make three points cuz two looks too few.

So here you have it. I always mention in my reviews that I'm a single player who doesn't have motivation to commit to online communities, so theHunter is bang-on for me. I think other single players will be content with it too. Go have a taste of the european air, if you can't go out IRL. I played over 5 hours in first and one go for the time being, but I will Definitely (capital D) play again, if PUBLISHERS DON'T TAKE THE GAME AWAY FROM ME, that is.
Posted March 30, 2020.
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1 person found this review helpful
2 people found this review funny
1.1 hrs on record
I'm gonna be serious here. Don't be deceived, this isn't a game. It's a study on how long a person can repeat senseless actions with no hope of a reward, all while being "motivated" to action by ever-present personnel with sticks, doing what personnel with a stick does... in some mafia game or in a prison.

From the technical perspective it has good character animation and pleasant music, fit for the arctic theme. Other than that it has so many faults it's hard to list them. To name the most prominent - it uses what I would call just-in-time scene loading? Things like buildings and scenery that are far away are loaded when they are about to come into view. This makes the game stutter heavily or even at times I saw my character continuing action while scene on my monitor turned still, until I hit some buttons. If it was a game, it would be unplayable. If someone wants to see a tech demo of unreal 4 in snow environment, then be their guest. Otherwise don't waste bandwidth for download.
Posted March 28, 2020.
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20 people found this review helpful
5 people found this review funny
46.5 hrs on record (6.5 hrs at review time)
Early Access Review
I know this is eeeeeeeeearly access, but I want to share my opinion on the current state. I had the game on the wishlist for a long time and people were reviewing it both negatively and positively, but I thought I could live with all the negatives. Turns out I can't. Mainly because noone described how the game feels from a standalone single player's viewpoint. I am coming from playing many space survival games like space engineers, empyrion, planet nomads, avorion and so on, so I kind of wanted something new. After all, who makes a similar game when there's tons of them on steam already, right?

I am a single player and I think other single players will not find this game enjoyable. It says it is different from empyrion or space engineers but only slightly. At this point it differs only in that it DOES NOT have some features.

I played the introductory scenario and I'm physically tired. It is literally tiresome. I can't describe why, maybe because everything is happening so slow? You have many points of interest to visit but they all feel too much alike. When you visit two or three ruined buildings to loot containers, you lose track which one was already visited. Containers - these hold mostly nothing or some crap. Occasionally you get some more valuable loot, and occasionally means one in 100 containers. Otherwisa all you find is the basic crap, as if all the previous residents were unclean (I found many dirty shirts) dirt and scrap collectors. Anyway I never got to build anything because from gameplay perspective I was already fed up because how long it takes to accomplish something. Maybe it's fun in multiplayer, but not in single. The introductory scenario allowed me to take a glimpse of what this game is like and today it had a big update, so seeing that and the update content, where it is going with things, made me lose interest in future development of this game.

Graphics are just so-so. I saw how it looks in full detail but was not impressed. Again, the difference from other games of kind was not noticeable in this field either. I was hovewer forced to turn detail to MEDIUM and after a while to LOW. I was surprised that in an empty room I could get less that 20 fps, even on the LOW setting. Something is really not right. I was playing some games on Unity lately, including the 2019 one, which I consider a resource hog, but they were running smoothly with occassional hiccups. Also loading times - it was said somewhere that you get no loading screens, but this doesn't mean game doesn't need to load resources - it aims to do it on the fly, at which job it fails - I got multiple freezes upon some scenery change, like landing on a planet. I have a decent gaming machine and of course the game is on SSD, but it still managed to freeze-load. Still not there yet in this field too.

AI is weird in a weird way, meaning it's not even AI. Monster hunters will be disappointed. Apart from weird and monotous movement, is enemy diversity and per-planet variation. You get none of that. I played 6 hours and saw one type of enemy on two planets I visited.

Sounds are low quality, especially the looping is bad. Reminds me of a scratched CD skipping. Music is unbearable. Certainly not fit for space game. It is at most a minute or two track that loops. One time I got somewhere and the music changed suddenly to some dramatic tune, I was nervously looking around expecting multitude of enemies inbound and tight combat... but it turned out it was this area's default music. Another time I was flying some ship and had country music blasting. Loud, skippy, fit for country music festival for the half-deaf. Made me yank the headphone cable off the pc.

So all in all, I feel very tired having tasted this game. I will probably still look at it in... twelve years time. After all, I want to see what has become of my money... or maybe when I retire and have nothing to do in my life and they still didn't abandon it then yet...
Posted March 27, 2020. Last edited March 27, 2020.
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A developer has responded on Oct 13, 2023 @ 9:28am (view response)
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Showing 1-10 of 27 entries