Hydroneer

I have tried for almost 50 hours to make this game fun, it has proven to be an annoyance and a hassle every single time i get on to play, i can never progress significantly due to having to clear mass amounts of dirt by hand just to be able to setup drills and harvesters that break every couple minutes, in all my time playing i have not found a single cloutium, an essential resource to progress, oh and visual effects such as the ore vein locator are impossible to turn off and significantly tank your framerate when you look at them, my experience has been overall negative and i would not recommend you get this game, especially if your interest was peaked youtubers like lets game it out, the game is not like he makes it appear

[h1]Ковырялся в грязи до того, как это стало прибыльным[/h1] [b][i]Буквально одной емкой фразой можно описать эту игру неопределенного жанра.[strike]А на этом все – всем спасибо, все свободны.[/strike] Но не спешите расходиться – ведь если вы спустились в раздел обзоров, значит чем-то, да зацепил этот «мёд» на главной странице игры. В этом мини-обзоре постараюсь для вас расписать, что из себя представляет эта игра и с чем её едят.[/i][/b] Но почему все же неопределенного жанра? Я, честно говоря, так и не понял, куда можно отнести игру, которая нахватала верхов отовсюду и толком глубоко не развила ни один пункт: ♦ Это однозначно игра не про выживание, ибо погибнуть здесь просто нереально – ни от голодухи, ни от госпожи гравитации, а с лавой так вообще можно в десны целоваться. ♦ Это не полноценная песочница, ведь карта здесь фиксированная, а ковырять земелю можно только правильную, и только в строго отведенных местах. ♦ Это не полноценная «крафтилка», ведь крафта, как такого – здесь нет (парочка вещей для продажи – не в счет). ♦ Условно это можно назвать симулятором раскопок и строительства, ведь этим мы будем заниматься 90% игрового времени, поэтому, думаю, на этом можно остановиться. [u]Начало игры[/u] встретит нас созданием своего профиля-карты и простеньким редактором персонажа. Крайне советую пройти коротенькое обучение, в котором нам, собсна, покажут как правильно [strike]входить в хату[/strike]месить грязь на первых порах. А далее, при загрузке уже на обычную карту – мы просто появляемся в этом пустом и блеклом мире, как когда-то появился Лунтик, но нашей фразой в этот моменте будет гордое «Я – гидронир». https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3733168080 А далее мы предоставлены самим себе. В руках у нас тазик с лопатой, в зубах щетка, а в голове – надежды на светлое будущее. Таким нехитрым образом, нам дают почувствовать себя самым настоящим брутальным старателем, особенно после первого вымытого золотого самородка из куска грязи. Но что делать дальше? Куда двигаться? Помимо постоянного валяния в грязи, занять себя мы можем достаточно клишированными и непроработанными ремеслами: • [b]Рыбалка[/b] – купив удочку и ведро для складирования рыбовых, мы можем начать этим заниматься хоть из ближайшей лужи – улов с любой точки карты будет одинаковым. Ужасна проста и примитивна – закидываем удочку, через 8 секунд нажимаем ЛКМ и лутаем рыбку. Для автоматизации достаточно поставить автокликер и пойти пить чай. • [b]Садоводство[/b] – название говорит само за себя. Культур для выращивания не так много, автоматизации это дело поддается только частично, доход от этого занятия весьма посредственный, а постоянный ручной сбор урожая по одной штучке рано или поздно доведет вас до батхерта. • [b]Строительство[/b] – из фиксированных наборов можем строить почти все, что душе угодно. Если же вы имели опыт строительства в других играх с сетчатой структурой – ничего нового здесь вы не увидите. Зато увидите кривые текстуры, из-за которых стройку постоянно приходится корректировать (просто нет возможности поставить блок в определенном месте, либо торчащие куски земли будут выпирать и загораживать объекты), разноцветные деревянные панели (когда стена имеет один оттенок, в угол крыши – другой), а так же максимальное скудное убранство, которым можно комплектовать хаты – отчего ваше желание что-либо строить улетучится максимально быстро. • [b]Шахтёрство[/b] – развивая тему копания грязи, зарываясь все глубже, в дальнейшем мы переходим к плавной автоматизации процесса. Для этого нам понадобится куча различных приблуд, работающих за счет воды и логики, которые покупаются только у торговцев, а так же херова туча шекелей для их приобретения. Поэтому прежде нам придется очень много гриндить, вручную сортируя руду и драгоценные камни, отливая слитки и бегая до торговцев с тазиком. Но когда вы дойдете до строительства буров и труб к ним под землей – сила русского мата в вас заиграет с новой силой, потому что размещать предметы здесь в скованных условиях – та ещё пытка. • [b]Квесты[/b] – которые сводятся только к одному пункту – принести неписю нужный предмет, будь то кусочек руды определенного веса, слиток, предмет или СУП из выращенных нами культур. За квестики мы лутаем особую валюту - жетоны, за которую покупаются более продвинутые предметы. За шахтёрство – свои жетоны, за супы – свои. Главной же фишкой игры выступает то, что у нас [u]вообще нет инвентаря[/u] – каждый предмет необходимо таскать в руках по одному. Мелкие предметы можно складывать в тазики, большие – возить в багажнике брички (кстати, тот здоровенный трактор в первой деревеньке – полностью ваш). Предметы из мира никуда не пропадают и через какой-то время ваш двор превратится в нагромождение самого разного хлама. Поначалу это действительно прикольно, свежо и необычно, но через десяток часов превращается в лютую душнину, особенно когда постоянно забываешь деньги в тазиках торговцев или забываешь купить какой-то предмет, а до торговца чесать через всю карту. Отдельную бычку я бы предъявил и [u]графике[/u]. Сама игра хоть и сделана в стиле «лоу-поли», но текстуры выглядят разношёрсто. Текстура камня, а особенно – бетонного блока, который просто залили серым цветом – отдельная тема для батхерта. Но больше всего меня раздражала постоянная темнота – короткий световой день заставляет нас играть в вечных сумерках, в которых нихeра не разглядеть даже на ярком мониторе. Пришлось в фулку выкручивать гамму в игре, чтобы не сломать глаза. Да, у нас есть шахтёрская каска с фонариком, только вот она загораживает половину обзора. И её необходимо СНИМАТЬ, чтобы сесть в бричку. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3733757801 К минусам так же отнесу кучу бесполезных предметов, типа молотка конструктора, которым мы «прибиваем» размещенные предметы, чтобы случайно их не взять. Если этого не сделать – постоянный подъем пола вместо чего-либо ЗАСТАВИТ вас это сделать. А ведь это банально можно было сделать через кнопку, чтобы было бы в РАЗЫ удобней. [u]Оптимизация[/u], в целом, достаточно неплохая. Но огромное кол-во мелких предметов за пределом тазиков будут нещадно уничтожать фэпэс. Поэтому стараемся хранить хабар где угодно, но не на полу. [b][i]В общем, игра получилась на своего любителя. Если же вас необходимо постоянно развлекать и мотивировать – брать точно не рекомендую, ибо здесь не будет ни того, ни другого. А те из вас, кому по нраву спокойный и размеренный геймплей, а так же любовь к соединению того, что соединяться абсолютно не хочет – эта игра точно для вас. Но положа руку на сердце, сделано все зачастую очень просто и я более чем уверен, что хватит вас лишь на одну автоматизированную линию, ибо в другой смысла уже не будет – получится она точно такой же, разве что чуть быстрей. А реализовать многие вещи не позволят технические ограничения.[/i][/b] [h3]6 отфутболенных неписей из 10[/h3] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3733754930 [b][i]P.S. Отдельная благодарность [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/IgorBlaze]grossmeister™[/url] за подогнанную копию игры, небольшой участочек, тазик и лопату.[/i][/b]

FIX THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SAVE BUG, i was so far into the game then i saved, reloaded... and POOF EVERYTHING IS GONE, you said you fixed this but i haven't seen it work ONCE i am pissed because this is the 4th save file i've lost. FIX THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ GAME

Tl;dr: Good enough that I bought it after playing a pirated copy, but it is held back by some truly bizarre design decisions that feel even more frustrating with how obviously the devs possess both skill and motivation. First, the positives. The game runs brilliantly. I have not yet really pushed things, but my rather modest mining setup runs without a single hiccup on my ancient 4670K. The NPCs and their fetch quests make the game world feel more friendly and alive, which is a pleasant departure from the hostile worlds of Factorio and Satisfactory. I absolutely love the aesthetic. I also love how everything runs on water, and that the devs give you a magic water pumping pipe rather than requiring you to power the water pump. I like how the vehicles are so easy to get back upright after flipping them. I like how you can combine gems into larger ones. And of course, I love the built-in mod support. For example, aside from a set of basic starting tools, everything you will use has to be bought from shops with money you earn by crafting commodity items like daggers, axes, and jewelry. That itself is fine, but for some reason, the devs think that it is a good idea to have to manually carry your money from shop to shop to buy things which, since you do not have any kind of internal inventory, means either making multiple trips back and forth to carry the money to the shop, bring back each purchase one at a time, and then retrieving your money, or using the in-game pallets which have finite space and take your pace from "a bit slow" to "old man with his shoes tied together." This is partly solved once you get one of the trucks, but even that requires you to cheese things by dropping things from above the truck bed in order to get your various items of cargo to phase into each other. As others have mentioned, digging mines is a chore, and requires you to either use the shovel to relocate one basketball-sized piece of soil at a time or use things like explosives or the pickaxe which, while significantly faster, erase the material from existence, thus denying you the resources contained within the soil. Then, if you want the floor of your larbouriously dug mining pit to have flat terrain, you have to use a rake that loves to target the side of terrain rather than the top, creating a Minecraft-esque block rather than the smooth floor you were trying to get and, of course, fixing this requires digging out the block and trying again. Another example of the design decisions that make the game less fun to play are the machines themselves. Having mining machines be damaged by unfiltered water when you can run a literal truck off water you grabbed from a pond is kind of confusing even in-universe, and having to use five filters to prevent this is kind of obnoxius. What is very obnoxius is that the filters have rather short lifespans, and the death of a single one stops all water flow, meaning that all of your machines and conveyors instantly stop. While the filters and other machines do not explode or anything when they reach zero health/integrity, they do require you to use either a single-use wrench or a 5(?) use bag of wrenches to fix them, and these are both items that you have to buy and, like everything else, you have to carry and use them in your hand because the game has no inventory system. Even dropping things is annoying. When you drop something, rather than going where you are looking, it gets dropped from a point to the right, probably to recreate dropping something from where your right hand would be if you held your arm out in front of you. While that is kind of annoying by itself, so much so that the devs give you a little indicator to tell you where a dropped item will land, you also cannot drop things if the item you are holding is touching anything, meaning that tall items like the shovel cannot be dropped while standing on and facing an incline, requiring you to turn around or jump to put the thing down. The game has a lot of potential. Frankly, the attention to detail that can be found in little things like how dropping a hot ingot into water causes a puff of steam, hissing sound effects, and cools the ingot makes the game's many annoyances that much worse, because it tells me that the devs are not lazy and that instead the various issues I have with the game are actually the intended experience.

Do you like incredibly tedious games?! Boy howdy, Hydroneer is for you!! No inventory system means you must handle every. single. item. one. by. one. After multiple journeys to town and back because you needed (forgot) something, bask in the glory of your fully built automated system churning out an endless stream of valuables that tickles the goblin part of the brain. Then despair as your greed drives you to start over in a new area, to dig even deeper for even more and rarer resources. Frustratingly addictive.

A particularly tedious mining/automation game. Feels like the style of the gameplay is "imagine a mining game with no QOL"

I've been eyeing this game for a few years now, waiting for it to become more fleshed out and to leave early access. Today, I thought it would be a good moment to try it out. And, to be honest, I feel like I've just wasted my time playing this. The start is very rough, the early automation mechanics are poorly explained and very finicky. Digging by hand is extremely inefficient yet you'll be forced to do it in order to even make space for the machines that do it for you. The machines themselves seem to need very specific black magic to work, to the point that your drill can become "buried" by the same medium it's supposed to drill through, just because you missed some small lump of dirt in the bottom left. Yeah, experience in-game may help me improve these situations, but it's not experience I would gain to "improve" the overall gameplay but to make it "tolerable". The bottom line is: There's way better automation games out there. It's impressive how rough around the edges this game still is after all these years. The lack of an inventory system, the completely pointless day/night cycle, the soulless towns, and the wonky physics are supposedly "intentional" by the developers to differentiate their game from others, which is like putting garbage in your soup to differentiate it from your grandma's. However, its biggest problem is that the early gameplay loop is quite unsatisfying, and feeling some kind of satisfaction for your hard work would be the only real reason to endure such a tedious game until it "gets good".

Jank can be fun, but this isn't the right kind. It's difficult to purchase items, build items, transport items, modify terrain... I see the vision with being without an inventory, but you may have gone too far by not even having a place for money. If the intent of the game is base building, it's too much of a pain to play.

The game had good potential at one time, but did not stick the landing. Rather than finishing and polishing the game, the dev team (Max) opted to declare the game a finished product simply to be able to sell a DLC for almost the price of the base game. The game is buggy and incomplete. The devs abandoned development and would like you to buy their new game (also Early Access). Doing the bare minimum to cross the finish line. Bugs get dismissed, or called part of the game, and not addressed. The game is full of incomplete mechanics, incomplete buildings, incomplete towns, and is void and empty by consequence. You will be told this is by design. The dev started with so much heart, then just gave up on a half-baked game. Warning: Multiplayer won't ever happen because UE4 non-determinism, with no dev desire to work around that. The official Discord for reporting bugs is a toxic evironment. You report a real bug, and you have your intelligence repeatedly insulted despite showing screenshots. If anything feels like a bug, you are deemed too dumb to understand the mechanics. My most recent incident is with stairs placement collision checks. One of my biggest bug complaints is the mesh checking for structure placement. Depending upon where a player stands, a building placement will be wrongly marked as invalid (Red). Same placement location, different validity check result. You will be told this is intended mechanics and you just don't understand. The bugs will not be fixed because the game will not be changed, ever. Abandoned. Clean up that Discord server and make sure people aren't insulted as part of their first experience. I gave the game 3 honest playthroughs in 3 different years; some parts were fun, but most of the time I ended grinding to complete my particular build vision. The building is honestly 10% of the game time, but 90% of what you want to do. The build is fun, the grind is not. The contract/quest token system is the worst part of the game. The cost of many items (farm items) is not worth the effort required because the early progression is so incredibly slow. Around 2000 tokens for a sprinkler, around 56 tokens received for a contract for a soup with tomatoes. Grinding for pitiful amounts of tokens to unlock equipment is not okay. No player wants to drive across the map for a quest to find out it is only 56 tokens when they are already delivering quests worth 560. And why on earth am I FORCED to farm in a mining and automation game? I am forced to because the quests for Prospect Guild tokens are soft locked behind townsfolk being saturated with farming quests. Want high-pressure pipe? You must do equal numbers of Farm Guild and Prospect Guild quests to keep getting either kind of tokens. The progression is intentionally designed to be slow and a grind in early game to stretch out the hours played. It's about 10 to 15 hours of real content, and the rest is driving, getting pitiful quests, and fulfilling them to hopefully have some decent quests if the RNG permits. I always have more than enough resources to fulfill any possible quest, but the quests do not progress or scale properly. I passively make 4000000 HydroCoins in 20 minutes, but I am stuck getting stupid quests for less than 200 tokens. It's a waste of my time. It's simply bad game design masquerading as "content" (hours played). The Devs will say that it's "not for everyone"; it's lazy RNG quests without sensible progression constraints on the quests given. There are many frustrations within the game. These are what I accept for myself as valid game design choices: - All-physical world, no inventory - Awkward item dropping and placing - Unwieldly vehicle control and scuffed physics (inverted truck pirouettes) I accept these as design choices and personality. That claim does not apply to driving around town grinding the same 2 quest types over and over. Give soup, give nugget/gem/dagger/axe/sword/ring/necklace. Now do it again >50 times, each time driving to the person, getting the quest, driving home, making the item, driving back to deliver, driving home again. That's how you get 200hrs on 3 playthroughs with only 15 hours of genuine game content. You've heard of second-screen video content? This is second-screen game. It's mindless, despite having all the logic and mining build systems to make it potentially engaging. Why did I play this game? Because I commit to making a particular build, but then I put the game down because I realize it wasn't fun, and I feel like I was promised something else. I was promised a mining, building, design and automation game. I got a quest-fetching driving sim I play while listening to a documentary. The bugs, particularly visual bugs, are everywhere. It's almost all mesh and collision bugs. It is not a polished game. It is not a complete game. No @grandmaMax, this is not a finished product. It is not finished simply because you declare it to be so; it is finished when you fix the bugs and problems identified by early access players in 2021. Not wanting to work on the game is not the same as it being complete. No, dismissing legitimate criticism is not "addressing" the criticism. It's lazy. Saying it's a "finished product" is an insult to everyone who bought early access. Please fix it before you call it complete. So where is the source of my frustration? I read Max's responses to negative comments. He's transparent. He would rather spend hours reading and responding to negative comments than touch his own code. This visceral reaction to personal accountability will destroy you in any professional or personal situation. In any professional software environment, that gets you fired. The standard response to complaints about waiting or driving or grinding: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198741387650/recommended/1106840 "Hey there, sounds like Hydroneer isn’t the game for you, and that’s okay! With Hydroneer our aim is to make a unique gaming experience that isn’t for everyone." Complaints about late optimization after 1.0 and multiplayer: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198037357715/recommended/1106840 "they found a few opportunities for us to optimize the game, that our lesser experienced team did not know about." It's been 6 years; enough time for you to get a DEGREE in game development. Figure it out. Here's a hint of accountability after backlash caused by ignoring 5 years of complaints: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1106840/view/3976182006224274699 The dev calling themselves a "lesser experienced team" while simultaneously declaring proper multiplayer "impossible" is lazy and a transparent attempt to offload personal accountability. You can't have it both ways; you can't simultaneously say you are too inexperienced to do BASIC optimizations that an external team can catch, while pretending to have enough experience to declare something impossible. Show us why. Here's exactly how you can get me to "consider updating my steam review" as you request on every negative review: 1. FIX collision checks on placement (especially bugs dependent on viewing angle) 2. FIX token progression and reduce the grind 3. Review the entire game map, and fix bad meshes. No more meshes clipped through in a lazy way, no meshes that disappear when I view them from the wrong side. 4. Get rid of any pointless invisible walls 5. Tell me where my vehicle goes when I "Recall Nearest Vehicle", and it just disappears 6. Have the villagers check to see if I've even taken their quest before vocally asking if I'm finished it yet 7. DO NOT reset motion blur to ON when I accidentally hit F11 and go into windowed mode @grandmaMax, I hope this extra information has been useful, and perhaps changed your perspective on calling the game a "finished product". :) @grandmaMax, if you decide to give Hydroneer a second chance, please consider updating your game. We’re a small game community and bug fixes really help us out, thanks!!