Out of Ore

Really evokes the childhood joy of playing in the sandbox, after a bit of a learning curve to get a handle on equipment. I never thought I'd enjoy moving around dirt so much. The rest of the game is fairly lackluster. The terraforming and physics are respectable, but not impressive - you still get "sky raisins" of dirt floating in midair and implausible cliffs and overhangs. But they're decent enough to be enjoyable without becoming overly cumbersome or terribly annoying. Conveyor belts - fun as always. Material processing and refinement structures are shallow - the greatest challenge in using them is just figuring out the sequencing. There are no configuration options or structural integrity to worry about or experiment with, and several processes are over-simplified - crude oil to refined is not a low-energy one-step process without any maintenance taking up all of 9 square meters, for example. Vehicles are pretty fun and generally have decent mechanics and control - and it's neat that you can configure your lighting loadout and such. There are a multitude of mechanical parts to maintain your vehicle with - but it seems like the wide variety is just a matter of endurance rather than affecting the performance of the vehicle, which is a bit of a bummer... A super cool mechanic wasted, only providing value to world-space-affecting lighting systems and merely polluting the Store otherwise. You will inevitably replace every part of a long-used vehicle with the "high-quality" variants because their pricing is trivial - and then the several grades of every part very quickly become irrelevant to gameplay. If there is some other benefit to higher-quality components than mere endurance, it is neither communicated to the player nor apparent in gameplay nor reflected in the pricing. They could easily reduce this complexity to two tiers - or even one - and no one would notice or care. It would be silly to call "power" a game mechanic at all. Preposterously cheap solar panels and turbines produce constant output even underground, there are no batteries or transformers, and power lines have stupid low capacities and run-lengths and refinement devices have insanely low consumptions... All of power-management is a silly, over-cumbersome chore. Because of line capacities you will need to build more and more completely independent grids as you progress - and the failure to make even the insanely over-simplified fossil fuel refinement and consumption require space or provide any notable cost benefit... Power in this game is not a mechanic or interesting narrative. It's just a really quite pointlessly annoying diversion from the interesting bits. I implore the developers to look to "Oxygen Not Included" for even moderately engaging power systems. TL;DR the game's strengths are vehicle gameplay and appreciable terraforming - and they do that so very well enough that I really do love putting on some chill tunes and just unwinding pushing dirt around for a while, to an extent that I have not experienced in other games. But it terms of actual mechanical gameplay - everything else appears to be overly-simplified or underdeveloped. All of the player agency will ultimately boil down to "where and how to dig" rather than any more compelling agency as to how to build or develop a business or configure things for optimal profits or efficient resource production and refinement. It could be so much more, but as it stands, the game is "where and how to dig." And that can be alright, with the right tunes.