Hydroneer

It's fine as a game, but once you get to the mid-late stage of mining, where dirt and ore spew out like a hose, the tendency for dirt clumps and ores to get stuck on themselves, build up and lag the game is so frequent, it's just annoying. You can't leave the game alone for 15 minutes without risking a grinding halt to the FPS. This, along with just random chance afaik, results in game crashes that also sour the mood and drive you to play a game which has a more static, but performance efficient, conveyor system, such as Satisfactory. And don't get me wrong, I don't have a potato; my PC is more than capable of handling intense games, so Hydroneer just has a ticking FPS bomb built into its core. It's really sad to give this a bad review, since it was fun to play. But I've unfortunately been driven away by the game itself, and I just don't feel like continuing in such a volatile state.

There's one fundamental flaw that stops me coming back to Hydroneer, the controls. Object interaction and placement are incredibly frustrating, with items frequently landing offset from where you're aiming. Building conveyor lines, pipes, and machinery often feels like fighting the game rather than designing a factory, and the lack of proper snapping or alignment tools turns simple tasks into tedious chores. Even basic actions, like dropping gold into a crucible feels unnecessarily awkward and imprecise at best. After a while, it stops being charmingly janky and starts becoming rage quit material. Performance is another major issue. As your mining operation grows, the framerate takes a noticeable hit, which undermines the entire automation fantasy the game is built around. On top of that, the lack of a proper inventory or wallet system creates constant busywork, forcing you to spend time managing items and currency instead of expanding. These quality of life problems make it difficult to keep coming back.

It's fun for a few hours at best, I tried so hard to like it but its so clunky and tedious to get anything done that it just misses the mark, my first experience with the game was last year and it was a struggle to get anywhere or find out what you're supposed to do, the tutorial is basic, how to find resources and how to connect pipes, it doesn't tell you what the pipes are for or how they're used for powering machines, I didn't get very far so I left it, then I saw the new update and gave it another go, it was almost exactly the same, the core issue is your character doesn't have an inventory, you know, like every crafting/ base building game ever, you have to carry everything ONE ITEM AT A TIME, are you nuts, so every single piece of ore, every single item and the placement system for the items is a nightmare, you need to enter a placement mode to do that, WHICH IS ALWAYS ON, meaning that I accidently pick up the anvil instead of the item crafted constantly, or the machine instead of the bucket, its such a pain, if it wasn't for online tutorials I wouldn't have made it very far, I learned that you need to dig out the entire lot to place drills down or you won't mine anything useful, which takes hours, then everything is super expensive, just to make one simple factory that feeds the drill into the harvester costs over 2000 coins, combine that with carrying every single piece of ore, smelting it into bars, heating the bars back up and dropping them carefully on the anvil, making sure everything is lined up and you'll get a sword that might be worth 96 coins or 106 coins or 125 coins, the price fluctuates and is a complete gamble, the only way to ensure you get the max amount is to make dozens of items and sell them in bulk, the automation is a complete joke, you can automate mining, crushing and sorting of ores and that's it, it doesn't automatically pour the melted ore, it doesn't automatically make the bars and it doesn't autocraft, meaning I have to carry every single item one at a time over to the furnace, heat them up and carefully place them all down for crafting one item, it's so tedious, the game says that water will break machines without a filter but it doesn't, I never had one machine break in the 5 hours that I had them running, the fishing is pointless as you'll make three times as much by just drilling ores, as is the farming, meaning that part of the game is useless, why would I invest in something that has little to no benefit, when I can just sell all the ores I generate in just an hour for the price of an entire mining setup, which brings me to the last issue, why is the crafting for the machines so far away and so complex, if you want more machines, you need to craft them, how do you do that, the game doesn't tell you, I had to look up a walkthrough to find out where I need to go and what I need to do, which is, going into the mountains, go into a fortress, go all the way down to the bottom floor, bring 300 iron ore, which you have to count, BY HAND, 300 coins, buy a mini drill, take said drill to a casting machine in the middle of the room, pour in the ore and bam, you've got yourself a new drill, why, WHY DO I HAVE TO TRAVEL TO NARNIA TO MAKE A BASIC ITEM!, why can't the merchants sell them, they sell everything else, why not the machines. In the end, this game is tedious, drawn out and clunky, it is fun for a few hours but once you realise the core gameplay is you running around constantly to get the basics for any setup, the interest wears off very quickly, it just doesn't work, it needs an inventory system, have the merchants sell machines (even if it was for a marked up price), the building system needs to be a separate function, so I don't keep picking up the anvil, it needs teleporters and it needs a story, which it doesn't have, it feels like an early alpha of a game, not a fully finished game, I won't be playing it until those features have been reworked.

This game looked amazing right up until I discovered the co-op is Remote Play split-screen only. What kind of nonsense is that? My friend and I are on separate PCs in different cities. Why would we want to play a split-screen game through a streamed connection instead of having actual online multiplayer? Who is this designed for? It's 2026. Not 1999. Not 2005. 2026. The fact that a co-op game releases with split-screen Remote Play as the primary way to play together is honestly mind-blowing. The game looked promising, but this completely killed it for us. Refund requested. I don't usually leave negative reviews, but this design choice is so baffling that I genuinely thought I was missing something in the menu.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this game. The core gameplay loop is fun and there are some interesting ideas, but it's ruined by the poor quality of life choices littered across the game. For example if you want to upgrade your mining setup from one drill to 6 here is what it looks like: 1 minute pondering and planning your setup, 30 minutes shopping for all the parts, 60 minutes digging out a giant hole, 15 minutes putting in access stairs or ramps, 15 minutes building (of which, 14 minutes are spent ferrying stuff from the surface down to your mine site.) So in a total of like 2 hours of playing you spend 1 minute solving a puzzle, 1 minute actually building, and 2 hours of busy work.

Great game my pc sucks but i can run it smoothly and i love the whole game aspect

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Why can you scrap money, but not pallates. Also, pease let me rebind to mouse buttons.