CryoFall

Too much grinding and very few variation in world building like biomes, animals, forgeable items etc. I only played 7 hours and I'm already bored and have decided to leave this as a decoration in my steam library. Not worth of the money. Rather spend it on something else.

This game is a colony sim if you have friends. If you don't then it's just a survival game. There are no pawns to control nor to recruit like in other colony sims. A suggestion for the developers: adding NPC pawns and factions for solo players would make the game way better. Until then, I can’t recommend this game, as I bought it expecting a colony simulator or at least something similar to Necesse.

I've tried this game a few times over the time I've had it and frankly, I just get so bored so quickly. The exploration is non existent, because travelling is absolute cancer. If you have not built beside an alien teleporter, enjoy spending 100x more time travelling than you do actually enjoying content. If you have, maybe that'll be half as bad lol. The crafting requirements are the most monumentally boring grind fest I have seen in a survival game like this. Gold being a 1 or 2% chance drop rate, and you need 10 of it to make one gold bar and you need dozens of gold bars throughout your play through, to even just get to tier 4. I have spent easily 90%+ of my time grinding, and I put the drop rate up to 4x for basically everything, that should tell you how abhorrent the grind is, and I didn't even finish tier 4 before I just got too fed up. Vehicles are all so boring and so slow, the hover crafts are maybe 50% faster than running? They're worth it, but not good enough to be the only viable travel vehicles in the game... The random world events are a good idea, but they should start weak, and some of them should be bloody doable by a new character. It's insane that you can start a game and get an event in the most dangerous part of the map, that is actually just a super huge alien boss. This isn't rimworld, you can't just ♥♥♥♥ on me like that and it be a good mechanic in a survival game like this.

Played a good bit of this in single player. Might be a different experience in multiplayer. The core gameplay loop exists from day one to day 100. You'll still be out collecting wood, stone, and basic resources late into the game. The resource collection to go from tier to tier is pretty steep and requires heavy grinding. Unfortunately once you tier up, you won't feel a true sense of progression. Instead, you'll feel like you're constantly chasing your own tail, trying to stay ahead of the heavy resource curve. Everything has a durability which forces you to remake weapons/armor and the ammunition consumption costs aren't light either. More importantly, the resource chains are multi-tiered which creates complexity. This isn't so bad in and of itself, but the fact that there is no global storage will have you going back and forth between workbenches, looking up recipes, and grabbing everything out of your chests over and over again. If they at least fixed that, I might recommend. But even with max boosted rates I don't think it has enough real content to justify the heavy amount of grind that must be done.

Developer's had grand plans that had the community hyped in early access. After the initial influx of cash, they spit out a couple pointless cosmetic updates and abandoned the project, releasing the "full" game and indicating they would no longer be developing it. The poster child for why Steam should do away with Early Access titles.

A chore without mods, which are very manual to install, with accessibility hurdles in modding, server creation, tutorial, progression; also scheduled wipes. Suppressing mods leads to QOL problems and lack of replayability. QOL and automation are subpar, with janitorial chores, quick degradation of equipment, leading to exorbitant grind. A somewhat decent concept that sabotages itself in execution. Neither ample constructive feedback nor inboxing the publisher led to reconsideration and tackling of the problems. During the development process, the developers showed remarkable resilience in the face of extensive feedback. This user invested countless hours on Discord, providing daily input with workable solutions backed by state-of-the-art knowledge and materials. Despite the wealth of well-researched suggestions offered, their implementation in the final product remained limited. Could be seen as a glorified Minecraft chest mini-game to trigger cheap dopamine responses, while the constant grind does a number on your cortisol and serotonin. Additionally, server wipes on public servers contribute to a social situation where you may find very nice people who help you out, only to lose them—and the newfound social and gameplay dynamics—as the server shuts down. This can lead to feelings of loss and a lack of social and gameplay reward. At the current 90% off, I would recommend this to adventurous people who are okay with the rather barebones graphics, character art, and animations, and are up for a very manual experience with a couple of friends, provided you don't mind going through tutorials on how to set up your own server. The game draws inspiration from titles like Left 4 Dead 2 and Darkest Dungeon, adapting elements of their design into its own resource management system. It incorporates a constant resource-bleeding mechanic comparable to L4D2's bleed out mechanics, creating a persistent state of attrition across all game aspects. This resource-bleeding extends beyond health to encompass items, equipment, and overall progress. Players face a relentless drain on their resources through multi-step recipes and aggressive item degradation. This design forces a daily grind just to maintain position, especially impactful in PvP scenarios where missed days lead to significant setbacks. Like Darkest Dungeon, often considered a pariah for its artificial difficulty, this game often relies on attrition, unfairness, obscurity, and complication rather than genuine challenge. The core gameplay revolves around managing limited resources under persistent threat, with challenge stemming from these elements rather than skill-based obstacles. However, there is a skill-progression and seasoned players can adapt through strategic choice of starting location and lean into unlocks and sales of products other players are willing to pay dearly for to cut down on their grind. By prioritizing these mechanics, the game risks turning gameplay into a demanding chore. This approach potentially undermines long-term engagement, following the path of rage-games that mistake frustration for difficulty and rely on triggering cheap dopamine responses through constant grind, negatively impacting players' cortisol and serotonin levels.

I played the game offline single player, it's not designed for that but it's possible. I enjoyed the hours that I put in. I wish it had a proper offline single player mode as well.