Recent reviews by Vanguard

I want to love per Aspera so much.

At the first glance this looks like a decent logistic puzzler.

The longer you play it, the more the absolutely infuriating, lazy implemented design gets to you.

---

- Logistic is absoluty broken. I have watched so many materials which preferred to be delivered via the slowest road instead of the hyperloop network... I have watched so many materials which instead to the factory next to a mine which needed an item from the mine was instead served by a far away warehouse, instead of from the mine... I have watched in AGONY the absolutely horrific deconstruction system in action which forces you to micromanage even the most simple deconstruction actions.

- No proper prediction of the rising water level. Combined with absolutely slow deconstruction of buildings, this will lead to a frustrating construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of your water pumps, ports, shipyards. Atrocious!

- Did I mention the poorly implemented logistics? There is not a button or command to tell your network to drain a mine as soon as it has any output. Instead you have to rely on an absolutely arcane and obscure ruleset that deals with ratios and when to pull what next from the store or a mine any given mine.

- The ports act as a warehouse. So imagine, without realizing it, that your warehouse sitting RIGHT ON THE SHORES, next to the rising waterlevels, with hundreds, nay, thousands of items, being flooded. Just why?
Why not simply implement a new harbour/Quay which does not have a warehouse? Just why? This game can be pain.

At the first playthrough it is bearable. At any subsequent playthrough it feels there are way too many artificial limiters in the game, such as research being super slow, congested networks with barely any means around it and believe me: I tried decentralizing my base etc,

This results in you being AFK and letting the game running at 16X speed for a lot of time.

- Combat: Oh my god. Clearly, it was designed to be in, but no one had the time, enthusiasm or spirit to implement it in an enjoyable way. This feature should have been cut, including the entire military research tree.

Lacking... severely lacking in enabling you to properly manage your base.

- Go play the Sandbox campaign and skip the story. The narrative in this game is atrocious and AMI (you/the protagonist AI) is the most lobotomized character in the history of written characters, right next to Subnautica 2's protagonist. For a "smart" AI, it poses questions that are absolutely trivial and do not reflect the psychological development of an intelligent mind. Also the "dialogue options" being presented seemingly do not match up with the spoken lines afterwards. VERY frustrating. In addition there is a lack of options you actively can chose / participate in OR actively refuse, such as attacking the other colony, making it a terrible choice. A much more linear story would have benefited this game and the scope of it just fails this game in the narrative department

I dislike it, with the few exceptions.

4-5/10 - go get it on a sale and play factorio instead. The entire game, even years after release, feels unfinished. The developer clearly lacks experience with games of this type, seeing as there is a clear lack of options to satisfy the needs of a logistics challenge gamer.

On the positive side: If you mute this game and play much better fitting soundtracks, the game ALMOST does a good job of capturing the feeling of colonizing Mars. And Doctor Foster's voice actor? Oh my god. I am not gay, but his voice alone makes me struggle with my sexuality.

I would still take a look at per aspera 2, but the first entry is rather a learning experience.

Currently at 200 matches played, roughly 50 of those won.

So I am a subpar player, that only wins one in four. Which is fine, I admit I am not the best and I play with friends who are even a bit worse or a bit better.

After losing 8 matches in a row due to Lights headshotting me with a Machinepistol halfway across the map, Mediums perfectly hitting every headshot in close encounters with a revolver or just being sawed to death by heavies and their lewis gun I guess its time to call it quits.

I want to recommend the game because it is fun when things come together, but I cannot in the current state of things. I will probably still come back to the game from time to time, simply to look for that dopamine hit when the game is fair and you only die to cheesy-stuff instead of outright cheats.

Update: Spent 3 hours today trying to get the daily contract "win a match". Not a single win. This game is fair and balanced.

Contains spoilers (review was posted after 11 hours of play, not ~7 as steam incorrectly claims)

Bad
- Income is not correct: If a description says "10 Crypto Bros generating $520K IPS (21% of income)" and my income barely goes up by 300K to 400K per second, then I wonder if they instead mean "520 K IPS (installs per second)" instead of (Income per second) which reads different if there is a dollar sign in front. It is bad UI design and should be cleaned up.
- Clippie is annoying and pops up way too often
- Clicking for money is from 200% to about 500% more effective than increasing your income any other way, this encourages heavily clicking to progress. At the same time, at around the ten hour mark, you would wait roughly 20 minutes to get another one of the higher tier income units (such as 40 Chan mob), which roughly would mean non-stop constant clicking for about 5 minutes straight.

This game needs
- An option to only show clippie with NEW dialogues. I am not interested in learning that clippie was made out of virtual children's blood for the tenth time.
- An option to disable hints, except those which you cannot get somewhere else (like the network 3-5 thing). Hints pop up WAY to quickly for game that is as effing slow as this one.
- Way more income increases via puzzles, mails, events, and a shorter playtime in general.
- To make clippie shine with way more dialogue and cool stuff to say.
- Make the scammers asking for another IP address accept 127.0.0.1 as IP and make you send an email a little bit later that "they are happy with the new host, but are currently experiencing heavy slow downs for no apparent reason." - this game has definitely room for easter-eggs like that.

QOL:
- Windows should activate WITHOUT you having to drag them actually. Click on window and make it pop to the front.
- If you pull up the "run" command, the cursor should be immediately active when the console pops up.
- When you hit enter inside the "run" console it should send the command instead of having to click the button below it.

Disappointed:
I was hoping this game would be way shorter for it's price and intended audience in the wake of the Unity decision to raise an install fee. Instead it is a slow, long, boring slog of a escalating income kind of game whereas it should have capitalized on the more witty writing and interaction with its small puzzles - because of the idle income games there are way better free ones, such as universal paperclip.

"there's lots to do" - straight from the advertising of this game. I feel that borders on false advertising. You basically are waiting to hit the few interesting marks in the game which give you an amusing mail or give you an upgrade. This is an almost pure AFK game in my mind.

The good:
I genuinely enjoyed selling my grandma's phonenumber to scammers and abuse someone's PC for virtual cryptominig like a big bad boy. Also, Grandma is the best!

Buy only if:
- You're heavily dependant on idle games which you check in on periodically or enjoy cheesing games with your autoclicker macro.
- You want to support an indy dev and want to point the middlefinger at Unity.

Fun little PVE autobattler. Worth a few bucks. Has its annoyances.

A game that is heavily reliant on grindy progress - if you want to play it, I heavily recommend buying the premium stuff you have come to expect from free to play games.

I can only speak to the PVE part of the game and it feels boring - games like the division do the co-op shooter part better. This game is rather boring in that regards as the missions are short, unbalanced and heavily rely on your knowledge of what's going to happen beforehand - getting caught in the open can down you in a single second, so you do not want to run into a spawn. The active skills of the classes feel not impactful at all and you probably need to reach maximum level to play the game as intended.

--- Original Review Below, addendum for the current state of game (22/may/2024):
- Still no inventory limit, resulting in terrible setups.
- Timer / Pusher logic blocks are helpful but not the solution. For example carbon burners need exactly one carbon every 30 seconds at full load. Less if you're not drawing all the power, resulting in thousands of carbon units being kept in "dead storage".
- Item Sensors still terrible to set up.
- Blueprinting still terrible. Can only reliably dock in one orientation and even that is too hard to make any sense out of it.

I don't understand if this is just terrible game design or INTENDED game design, as if you're supposed to be punished for being "lazy", when other games such as factorio find better ways of keeping you busy while NOT punishing you with tedious setups.
---Addendum end

In its current state (Architecture & Design Update), Astro colony is neither a craft-survival game such as Minecraft nor a logistics puzzler as satisfactory or factorio.

The tools the game offers you are very limited, and clunky and there are no real challenges which a moderately experienced gamer won't figure out within 4 to 6 hours of play. I spent the mayority of my time in game (currently 40 hours) by toying around with the logic blocks or simply decorating my colony.

The game is far from finished and if you're looking for a challenging puzzler right now, this is not the game for you - I recommend to get it despite its flaws because I can see the potential in this game and it will take just a long time to eventually finish the game as a product.

The game's strongest parts:

The fun part about the game is certainly the ability to place and construct unique customized buildings and production platforms, while attaching thrusters to your colone to hijacks "planets" and attach them to your colony. It has a very "Lego"-like feeling about it and it is insanely fun constructing your "astro colony", even though the buildings you craft with the Floor, Walls, and Blocks palette will serve almost no function except for decorative purposes. Putting down powerlines, belts, foundations, etc. works really well, the game is super stable and runs fast! Nicely done! The game already offers mod support and while I have not taken a look at them, I appreciate games who do this.


I will break down various aspects of the game to show what irked me during gameplay and could need improvements.

Robots:
- Generally all robots pathing looks clunky and blocky.
- Farmer Robots keep getting stuck for no good reason, resulting in your sometimes to have to babysit your farms.
- Miner Robots can get stuck on the main platform, requiring a "reset" of the miner on the next platform by lowering the amount of robots requested to zero and then increasing it back to two.
- Delivery bots bump into each other and make the factory look ugly. I despise this as a logistics solution despite the limitations of storage and belts. It lacks the simple elegancy of Factorio style delivery and logistics.

Mining:
- Mines are terrible to use, as they are cumbersome to place, require flat terrain and mine only a flat terrain.
- The better solution is to use miner robots, which suffer their own drawbacks, like being incredibly slow.
-> This is not a real problem as your factory really does not require much throughput at all in the current game state.

Technology:
- Techs are super limited and some materials like dirt cannot be automated to gather, as they are won as a byproduct of mining.
-> Not a huge problem currently as the tech tree can be plowed through in just a few hours.

Recipes:
- Some recipes are awkward but they show that there are way more planned productions chains.
- Currently, for example, polymers require wood and radioactive rods. It doesn't make sense and I am sure we will see oil and other chemical fluids in the future for this game.
- Nuclear reactors are extremely disappointing to setup, and don't even require water for steam and turbines, also processing nuclear fuel is really not done well. Not a big deal, since Solar power is completely OP and eliminates the need for any other power generation.

Production/automation:
- Water output isn't limited to attached containers, so water crushers will infinitely crush ice for no good reason. At first I assumed this is due to the miniscule amounts of water being drawn from the oxygen generators to power the oxygen barriers. But even when disconnecting those from the waterpipes, I saw the ice crushers just march on - so there is no way to limit or automate the processing of ice, as you cannot inventory sensor the water tanks.
- Due to how a fabricators can work on multiple recipes in parallel, you EITHER have to
- Set up multiple seperate slow lines, wasting a lot of space and energy
- Set up a congested, complicated line with multiple strange outputs and filtering logic blocks
- Either solution will end up in a lot of spaghetti lanes

Balancing outputs/storage:
- In theory you could balance all products down the line using arithmetics blocks to compare all your warehouses and their dependant products, but it is an absolute hassle and very unsatisfying to set up.

Automation/Logic blocks:
- Automation is really hard, since there is an unlimited inventory for each machine. If you do not preoperly setup your machines, you hamstring yourself.
- You can work around it with bots, since it allows you to set a request limit, but the amount of bots needed for large scale production looks ugly and bumpy.
- Working around inventory limits with sensors, blockers and deciders works fine, but they take an eternity to setup and you need to do this a) for the output from your warehouses, so you do not run out of a specific crafting material you need for placing devices and b) for the input of every fabricator, so it doesn't stuff itself full with 1000000 ironplates to chuck away at a rate of 2 / 10 seconds, etc.
- Logic blocks cannot be programmed in Templates, making templates less useful
-> I REALLY HOPE that in future updates we are allowed the set inventory limits on our machines directly, making this entire process way less painful.

Templates:
- Templates do not go underground (which would be nice to hide cabling below the floor), which requires you to set blocks on the first floor, which makes it sometimes clashing with the foundations you have set around the templates. Something like a block which would copy the properties of the foundations around the template would be nice.
- Templates only properly work with foundations or floor below them, "docking" templates with existing foundations does not work.

Transport pipes:
- Seem to be utterly broken as they dont interact with chest, warehouses or convery joints to put them back on belts again.
- I may be using this wrong, but they are in need of a rework.

The scenery in Pathogen is awesome, the level building is impressive and the fights are intense as always. The music and feel is haunting. Overall this is an impressive little DLC well worth at least ten buckes. Only three levels are disappointing, but that´s simply because a larger map pool would do well for the longevity of the game.

However, with the introduction of crossplay, the underlying technology has been a massive letdown.
- Massive lags which can only be blamed on consoles having to load assets, making you miss critical skills and shots. Once I´ve had a drone evade my particle lance twice in a row because of a second-long lag. This doesn´t happen when playing with a Steam-only group.
- Again, when playing with console players, the lag can lead to you missing dodges, despite the same dodge move would have saved your butt when not playing in crossplay. Very annoying.

Towards the community:
Stop camping out in some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ corridor, because you can´t shoot aliens and check your motiontracker at the same time. It´s ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring and terrible.

If I could make one wish for the improvement of the game it would be punishing players trying to break the AI of the game by taking advantage of how the spawns works. Triggering a room spawn and then running back outside is the most annoying and worst problem this game has right now.

This is one of the best games of the decade. The feelings of loneliness and struggle, alienness, caring, discovery, loss, journey and satisfaction of overcoming you will have while playing through the game are worth remembering for a long time.

The game doesn´t hold your hands - this can lead to very challenging moments. Not giving in to look up the solution online can feel very rewarding if you persist through it, but you shouldn´t feel bad for looking up an very arcane piece of information.

Having multiple saves is recommended, you can bug out some of your items in game, like if you park your vehicles too close to the coasts, for example.

It still is worth every minute of time you put into it. Subnautica is one of those games you wish you could forget, so you could experience it all over again.

Contains spoilers

While having numerous improvements made to the game in terms of stability, base building and leading you through the game,there are some downsides to how the game is presented.

I still recommend the game, if you´re a fan of the first subnautica, but if you have to choose which of these games to play if you could only play one, then choose the first game.

The good:
- Base building is pretty awesome.
- Sea Truck is fun to cobble together, some nice upgrades
- Again, beautiful biomes and the oxygen plants make stretching your dives out more fun and rewarding but also more risky - especially on hardcore.
- Seamonkey - disliked them strongly at first, but they´re actually the best / most fun creature on this planet that actually feels alive instead of like a constructed robot.

Changes / inventions I didn´t like:
- Having the Prawn suit feels almost superfluous - I didn´t use it even once to mine for minerals.
- The missions on land are long-winded, confusingly layouted and disappointing. The biggest challenge is dealing with the cold - ice worms feel badly scripted and can easily get you stuck with a swiping movement in the terrain. Use plenty of beacons when navigating on land to mitigate some of the pain.
- While Subnautica was never about combat and esp. Leviathans were mostly meant to discourage you from staying in one location for too long, the creatures in this game feel especially... toothless. I don´t know how to describe it better. But once I got the Seatruck and the free defense upgrade, I stopped caring about danger in this world.
- The headlamp, which offers illumination in dark areas, shares the same inventory slot as the rebreather. So the lamp cannot be equipped in places where you would need it the most... WHAT... THE... LITERAL... Just stick with the light from the Seaglider, even on land.

The worst offender:
- The ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ story. In the first game you never encounter the architects and you don´t have any dialogue. You experience the world through your actions.

- Sam goes looking for her sister after she doesn´t believe that mere negligence of security procedures killed her, only after learning that is EXACTLY what killed her, while trying to sabotage Alterra. She also caused the death of the security guy, as far as I understood it. VERY unsatisfying and confusing writing there.

- Margurit´s a badass, you have to love her. But could we maybe question her role in the demise of Alterra´s perrsonnel when she blew up the lab?

In this game after you rescue the architect, you get constantly chatted up with inane drivel - what should be a fascinating conversation with an alien intelligence (it starts out well - "Oh. Your species recognizes a difference between your organical and anorganical components?" was a nice twist) quickly becomes a series of cheap cop-outs ("I don´t want to talk about it" - "If you want to know more, I would like you to construct my body first.") and inane drivel about family and feel-well. Which would absolutely have it´s place in the game at the right time. BUT the most important questions never gets asked.
- How do you feel about humanity in general, not just alterra? After all you expressed some understanding of Sam´s Sister well meaning heroism.
- Could your species advanced bio-engineering be helpful for us?
- Would you like to announce your presence (that your species is alive after all) to humanity?
- Maybe humanity could even help with any events on your planet? After all, humanity TWICE cured the deadly bacterie, where your people failed miserable, despite having almost limitless resources.
- And so on. It feels the story wasn´t either thought through well, or was cut short due to budget/time constraints.

Eh, I´m done with this game, I am glad I played it, but at times it felt like biting into a very sour lemon.

Shooting Bugs, not too bad of a loot system, aliens can become bulletspongy on higher difficulties, but still fun. Good mix of classes and an interesting perk system, which rewards leveling up multiple classes. Missions are nicely designed and have the Aliens-feel to them. Yeah, get it if you like Aliens. It´s close enough to Left-4-Dead that you can pick it up with your crew of three.

I´d like to see more missions and would buy a DLC that gives more content.