Solo game any fun ?

[Dradiin]

On the fence atm, but if the solo experience is decent i will pull the trigger and buy this game. Anyone willing to toss me a few bones on the pros and cons ? Thanks in advance,

[Tahnval]

This is my take on it, of course. You might end up with a very different opinion.

Pros:

The mostly aquatic gameworld is distinctly different to most survival-ish games. The devs have that part done well already. Diving is done well. There's a good sense of buoyancy and freedom of movement and the inherent hostility of the environment itself. You feel the need to monitor your air supply, especially when you're freediving (your character can make crude SCUBA gear as they progress in knowledge through research, but to begin with you're freediving). You're visiting a place you can't survive in. You can easily get lost because things look different when you're moving freely in all 3 dimensions. Exploring a boat or building underwater is different too. You need to know the way out and how much air it will take to get there and get back to the surface. I think this is the biggest strength of Sunkenland (at least so far). It's different.

It's designed as a single player game. Since you're looking for a single player game, that's an important pro.

The fighting against NPCs in the gameworld is quite well done. You need to be cautious. You're not facing Stormtroopers - the NPCs in Sunkenland can shoot quite well. Your scavenged and repaired armour is a lot better than nothing but it's limited. Get hit by 1 bullet and you'll get minor injury and some damage to your armour. Get hit by 10 bullets and your armour is toast and so are you. Some of the NPCs have fully automatic weapons. NPCs move and they use cover. It's certainly not perfect. For example, an NPC doesn't react to other NPCs. If there are two NPCs and one of them detects you and starts firing, the other NPC won't do anything. But it's pretty good.

There are a lot of decorative items that can be scavenged to decorate your base.

The music fits the gameworld very well.

It's cheap.

Cons:

I think at least almost all the cons are due to the fact that it's nowhere near finished. It's currently on v0.1.4. A very early alpha.

There isn't any story or any lore.

Base building is limited. 1 roof piece (which is crap and couldn't possibly work as a roof because it's full of holes). No solid floor pieces. There are solid foundations and solid walls, but not floors. No curved pieces. No half walls. Stairs can be moved freely but can't snap. Ladders can snap but can't be moved freely. It's often very difficult to place roof or floor pieces, even if you place a pillar at every corner of every square. You can't move a building piece once placed. You can only demolish it (losing some resources, though thankfully not with the expensive reinforced pieces) and build a new one. Objects (workstations, decoration, etc) can be picked up and moved (although you have a craft a special tool to do so) but building pieces can't. You can't upgrade building pieces either - it's demolish and build a new piece for that too.

Some aspects of the UI are clunky.

There are some clipping issues. You can walk through some things that should be solid. Not many, but it happens sometimes.

Hostile NPCs and creatures can see and attack you through some solid objects. Shipping containers, for example.

The game map is fixed, no random gen option. A fixed map is a good fit for a story-based game, so it will be a good fit at some point in the future when the story has been written. But not now.

I've been playing for ~45 hours and I'm about done. At least until an update. I paid £15 for it, so that's good value in my book. And I'm pretty sure I'll be playing it more in the future, after more updates. Definitely after the story is added.