Recent reviews by ::Egan::

I liked it, it was short, but cool. I liked that some levels had the timer, like you felt like you were helping the soldiers. I got it on sale for 75% off and it was super worth that price.

It's fun, lots of exploring to do, some threatening vibes but not scary. Good immersion. Good graphics/style. The first 30 hours were great. It's a LOT better than it was when I first played it in Early Access some years ago. Genuinely a great game now.


Top 3 best things:
- Exploring around the first 20 hours or so, constantly finding new things. Finding tons of habitat parts, new creatures, new items to pick up, new crafting recipes, new wrecks to explore, new plants, new depths. Super cool. In general the progression was great, upgrading the habitat, upgrading vehicles, upgrading the cyclops. Really great!

- Being able to make a habitat at all. You could feasibly have all the mechanics of the habitat be inside of the cyclops sub, in some alt universe of this game. That would be cool and fine, and the sub is portable so it would be able to go mostly anywhere in the map. But being able to make arbitrary permanent bases anywhere around the map feels really cool. Especially when you go somewhere threatening and can set up a base to feel more secure there, especially with a moonpool and a scanner. Super fun feelings. Being able to decorate is cool too.

- How immersive it is, good sounds and music, good style and graphics, good models and animations, good lighting and colors. Really interesting environments.

Top 3 worst things:
- How much time I wasted going from points A to B - which were in a straight line, just holding the W key, and being able to look away from the screen and think about how much time I was wasting playing video games. Not only is it a waste of time though, it also feels so slow. The fastest way to travel is the fast-speed on the cyclops, and even throttling that for heat with medium to avoid fires, it still takes 4 minutes of holding W to go across the map (not counting the warp gates which only go to very very particular locations, I'm talking personal travel). Probably 30% of my playtime felt like mindless holding W, at least 15 hours.

Also in general moving around on foot feels really slow, especially in huge spaces like the islands, the crashed ship, or the area at the bottom of the world. Takes ages to walk around those spots. Yes I admit it WAS neat the first time you went to those places, but if you ever had to go back (and you do) it just felt like such a slog each other time. I wish I could sprint faster on foot.

- The last 15-20 hours were very 'needle in a haystack' feeling. Where the pick up or achievement you need only exists in one location, and it's super precise. The world is huge, and without using a guide the game would be very unforgiving in some parts.

There were a few achievement items, like the PDAs in the degassi seabases, that felt so unfair to find. I actually visited all of the locations, scanned all of the crafting recipes, grabbed the cool items, but just missed the PDAs that have no sounds/visual distinction on desks so I missed the achievements on the first go. I was looking for ages for places I hadn't visited, only to find the achievement items in the places I already had been. That felt very bad.

There's also no easy way to find particular data boxes you need or to find particular fragments you need. You can scan for these two types of items on the scanner with max range, but they could be duplicates and you have to just waste 20 minutes going to grab them (x20 locations) only to find they are duplicates. I really wish there was an upgrade on the scanner to maybe label what fragments/databoxes are, or maybe to not display ones that I already have. I know some of my friends just used youtube guides to find the databoxes, but is that the expectation? To use youtube? The game is supposed to be immersive i thought? Ya let me just exit the game to go find out how to do this thing. Probably 10 hours wasted looking for particular data boxes.

Related is how bizarre some of the mechanics are. Like how the aquarium functions, who the F was able to figure that out without looking it up online?! The game doesn't tell you anything how to set it up, it really should! The youtube guides for setting up aquariums have tons of views. Same with the power antenna - that ♥♥♥♥ is so weird and stupid. It only works with 2 power sources, the solar panels, and the heat source thing. Why doesn't it work with all sources of power? Why can I build it on my base but not use the power from my base? All the other lights/tools can be powered by being placed on the base, but the power antenna can't?! How the hell are you supposed to know that? It isn't written anywhere!

- Hard to think of more bad stuff about the game. Those first two worst-things are just really particularly bad. lol.

Maybe it is kind of sucky that there are some things that felt lackluster, or underutilised in the game?
I never needed to use the cyclops shield ever (and happily gave it away for the rocket at the end).
I never needed to use the cyclops/moth/prawn torpedos Ever. I fired a cyclops decoy torpedo once and it seemed to do nothing and the leviathan that was chasing me just still kept chasing me... That felt super lame! (I bet that's not how they function, and there's a youtube guide with 200k views how to use decoy torpedos and it's something super weird and strange and not-actually-useful anyway).
I also never needed to use the "air pipes" - they sounded cool but I never had a good reason to ever use them. It would slow down progression even more. Maybe if some particular machine needed it, or a special plant needed it?

I never needed to use the pathfinder tool or the air bladder, but I guess at least I could see how it could be useful, I just never needed or or ever thought it would be useful to me. Maybe if you could upgrade the pathfinder to go to particular data boxes, ehh? Maybe you could use the air bladder to go horizontal to travel at max speed? Maybe attach air bladders to a vehicle to give a temporary costly single-use boost of speed? I'd actually use that a lot then!!

There's also a ton of plants, especially on the islands, that don't seem to have a use other than cosmeticly if you were building a base on the islands? Just strange, not unwelcome, but just strange. I was excited to find them, but then it felt lame you can't use them for anything, like, what? Unless you can use them for something, and the youtube guide has 200k views again. I didn't get it.

Also that the lava area didn't get used a ton it felt like. It has the blue crystals and the sulfur pickups, but you only need a dozen of each before you never need them again, and then the whole lava area feels pretty useless to go to. I wish there were more cool things to do there. That area is very cool. I like how dangerous it feels. Like imagine you could get more decorations but you had to kill special monsters down there for them. Or there were special decorations you could find near the lava. Maybe there's some habitat structure you needed to build a lot of, but it uses kyanite crystals, like special base wiring, or special scanner upgrades for the end game. I'm glad at least the rocket used these items again.

It's a game for people looking to relax, but you also need an extreme amount of patience. So if you are low on patience and looking to relax, don't play this!

The game controls are using velocities, but this leads to many frustrating situations where if you barely miss your target star then the proximity you had with your target will slingshot the missed-target WAY off track. This happens really often, and every time it happens I want to rage quit because it is so annoying. It feels too punishing, it is not fun, it makes me angry (the opposite of relaxing) and it happened to me at least 50 times, which is too many times!

The game concept is cool. The music is relaxing. It is cool to be able to use the backgrounds, they should be enabled by default in my opinion because it makes it easier to line up targets.

If you do have a lot of patience then you can play this game.

The crossplay between STEAM and Windows 10 was not functioning for me. I tried half a dozen different potential solutions from google searches, and none of them worked. And it seemed a LOT of people were experiencing this. The game felt cool otherwise, but I bought this game to play with my friends... because it's a multiplayer game...

Hesitant review.... This game is fairly unintuitive, Extremely Slow, and fairly unfriendly to new players. The workflow is not obvious, and the tutorial is really lame (just a text manual to read, talk about immersion breaking). The gameplay is SO SLOW. I literally just left the game running at max-fast-forward speed (3x.. it should go faster than that if this is the intended gameplay..??) and left the room for 15 minutes in real life so I could get the intro tasks done....

The world itself and the art style is very beautiful, and I'm excited to see the gameplay fill into its potential. I don't think I can recommend this to most people who may play this YET though because it's not easy, and not very fun. But maybe for people who have TONS of patience. Hopefully the devs make it easier to get started.

I was fooled by the screenshots and videos.

I looked at the screenshots and assumed there would be depth in the combat engagements, or depth in the stealth (since I found this in the "stealth" category on steam).

The stealth is broken - it doesn't work. You can crouch to go less-visible, and there is tall grass to be even less visible. Enemies will still see you in this from 20m away, and will yell and start sprinting at you instantly without any hints or warnings that you're doing anything wrong. And because you don't get any hints, or warnings, then you don't know how to improve on your actions while playing making it very unintuitive.

There are also enemies that spawn on proxmity as you approach some objects in the game without any warning this will happen, and they instantly permanently break your stealth (some objectives have optional 'do the level stealthily', which are instantly failed).

The level design - I didn't see any benefit to this being procedurally generated. The stealth wasn't improved by having the randomness. And the combat feels the same across all levels, whether indoors or outdoors - no difference. What's the point?

As other commenters have said, the starting weapon, the stake, is the supreme ultimate weapon. It has the highest DPS and because you are right beside the enemy you are almost garunteed to hit the enemy, as opposed to missing from a distance with the recoil on the guns. Using any other weapon felt like an immediate downgrade, and made me wonder why I bothered purchasing the weapon and the ammo at all.

This game is full of bots in 2018. I didn't see another human player in 5 rounds, and the bots only play on one map so you can't play any other map unless you want to do it alone.

Also when you close the game you also have to go into your task manager and end iexplorer.exe because the game won't close on its own otherwise.

I played an hour and what I saw was the music and art were okay, but the gameplay balance was incredibly frustrating.

There were lots of 'puzzles' in the beginning that the 'solution' was very unsatisfying and slow. The game has speed-enrouraging text that comes up on screen, as well as generally the nature of a timed/score game, so you want to go fast, but a lot of the puzzles require you to go slowly, very slowly, to do things precise.

In almost all the obstacles in the opening hour I felt like I was guessing half the time, throwing myself at a brick wall. Often solving the puzzles didn't lead me to understanding the game mechanics any better since the 'physics solution' that I came up with in this "physics platformer" was not the right way to solve the puzzle, but I had to do it single right (weird) way.

The music was pretty good, although at the sloww frustrating parts in the beginning hearing loud cheerful gleeful music made it feel really pretentious. It's a similar feeling to when video editors put emotive music behind the video to make you feel a certain way, but it's not how I am feeling; I don't want someone to tell me how to feel about something, especially in a game. That's just a small point - on the music - but I wanted to say.

The graphix did look pretty good, the style of the game was neat. Although some of the obstacles I feel like could have been better representative of instant-death-killers rather than 'is it white or is it light green(toxic)?'. Also the 'wind' pushers in the bubble air stage (the start) weren't very obvious either.

5/10

Developer was in to make a quick buck it seems. One could do a few easy fixes for this to add a lot more depth.

Result is an slow paced 'random chance of finding ammo, die with no consequence, no story, broken features' game.