TLDR; Can't recommend at this point unless you have a high tolerance time wasting and egg sucking, or want to significantly increase ambient room temperature for mediocre fidelity.

I've hardly played the game (under 1 hour) and already have far too many grievances to continue for now.

Some of the problems I encountered in my short experience include:

• The optimisation or lack thereof. An RTX 4090 gets very hot almost immediately on this title, despite not experiencing this on any other game, ever. Even on the lowest visual settings (which looks absurdly sub-mobile game in appearance).
  
  
• The character customisation is limited to put it charitably and there are only 2 different suit options; white or black. Black which looks the nicer of the two in my opinion unfortunately has ASUS and ROG branding all over it. Not something I'd necessarily want to be seeing on Mars.
  
  
• The tutorials. The pacing is all over the place, the computer AI voice lines in some places are incomplete. They have a weirdly slow pace which doesn't keep up with the players actions. You're awkwardly waiting around for the next one and the next one to the point of frequently wondering if you've managed to break its scripted chain.
  
  
• The audio levels. The intro video, voice-overs, tutorial, all of it has a very low sound level. There isn't an independent slider in the options for voice-lines and the audio levelling is off. You either read the subtitles and listen to whispers or push to normally deafening levels and hope nothing louder happens by way of a sound effect.
  
  
• Basic mechanics for any fan of the genre are way over tutorialised, first of which took 15 minutes to convey: wasd is move, shift is sprint, c is crouch (eww, by the way), space is jump, and tab opens a menu with common sense phraseology not needing further explanation.
  
  
• There is an item for deconstructing scrap which looks like an angle grinder. It has no feedback to being used. The durability of the thing you are deconstructing is expressed as a sold blue radial progress bar which decreases with no animations or fanfare when holding left-click while looking at scrap. Much of the rest of the UI similarly has no 'feel' and lacks coherent visual style. Yes it is early access and that type of thing may be put in later, but it also might not either.
  
  
• There is a blowtorch tool which is used to construct buildings. Buildings are selected in the tab menu and placed by left clicking in in the world. By default they snap to grid. The first experience of this was building a set of stairs to get to an airlock; orientation was automatic and would consistently be facing all the wrong directions until being in a specific location on the ground. It felt weird to be so constrained in this manner without option of manually rotating. Once the building was confirmed, you have to switch to the blowtorch tool and hold left-click on it. This has a different type of status indicator than the deconstruction saw tool; a ghost builds up from bottom to top to signify progress rather than the radial progress bar. Not to say this is any better or worse, just inconsistent.
  
  
• The suit UI is visually interesting in how it conforms elements around the concavity of a supposed space helmet, but this is let down by the off-angles and inconsistent alignment of groups and their content. A panel on the right side for instance is at a 25 degree incline but its contained text doesn't conform to it.

It feels very Space Engineers to me. There's potentially a fair amount of things to do in the game, though I wouldn't definitively know as I can't stomach the ongoing glaring issues vs the time commitment already sunk.

My time as a player has not been respected so far. I have played under an hour of the game's critical path, where I should be being sold on the sense of scale, of wonder, of exploration and the excitement this opportunity on Mars presents. This wasn't the feeling I had gotten and so I may only presume the rest of the game at this point is of equal or lesser quality. I don't mean to be dismissive of the hard work already spent by the developers in getting the game to where it is, but it simply is not worth my, and I'd wager a lot of people's time.

Its a great idea at the moment and I'm looking forward to playing again once if quality of life improvements and what I'd consider 'the basics' of a game in this genre are delivered. As a bare minimum I want more a immersive, coherent, responsive experience with better optimisation and a means to change meaningful settings in the options menu, like accessibility options, the ability to set values numerically or even just have sliders show their numeric representation.


May or may not update this review in the future so look at the date and take it with a pinch of salt. Just know that all this is part of the experience you are buying at this point in time.