Ostranauts

I've enjoyed the game so far. I don't agree with the sudden 1.0 release though. Story lines are unfinished. Place holders. For example. The transit map clearly had a lot planned but it seems they just put literal tape over the location names and called it 1.0. There are also issues that have been around for years. I checked out the discord also... hundreds of unanswered or brushed off bug reports. Seems to be a mod in there that dismisses(with humor) players genuine concerns while putting clown emotes on any bad reviews that are piped into their server. Surrounding yourself with this type will only end you up in a echo chamber

I tried a session years ago (around 5 hrs). UI gave some problems, so I decided to put it off, until they finished the game. Well, it's 1.0, another 5 hrs, and oh boy. While some of the UI issues have gotten better, UI is still illegible in many ways. Why are some items "pristine" and others not? It obviously isn't item durability, as I have seen pristine items that have been torn apart down to 30% or less. Repairing it to full, 100% doesn't make it either. No rhyme or reason. Then there is how little oversight one has over what each stat does, what your traits do, what your skills do, etc. Sure I can see that over time I do repairs quicker, I install and uninstall items quicker, after some time. But there is nothing telling me why that is. If not for the wiki, I would have no clue what "security threshold" even means. Speaking of the wiki, it felt like a shot in the nuts, when I discovered that a 1.0 game has so little variety. Ok, you upgrade from a screwdriver to a power tool. What's next? This is 50 years in the future. The one upgrade path, that is somewhat fully developed is the one that is about structure cutting. You go from a hacksaw, to an angle grinder, to a laser torch. Everything else? 2 or even just 1 tool only. The PDA neglect is the worst part of it. There are multiple cartriges that you are supposed to be able to slot in. Two slots only though. But over 5 cards. So you are stuck constantly switching around, depending on what you need to be able to see at that moment. These are just the tools you use directly. What about the ship? You use the same nav console that EVERYONE USES. There is only one. You use the exact same thruster, so on and so forth. There are only two items that actually have some variety: sensors and floors/walls. You are able to choose from around 10 sensors and there are, what feels like, over 40+ floor tiles. You also get some choice in clothing (which doesn't matter, because you spend so much time doing EVA anyways, thus you aren't seeing it). To be clear, this wouldn't be an issue, if everyone item wasn't branded with a manufacturer label. Rimworlod has one console and nobody cares. But when you have "Polaris "Standard Navigation Console" Nav Station" as your nav console, well then suddenly it becomes a question of why nobody else is in that business. There are multiple tool businesses, why not multiple nav consoles? Overall game progression feels grindy and tedious, while also being rather straightforward and linear. Would not recommend.

I've been tentatively following this game's development since the day it was announced, but there's a good reason I waited to sink my teeth in until now. Unfortunately, I also picked a horrible time- as by the time 1.0 has dropped, the game is still riddled with bugs. At first, they were few and far between- enough so that I was genuinely confused over all the negative reviews citing the buggy state of the game as their reason for not recommending it- but now that I've been playing a single character for an extended period of time, they've only grown more pervasive and annoying as time goes on. The developer, Blue Bottle Games- has taken a pretty "Meh" approach to the whole thing. Player concerns have been very VERY selectively answered, and even then- the response tends to me something along the line of "Yeah here's all the reasons it wasn't ready for 1.0 but if you guys buy enough copies I might actually do something." Overall, it's an incredibly unique game mired by a lack of commitment. I don't care if you've been working on the game for 6 years or more- you've been getting PAID to do so by people who chose to support you and your project, and they've been rewarded with a handful of dirt to the face as a thanks.

Edit: added parts about social and modding. Full of bugs, poor design around every corner, and questionable balance. Also very unique, with absolutely no alternative. Would I play it more? Absolutely. Would I enjoy it? Probably not. That's the nature of a toxic relationship. Now, a little bit more in depth: [h1]Bugs.[/h1] There are a lot. Honestly, at some point I'm not entirely sure what is a bug and what is bad design. FPS drops, script errors, physics, memory leaks, everything would be broken at some point. I liked it a lot one time when the game created all files for a save, but didn't put them into a zip archive and couldn't read this save file. Easy fix, though. [h1]Poor design[/h1] Well, the list would be as long as the game features. Basically, everything that you would do in this game would be made in the most stupid, time-consuming, unfun way. I'm pretty sure that AI slop would make a better design. Here is a little list of examples: When you load the game, the splash screen with update info is right before loading. I think it doesn't block the loading itself, it's just its placement is very inconvenient. * UI is just plain bad. All of it. Like, when you're in a helmet, it blocks your UI. Because of this, I missed a very important button for 30 hours. All bags are just a fit of tedious micromanagement. Character traits are just a long list of perks without much formatting. Visor in damage mode doesn't let you see building marks, and it's VERY NEEDED to see them in that mode. When you dock, "Match speed" and "Prox Warn" alarms are not in the dock screen, AND YOU REALLY NEED THEM IN THE DOCK SCREEN. * Quests are just 98% plain text, without barely any choices, no scene art, not even book formatting. AI. It's very long to describe how poor the AI in this game is, it's easy to find info on all problems with it. Let's just say they often choose death instead of being part of this game. But without jokes, many people decide to play without crew at all and not deal with AI. I guess that says a lot. * Close-quarters combat is rudimentary. Well, it's just not fun at its core and stupid. Why the hell do people with lethal wounds in vacuum die after like 5 minutes? * Ship building. It mostly works. But there is absolutely no dry dock in the game, so you need to do it in vacuum, and that means you need to deal with AI and micromanage them, because they can randomly stop changing batteries or O2 tanks and just die. It's also a HUGE TIME SINK. At least 15 of my playtime hours were spent waiting for things to be done. [h1]Loot[/h1] It's sad to say, but you will see 80-90% of loot in the first 4 hours in the starter playground. There is just barely any WOW effect, not many things to be discovered. No gold mine to strike. It's just a tedious, steady grind. This problem is tied to general economy balance. In a game about making coin by salvage and exploration, this was a HUGE LETDOWN. [H1]Social combat/NPC dialogues [/H1] You know, I like it on paper. I think I even grasp what you need to do for results. But there is no real explanation of the system in the game or on the internet. But in reality, it's a mesh of bad UI and poor action feedback to the player. First, why do you need to look at 3-4 different parts of the screen to see the outcome of your actions after every click? Second, why do stats jump like mad when you click on an option with a simple outcome? NPCs 80% of the time answer gibberish because they play the same system, and you also say a lot of gibberish. There's really good gameplay here, but it's buried under layers of undercooked implementations. [h1]Balance[/h1] Well, it's shaky at best. Economy is weird and very artificial. As I said, it's a problem tied to loot. Without interesting, varied loot, it's hard to balance the economy. So they made GIGS. So you don't need to look for 10-20k ships, you can take a gig that will pay you 30k for a VERY easy task at the ship, and you can also loot this ship. But gig payments crumble under their own weight, because they're balanced around distance. So you have delivery gigs that pay you 1500, and the same delivery gigs that pay you 10mil. So, why would I salvage anything in this game about salvaging things, when I can just travel from A to B and make 2000% more profit? Little bit about combat balance. Imagine, you're a skilled space suit user. You're in vacuum. You have a crowbar. You feel brave and on top of your game. You have no combat experience. And your enemy is a poor space suit user. He has insomnia and is on the edge of a breakdown. He's terrified. He has a pocket knife. He's 1 level higher than you in combat. Who would win? Of course, the enemy. He will absolutely destroy you with his bare hands; he wouldn't even use the pocket knife. I guess that's fair. [h1]Mods[/h1] Modding community is strong for a generally low playerbase. But they mostly fix annoying and bad design and UI, but they can't fix everything. This is a job for the developer. There really shouldn't be a mod that mutes the proximity alarm when you're docked, or a mod that adds EVA suit lockers, or a mod that lets AI grab multiple items before starting to work with said items. This all should be part of the base game like yesterday. -------- So no, I can't recommend this game to anyone. Developers shouldn't release games in such a poor state out of desperation. But yes, I would probably play it more, because this is a way of a toxic relationship.

I've followed this game's development for years. I loved Neoscavenger (the developer's last game) and a sci-fi sandbox space sim set in the same universe sounded amazing. I finally decided to pull the trigger and buy it, but I just cannot recommend it in its current state. I suspect that if this is what they consider a 1.0 release after half a decade of development, then these glaring issues will probably never be fully addressed. So many of the game systems are bizarrely obtuse. For instance, your psychological needs are generally satisfied through dialogue with NPCs in a system the devs call "social combat." I'm sorry, what? This is the worst attempt at dialogue gamification since Oblivion's persuasion wheel. Worse yet, several "gigs" require you to stumble through this social combat sequence with no clear guidance, just hoping that the interaction you need pops up. There is so much potential here. The game can be really fun at times. It's really satisfying to find a derelict with good parts, repair them, and sell them or use them to upgrade your ship. But those moments only punctuate a long, tedious slog. It just feels like somewhere along the way the developers forgot that they're making a game.

Needs more time in the oven

Fun for a bit but the more you play the more it's clear this isn't close to finished. this was quite clearly kicked out of early access by factors external to game development. aka the publisher, financial reasons or the dev maybe being sick of it?? i'd call it maybe 50% done. i spent far too much time at the starting station and now that i've gone out and explored the system it's like an empty mall there's basically 3 functional locations and a dozen more that are empty apart from a few basic NPC's and standard services. CQB combat and social gameplay are virtually identical and feel completely unimplemented. they're basically press button to be friendly / not so friendly. for example flirting consists of making a single weird facial expression over and over and over and over again. and you experience that in a scrolling text field. Crew management is like the sims with terrible AI. it's just obnoxious. when i restarted a fresh save i just didn't bother getting any more crew than the player character. What is fun and implemented well: - Ship navigation (RCS or torch drive) it really feels like you're steering a brick through space or a brick tied to a nuclear reactor that's throwing fusion exhaust out of the bottom. - Ship to ship combat. caveat: it's basically isolated to 1 location unless you go full murderhobo What's okay - Constructing your ship. it works but oh dear lord is it tedious to design and modify your brick - Mining. it's functional and somewhat tied in with ship combat (it's a contested zone). but not particularly amazing. it's fine. what's bad: - Crew control. Half the time the autotask stops working for some inexplicable reason and you have to take care of every persons needs the sims style. literally half of the needs are convoluted and annoying to deal with (the social needs) where 1 is almost impossible to satisfy (altruism) - 80% of the solarsystem is bland empty stations with nothing special to do. - Social / CBQ combat. it's spamming the same things over and over to achieve the desired result with little in the way of useful feedback. - The performance is atrocious. loading takes ages, saving takes ages, the autotask function stutters the game constantly if you make your character build something as simple as a 10x10 floor - There's 0 quality of life. that 10x10 floor? you'd better have manually filled some backpacks with flooring cause otherwise your character will grab them 1 by 1 by 1. i'm just glad there's a mod that helps with picking up 100 pieces of floor first. cause the alternative is that you basically do that manually!