It's literally just a barebones Valheim with a worse version of Scratch. However to force you to use the basic programming, they've made the crafting system of Valheim tedious, meaning among other things only being able to craft 1 item per workstation and some of these crafting options taking longer than they need to. I'm gonna be honest it didn't feel like a game, it felt like a basic course on coding with added gamification elements.

I've been really into survival/crafting games lately, and picked this one expecting it to scratch that same kind of itch.

Unfortunately the game still seems to need a lot of polish, and there are several things that bother me.

1. When you start your "City" it's a square of maybe 16 tiles. A tile is about big enough for your character to stand in comfortably, so a 4 by 4 grid of tiles isn't super big. That wouldn't be such an issue, but the game only allows you to build on places with city tiles (which are essentially the stone paving tiles). If you want to expand your city, you have to use 1 wood to put down a stone paving tile... Then, when you want to start farming, you can't do so on all the dirt and grassland all around your city, you have to first put down a stone paving tile, then spend 1 stone to put down dirt on top of the stone. It makes no sense. I spent way too much time trying to get the robots to go cut down nearby trees at the beginning of the game, not realizing they'll only cut down trees grown in specific farm spots connected to your city.

2. Finding certain resources is convoluted and annoying. To make a sword, you need limestone. I ran all around looking for different types of rocks that might drop this, never did find any limestone dropping rocks. However, I did get 1 piece of limestone through fishing, and got another 8 or so by fighting mushroom enemies a couple hours later in the game.

3. Speaking of fishing, there are glowing spots in the water that lead you to think that's where you get fish. Nope, that's where random items will be caught, such as limestone and rolled up & tied deer skin (yup). If you want actual fish, you just fish anywhere in the water. Seems like that would make sense, but the glowing spots made me think I could only fish on those, so my first 4 or 5 fishing catches were random junk.

4. The main companion robot from what I can tell right now, cannot seem to pick up the wood or stone that drops from cutting down trees or mining. Resources dropped in this matter are ones that float a bit and get picked up automatically if the player walks over them, whereas there are stones and pieces of wood that require the E key to pick them up, which the robot can get. This is not only weird, it's very frustrating. The game makes cutting down trees difficult on purpose (even tells you so in game), but then makes it so you still have to follow the robot around to pick up all the stuff.

5. The game design seems to make typical tasks more frustrating than they should be in order to get you to use the programming tools for the robot. It would be nice if they just made it a bit simpler such as "Have Robot 1 craft 20 wooden arrows". But you need to have it say "have robot take wood from chest 1, put it in crafter, craft arrow, pick up arrow, put arrow in chest 2." Fortunately there are saved programs to load and skip most of that, but as others said it kind of defeats the purpose of the programming part of the game.

6. The character creator is very barebones, to the point where it would almost be better to just have 10 or so preset characters to choose from that are more unique looking. As of right now, you can change the hair style (and color), and the eyes (and color), nose, mouth, as well as what color your generic space outfit glows. No options for head shape, body shape, height, or voice.

7. This may just be a configuration issue for me, but I couldn't fully play it with my controller on the PC. Most things would work, but there is a radial menu that needs you to point to one of the options to select, and nothing I tried would work on the controller. I had to switch to playing with keyboard and mouse for the rest of my few hours. I was using an Xbox Series X controller, which works fine in most other games I've tried.

I really want to like this game, and I'll be keeping an eye on it to see if it gets some updates in the future. Right now I can't recommend it.

Shallow and half-baked, this feels like an Early Access game.

The world feels empty, the programming aspect feels pointless since you just use prebuilt "programs", and the manufacturing doesn't feel thought out at all.

The robots mainly exist to manufacture the materials you need to create your completely cosmetic city. The core content of the game follows the milestone system of Satisfactory, except you only ever need 10-20 of each item for a milestone, so you could easily craft items yourself and go through the entire game without using robots at all.

And in some cases, such as farming, you will be more efficient just planting and harvesting crops on your own since you need much less food than you produce.

This could be forgiven if the rest of the gameplay was good, but combat is as generic as can be, and the world is large, empty, and full of hills that make building things ugly and inconvenient.