Recent reviews by Murk

UPDATE:

This game is abandonware

They never got it properly working and whilst it's playable it has many bugs which will now never be fixed. Play KSP1 with mods instead

Relaxing village builder with a chilled pace and decent graphics

Some graphical bugs as to be expected in EA (such as guardians sticking in rocks, trees sprouting just into the water and, most annoyingly, the camera rotation often stopping working) but by and large a nicely put together effort

In my first 2 games I haven't found it particularly challenging to balance resources and grow basically as fast as I can find new colonists and build houses, but hopefully this will be enhanced as the game is tweaked. Certainly it is a lot less challenging to manage the population that many other games I've played recently in this genre, but on the other hand this does make for a relaxing experience. No mechanic around children to grow the population makes it feel a little contrived (you have to go into the world and find refugees to join you) but maybe this will be added later

The mechanics with the guardians (soldiers) do need some work though - they are very awkward to control in any sort of group and cannot easily be multi-selected and given revised orders if say 6 of them are waiting and 2 others have got stuck on terrain (happens a lot!). This means a lot of extra clicking to respond to a raid, or even just exploring the map, which is frustrating

Beyond the items I've called out above it plays perfectly well and it quite enjoyable in it's current form. There are lots of areas the devs could take things including deeper effects of the rather attractive snow and more complexity in the resource chains (personally, I'd love to see the different biomes link up on a single map with trade caravans taking specific resources between them for some really deep game play but who knows...)

In summary, a good start for a game just hitting Early Access - I've certainly played a lot that are less polished on Day 1 of EA! It feels like it has lots of potential for more depth if the devs continue to expand it during the EA process

Bonus points for no crashes to desktop at such an early stage :)

I'll be watching the development of this game further and look forward to playing more of it.

Built a decent sized base, managed to pressurise it, start growning a few plants and get a reliable atmospheric processing operation running. Managed to get some logic working to make the solar panels track the sun, and even wrote some more logic to support automatic lights

I needed more water for plants so thought I'd try burning some spare hydrogen gas to save time instead of mining ice

This started a massive inferno and heated the greenhouse to 1500C, burning off my spacesuit

I opened door to escape the flames, introducing more oxygen, raising the temperature about 2000C and creating dangerously high pressure. This then caused explosive decompression of the corridor outside (and in fact everything else once the chain reaction blew up the oxygen and hydrogen storage tanks next door), blasting me across the map

Not sure if it was the high speed impact with rock, suffocation, decompression or fire which killed me first but the base was just a massive crater

11/10 would have one stupid idea and blow up 50 hours of work again

When it first came out this was the best seasickness simulator ever. It suffered so badly from lag that it was very much unplayable. However, whilst the game has not been updated for a number of years, PC power has increased, and on a modern machine it runs very well.

What follows is my original review from several years ago...

I've kept coming back to this during early access and thinking that this time it will be better. But no - just more features on top of an unoptimised game engine, equals increasing frustration.

It is an immersive game if you like a fairly realistic survival experience (although we need to talk about mission architectures - seriously who makes the vehicles internally methane generator charged but without charging ports and with no standalone methane generator?!)

The lack of autosave is frustrating - save often because if you trip and break your helmet then you're just dead. And tripping can easily happen around cables etc.

Beyond that the game does a good job of making you work through things carefully and methodically - which is how I think a real astronaut would and is graphically immersive.

Great family game. Although I'd caution not to let the 9 year old defuse the bomb...

"How many wires are there?"
"Well there are 5. No 4. But the third one is red"
"OK what colour is the second one?"
"The third one is red dad!"
"Yes but what about the second one?"
"It's blue"
"OK, cut the third one"
"The white one then"
"Wait! What?! You said the third was red!"
"No that's the fourth"
"OK so cut the..."
"Because there are 5 and it's not the last one"
"OK. Don't cut anything - we need to start this again. How many wires are there?"
"I don't know. The lights went out. I think it was 4. Or maybe 5 or 6"
BOOOOM!

10/10 would blow my entire household up again

First experience of the game: Cool - I started near a farm and I see other people. I'll go talk to them and see if I can get a quest. Wait why is he shouting at me about being a heretic. Oh I'm unconcious on the floor. Wait. Wait some more. That's better I'm standing up again. Oh look doggies. Wait what? I'm dead! One more restart and then I'm giving up on this...

Cool I started near a different farm, in the desert. Oh look there's a massive fight between people and animals in the distance I'll go look. Arrive in time to loot corpses. Yay I have a few animal skins an some better trousers. Now I'll go sell these. Wait why I am being attacked by the villagers? Yay I got a hit in! Oh I'm dead. Just one more restart then I'm giving up on this...

Cool I started near some weird insect people... (insert stuff). Wait I'm dead. Just one more restart...

Cannibals? Interesting I bet they have some loot... Wait I'm (you guessed it) dead. Just one more restart...

I was honestly ready to give up on this game after my first character died before I even really knew what was happening. But then the game really grew on me. When you start as just a normal person (or people if you choose some of the start options) there's a real sense of achievement when you make it! But make no mistake, this game is unforgiving at the start (which btw I think is brilliant) - if you get frustrated by losing your progress because you're outclassed and didn't run away fast enough (or sometimes even if you did) then this might not be a game for you

25 hours in and I'm on probably my 7th or 8th restart but this time I managed to survive long enough to mine some stone, build a house, some walls and grow wheat. I'm now a bread baron, hauling 50 loaves a week to the local city and managed to hire a couple of extra pairs of hands. I feel like I've hit big time. Until I look at someone the wrong way and get killed I guess :)

Really enjoying this game, despite my early fears that I might not. It feels like a dynamic world where you can build what you want and interactions with NPCs feel pretty believable, especially for an early access game.

Yes it's quite hard. But as that's really the point, and by being hard you really do feel you've achieved something. And it's the sort of game where (like real life) from a random sequence of events you just sort of fall into doing something you'd have never planned and it turns out to be fun (I certainly didn't expect my best success so far to be as a baker running the gauntlet between cannibals and wild dogs to get my bread to market every week!)

I look forward to expanding my bakery whilst seeing off hordes of hungry bandits for many hours to come (I've just installed some crossbow turrets to help with that). Until I overlook some small detail and die.

Pros
No handholding / tutorial. Like real life!
Engaging universe and NPC interactions
No set direction - you canfight, trade, build in whatever combination you enjoy
Graphics look nice

Cons
Difficult - don't spend too long customising you character at the start - they probably won't make it!
Some graphical issues which I expect will get ironed out before release


Definitely recommend this game if you enjoy a challenging start.

10/10 would die again (probably several times)

10/10 would waste 1000 hours again

Pros:
You can run your own space program
You won't care when you lose your job because you've been playing this all the time, because YOU CAN RUN YOUR OWN SPACE PROGRAM!
A great way to lose weight by forgetting to eat (also friends/spouse/jobs [see above])
You will gain a new appreciation of the technological prowess of frogs
You may actually learn some physics and/or engineering
Once you exhaust all the mods you may actually learn 3D modelling or programming so you can make new mods (this could help if you lost your job on step 2 above)

Cons:
You will get addicted to finding mods for more parts, more realism, more ships, whatever
You will have to stop playing occasionally

Don't believe the warnings about 64 bit. After your first 50 mods, you'll need to hack it to 64 bit to keep going. Unless you want to land some of those 200 missions. But once you break the mods so they'll run on 64 bit it's really very stable. With 16Gb of RAM anyway. Obviously only do this if you're prepared to support/debug your own install or reinstall from scratch if it goes wrong