Recent reviews by God, owner of the Universe

No FOV controls -> thumbs down.

Eat it, developers unworthy of anyone's time. A 3D game (1st/3rd person) in the year 2024 without FOV options is plain simply an affront and should lead to loss of jobs. I'm serious.

From the release notes as of today, 2023-12-12

https://steamcommunity.com/games/544550/announcements/detail/3897365840790049456

Originally posted by Dean Hall:

While not a profitable project (our typical daily revenue including DLCs is around USD 800 gross, roughly 400 of which makes it to us), Stationeers is important to all of us in the studio. We hope that shows in the hard work we do with our updates, and we feel this one is no exception.

Not only does this update contain an entire new game around Rockets, it also contains a massive array of performance, usability, and general fixes. Our change log is so big that we can’t fit all of it in this post.

Originally posted by release notes:

This pack adds cosmetic uniforms featuring fifteen different international markings for wearing on characters in Stationeers.

Our DLC was made to provide a way for those who enjoy the project and want to further support it, and in return receive some simple new content. This content is not essential for the game. Consider purchasing this if you want to further provide support to its ongoing development.

That is what this is, and that's why you should get it.

Please support this outstanding pioneer niche product. They're probably writing gaming history. Many games of the future will have atmospherics, even though that's not key to the game, just as shooters like Half Life 2 come with a physics engine which lead to related puzzle scenes - and fun - when the core game isn't about that at all. It'll become normal, trust me. Now leave out some pizza toppings and help pull the wagon!

Refunded: Despite turning the game's V-sync setting on (to 60, like I need it), I got constant screen tearing.

Turns out, the devs have known about this problem since 2019 (4 years):

https://steamcommunity.com/app/856610/discussions/0/1738882605423963433/

Keep your game.

No FOV (field of view) settings in a 1st person 3D game. -> Thumbs down. This is law. (Refunded.)

The learning curve is steep, but it's really really worth it! Had this for almost 2 years before I dove into it a few days ago. My God, I was missing out!


Made a trailer because I LOVE this game!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQfLYT8qVTg


Quick onboarding video for total beginners:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hTTWJKdJ80

Buy if you're tired of crafting recipes and lack of complexity.

I now have over 1200 hours pure playtime, and I won't stop. Each play-through is different!

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Played 50+ hours solo, but today felt like multiplayer - even found a non-empty server.

Soon my oxygen was too low. So I started making a flexible gas filtration construct - but I was running out of time. A random stranger helped laying some wires and making some gas filters.

Under "pressure", I checked every gas bottle I could find with my PDA (of course using the Atmos Analyzer Cartridge). A little O2 here, a little there ... I could keep myself afloat for mere minutes (really, less than 2 per bottle), then I switched the empty filtration source canister with the waste gas bottle in my spacesuit, so I had even more O2 to filter out.

Then I asked the guy who helped me for his waste gas bottle - I wouldn't have survived otherwise. (I wished we had thought of this: "How will he ever survive this?" - "Your gas is as good as mine.") Then I also found a welder gas bottle: 75% volatile, 25% oxygen. Another few minutes.

During this time, we managed to set up an Ice Crusher at the assembly, I piped things up, and then I was quickly blessed with a few bottles of 8+ megapascals of pure oxygen.

During all this, I also ran out of food (But there were reserves around.) and out of water (No reserves ... except the corpse of another player on which I found a water bottle.)

Then we found water-ice, so I prepared the assembly's setup accordingly, crushed the ice, and slowly let some of it into the pipe system (The Ice Crusher can hold a brutal amount of pressure, but bottles can't hold all that much.) - and then we had water.

There was more that happened there, e.g. the other guy was also running out of oxygen and water, so I shared the water I had found on the corpse. But in the end, we had it all ... and could start playing.

---

There is so much to tell. I've struggled with hydroponics for a while, but now I have canned tomato soup (Long lasting and very rich.) and some seeds. I have yet to construct a faster airlock. I have come up with a hypothetical solution for laying pipes to the outside even after a pressurized base has already been established inside. Etc: Fun-gineering!

This game will be part of gaming history because of its deep and accurate simulation, and all that in a fast 3D realtime environment which also works (mostly) fine in multiplayer.

The devs chose a niche that only few people will invest in, so I bought the entire DLC for ~€27 to support them, and because I like the option of playing as a robot (high energy demands but no food or gas requirements) or as an alien breathing completely different gases.

This is why I wish that many people buy this game. At full price. I know I didn't, and I don't regret it and wouldn't accuse you. I'm just saying: The world is richer thanks to what these devs are doing. This game is unique, you will see! And it will inspire so many games to come.

Jump onboard. Try it every once in a while. Once it clicks, you'll be in for the brain teaser gaming ride of a lifetime.

Your player avatar isn't just a camera with health bar! (Though currently, there is only a health value, even though organs are supposedly prepared under the hood, a relatively deep medical system is coming in the future, I heard.)

No, you have a helmet that you can open/close with appropriate sound changes (just like the sound also changes depending on atmospheric pressure), you can lock it, you can turn off/on the oxygen flow, air conditioning, the gas filters (You have three slots in the starter suit, so you can also breathe O2 mixes that contain hazardous stuff.), can adjust the target temperature, target pressure, can flush the suit in case there's harmful gas buildup (Can't happen if your filters are proper.), you have an oxygen tank, a waste gas tank, and all of it is calculated realistically.

It's just a blast to work with so many living realistic systems that work together. Pure meaning.

The pipes are radiating away heat, there is condensation, you can create a custom refrigeration or heating system, there's a furnace (No, you don't know what I mean, because you're thinking of game furnaces right now.), there's electricity management (with nice beefy station batteries that you can build rather early), you can even program chips to control your base, or to point the solar panels automatically at the sun, etc. - I think there's even robotics. And it's all still just Early Access. 50 hours, and I have only just (properly) begun.

Again, get this game. Do it. Your older self will agree.

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Man, I wish I could let you participate in the intense adventure I had today (single player, Moon, hard difficulty). Words can't transport the intensity of it. How I used a furnace to get greenhouse gases - but it was always too hot, and I couldn't get the AC to work for some reason. So I jury-rigged one. It's too powerful, though: Turning it on for 10 seconds cools the entire ~200 cubic meters room down by 2°C.

And now I have baked potatoes. ... Pure adrenaline experience - the time pressure, all the systems and decisions you have to keep in balance, the long list of things I still have to do to get my little survival base stable and secure. That's actually the thing I realize is the most fun: To keep "living" complex systems in balance. And that's what you get with this game, definitely.

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Another emergent mission / action scene that happened just now: I'm on Earth's moon (aka the Moon) and have, of course, a little greenhouse there. I have some pipes outside with passive radiation emitters. An electric vent blows air from the greenhouse into those pipes, and another such vent sucks it back in (else it would stay in the pipe too long).

In the computer that I placed there, I had written a little assembler program that reads the gas sensor's temperature value and turns the first vent on to circulate air through the cooling pipe as soon as we reach 23°C. This only lasts for about 1 second, then it automatically turns off, because the setup is so incredibly powerful that the entire room has cooled to ~22.5 in that time. This happens about every 5 seconds (when the sun warms the room) or every ~20 seconds during the night.

I placed some info screens outside to be able to monitor temperature, pressure, and CO2 ratio while building outside. For efficiency, I had this running on the same programmable chip.

But I decided to move the screens, so I cut the cables. After almost a minute of working, I realized the air was visibly moving in the greenhouse. All the time! FUUUUUUUUUUU!

I ran into my manual airlock (They don't come any faster.) and found the room at about -20° Celsius: I had cut the cable to the assigned but now no longer available display screen just when the cooling was active! So it hadn't stopped!

I manually turned off the vent. Were the potatoes still alive? I ran back outside to the furnace, which originally served to fill the room with atmosphere, tossed some reactive gasses (in the form of ice) inside, fired it up. Then back inside, I operated the valves I had installed in the gas filtration assembly and turned on the pump. Quickly the temperature rose from -20 to 20 again, because just like my cooling system is completely OP, so is my heating - it's meant to make steel from iron and carbon at high pressures, so yes it's hot gas, which was originally a problem when I filled the room - but now it was JUST what I needed!

And that's Stationeers. Hop on board already!

Refunded.

In the first few minutes, there was a little critter creeping towards my people, started attacking them. No matter what I did, switching them to hunting mode and other measures, they did not fight it off but kept being attacked. That's like having a full oxygen tank but just FORGETTING to breathe, it's just stupid!

I looked up on the Web (Something you should NOT have to do.) how to do this, followed the tips, but it didn't work. The only thing that worked was to tell a guy to hit the critter now. Which they did. One time.

Nope. Count me out.

Got it for €7.35 (-70%) instead of €24.50, played 2.2 hours over 2 days with all settings to max and good framerate (beefy machine), refunded (thanks, support team!)

Reason:

While the visuals are good ...

(high res wallpapers, lots of assets in the in-game "store" (where you get radiators etc.), good looking engine (light rendering when you turn off/on any lights) with good FOV options)

... the game gave me otherwise a very cheap impression, like it's Early Access - but it's sadly not EA.

Your walking step sounds are always the same, fitting for hard stone ground, but you even start the game surrounded by a sea of grass, so it's completely unfitting. What a simple way to make - or break - immersion. How did they not catch this? Hundreds of assets in the store, but walking sounds were somehow not easy to come by?

The next bad first impression: In the first mission, you pick up garbage in a house. How does this work? By clicking on the garbage. Immediately, a whole area of the trash just vanishes, not just the bit you clicked on. And it's not in a plastic bag that fills up that you have to eventually dispose of - it just vanishes. Run around and click repeatedly to clean up. What incredibly complex gameplay, what sophisticated implementation.

Then comes the cleaning. The (level 0) crummy hairy broom gets moved forward and backward in a simple sinus oscillation repeatedly, and the dirt texture you happen to aim at fades out, even if it's on a couch or on a table covered with tools etc., even at some distance. The tools feel completely FLOATY. You wave them in the general direction, and the house restores to its un-dirt-textured natural clean state. Just doesn't feel right.

It feels cheap and prototype-ish.

And the game is not fun to me. There are probably a lot of such activities to unlock (I got to painting, making/breaking walls, fixing outlets, installing radiators/washing machines, and I upgraded some of these activities, which is an attractive mechanic that I would otherwise have liked to explore more), but they are just too cheap, too simple, too SYMBOLIC almost, like someone's telling you "And then he did this and that." instead of you getting the actual feeling that you did this and that. Painting and making/breaking walls feels nice, and scraping dirt off windows is less simplistic too, but the other stuff is just first prototype level implementation stuff.

I don't know why this game gets high praise.

7 of 8 stars. (1/2/3/4=nope, 5/6/7/8=yay) It has its flaws, but the overall fun and mix of elements is so well done that I'd go so far as to call it a masterpiece.

It's a Ubisoft theme park - but it's not typical or shallow, it really feels right.

Got it for €15, would have paid €25 despite being very frugal. Played on high end PC with all settings on max, 40 to 60 FPS, so your mileage will vary.



Glass half empty:

- "Run from place to place and kill people." (That's indeed really 99% of the game.) If you end up thinking like this: Take a break, you're not seeing out of your eyes any more.



Glass half full:

- Large and really gorgeously designed and rendered Mediterranean ancient Greece (land and sea; theme park distances though: Easily 1/1000th of reality scale) with reasonably slow day/night cycle.

- Lots of different animal types: Lions, wolves, donkeys, sharks, etc.

- Varied landscapes, caves with simple but entertaining puzzles, beautiful towns and ruins.

- Optionally sail the (tiny) sea with an upgradeable ship, fight pirates and other ships.

- Diving in lakes and the sea is fun (albeit samey).

- Great voice acting, lots of (often surprisingly varied) dialogue with lots of choices (not sure if those matter beyond slightest variations, though).

- Interesting and very powerful special moves during fights (obtained via skill points).

- Good stealth mechanics - you don't always need to fight when you choose to take a fort. Stay hidden in bushes, use whistling and arrows to steer your prey, or use invisibility.

- Opponents will often show unexpected fighting rhythms, feels often like they're really different people, especially the endless onslaught of mercenaries you'll face if you neglected to keep your bounty low - or neglected to slaughter the dimwits who sponsored them.



I'm sure I forgot a few things and don't mean to be comprehensive. I'm just saying: I played over 100 hours so far but only paid €15 - you should absolutely get this game, even if less discounted!

Comes with Ubisoft (dis)Connect, so that sucks - but if you start it directly from there instead of Steam, and even use the Offline mode of Connect, you'll have a smooth ride without the constant idiotic error messages. Really, they should fire a few developers and managers for this one - but again, it doesn't get in the way if treated right: So far 120+ hours and no problems to speak of. I did backup my save games a few times because I heard Ubisoft cloud horror stories about this game, but so far I didn't need this.

STRONG BUY! Even for full price (€20; I got it for €16).

---

Teardown is brilliant and novel and so very well done, especially ... everything!

The graphics are brilliant. The world consists of tiny voxel cubes (which even can lie/fly around angled and rotating), all of which are fully rendered incl. shadows, reflections, everything. Visually, I'm pretty sure they're using RTX, I've seen proper reflections in the really beautifully rendered graphics.

Be aware that I have a very beefy gaming computer, so I always reflexively use max settings (probably here too) - and I had to keep VSYNC in the game on their recommended dynamic setting (resulting in screen tearing), else framerate would not have been smooth. But I promise you that you will forget this problem once you're playing this awesome game!

The sound design 100% corresponds to the physics, incl. steps in shallow water, size of object falling in water, materials impact strength. This game has the most realistic fire simulation I've seen (and heard) in any game so far. Same for the fire extinguisher. And all those wonderful particles will even behave differently on a stormy night.

The physics are the best I've seem, it's all just 100%. (Caveat: Sometimes, planks you place will not lay on the respective ground but dangle through it. This is an extremely minor problem, this caveat was only mentioned for truthfulness.) Even the vehicles (cars, trucks, boats, forklifts, ...) go the extra mile in their realism.

You've had games where you can spray-paint the world - but this is the first game where you will make thorough use of that ability - to jot down your speed-run route in the many maps that require you to finish in 1 minute once you've deliberately triggered the timer. It's great fun to make your path and mark it, and to iron out a few kinks to gain a few extra seconds.

I'm 30+ hours in (howlongtobeat.com speaks of 10 to 60 hours), no idea how many levels are left.

I've had NO crashes or any kind of wonky behavior. AND A BIG PLUS: As soon as the game loses focus, it no longer burdens your machine! The fans pipe down right after! (Confirmed by Task Manager.)

Tuxedo Labs deserve your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cash, man.

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Nitpick: To load your one in-level savegame after revisiting the game, you first have to load the respective map. You do this from your in-game computer, and often you have multiple maps (max 3, I think) available at the same time. It would have been better if you could just load the game from the main menu.

Buy it. Fun gameplay and skilltree, great presentation. You keep pursuing&enjoying your improvements. It's grindy (but in a fun way), but basically every step of improvement is palpable. The map is quite big and diverse, and I've only seen like 10% of it so far.

I read some reviews, but this one tipped me over the edge, so I recommend you go there:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/martryn/recommended/846770/

"Dysmantle" is a solid 80%. To be exact:
[0 1 2 3 | 4 5 *6* 7] = ~81% (75%-88%)
where 0123 is the negative half, 4567 is positive.
This is the way I gauge games: I ramp up the resolution of the score list until just before I'd no longer know where I'd land.

Why is it not 100%?
Because of the stupidly awkward camera angle and camera controls. I constantly feel like I want the camera to be lower, to look more into the depth - and I'd really like the camera to follow where I look instead of going all twin stick on this.

HowLongToBeat says:
Main Story 32 Hours
Main + Extras 53½ Hours
Completionist 72½ Hours
All Styles 54 Hours
https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=84868

I'm at 10 hours (all in one day), got it for €11 instead of the full €20.

IsThereAnyDeal says that this €11 deal right now is on par with the historical low. This is a game worth the full €20 price (but I'm frugal, so I always wait for discounts).
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/dysmantle/info/