The Crust

"The crust" GAMEPLAY is above-average, compared to games of its genres. This is a good game for 50 hours, and a great game for 200 hours. after that, it falls off a cliff due to countless minor issues compounding up exponentially, and occasional mayor issues BREAKING most of the game (by bugs or ballancing). Setting and story/choices are good. This game keeps you busy and not bored. This alone, DESPITE EVERYTHING ELSE, could give this game a very positive review, especially for being in-development and still being extended for free (early access like). BUT you just slip into a negative-review, because: This game is still good, its also VERY WEIRD , and not in a good way, and over time, the bad-types-of-weird just overwehelm all the good aspects of the game. thankfully, you may have have 50 to 200 hours of mostly fun before that. but beyond that much time, the game is spend-up andbecomes almost only weird in worse and worse ways. "the crust" does not get MUCH better with time, and it does get "much worse" with time, or at least much more repetitive, and the narratives of the-crust, that are full of interactive meaningful choice still do not safe the gameplay over time, like the gameplay within the "frostpunk" approach of narrative choice in a city builder is saved by a good procedural narrative of choices. The core failure of the crust is mostly "kitchen sink design", not done terribly, but still done poorly. "The crust" is a WEIRD genre mix, that initially looks like it is almost only a factorio-like game, by its trailers and first impression from its demo. THE PROBLEM here is, that IT IS NOT JUST conveyor-factory-assembly. (Its mostly still a PRETTY and dumb unfinished mess). This is such a bad issue, that it ALMOST borders "false advertising", in terms of that genre this game is. The factory building will only make up 30% of your play time rather soon, mostly because demolishing will barely return ANY construction cost, and because maintenance costs are rather high INITIALLY, so you do not rebuild much (this is good actually), but THEN you notice, that resource nodes slowly deplete (and this is in strict contrast to "high maintenance cost with almost no recycle-refunds) , and sometimes even less than 30% of play time is factory-building, and the other play time is significantly less-fun than factory-building. more and more play time is scrolling lists and navigating on a globe, all with a visually well designed, but gameplay-inefficient UI (overly obessed with extra clicks from needlessly detailed queries). Other management games full of resources and trade do the same UI-design with much better, while not being 3d; (steam-dwarf-frotress, songs-of-syx), and for similar 3d games, "the crust" falls very short when compared to games like "tropico 3to6" and "whiskerwoods" and "factory town" IN TERMS OF UI DESIGN, when it comes to converting resources to currency (and than using that currency). ... and than suddenly, you get 100% refunds from recycling structues, and you manage small remote outposts, THIS GAME CHANGES OVER TIME, and it only tutorializes the imidiate future, not the long term future changes, and that makes it VERY WEIRD. "The crust" VISUAS are just TERRIBLE, too often it is dark dirt in dark conveyors in pitch black rooms, and 4 resources look confusingly similar, 2 resources look like each other in their tooltip-representation, compared to their ingame-color, and almost all of this game is monochromatic, because moon surface is GREY, and caves are dark. WELL, you just need colored light to convey information beyond "conveyor speed differences" and "smelter type" and the game will look a LOT better. we have 90s real time strategy games like "earth 2150 the moon project" that are set ON THE MOON surface , that look more appealing than "the crust", because they understood IN THE 90s, to use illumination to fix the dullness of visuals of a grey setting. "The crust" is still definitely-UNFINISHED at version 0.99, and also slightly/significantly buggy, and full of unskippable full motion cutscenes, and a lot of VERY WEIRD half-assed-ballancing issues: "The crust has countles minor annoying pitfalls in it, most of those are summed up as result of "kitchen sink design" of a genre-mix with an identity crisis, where the core-game changes over time, just by unlocking some research. (1 research sudenly gives 100% refund of wires and belts, a later one gives 100% refunds for structures, and this fundamentally changes the subrenre OVER TIME) While a much better quite similar game "whiskerwoods" is clearly "a game made by smart people for smart people" , the crust CONSTANTLY gives the impression, that "the crust is a GOOD game, made by dumb people for dumb people": - The tutorial is always mandatory, the narrative is always linear. this is BAD tutorialization for dumb people! "whiskerwoods" does this better; THERE the overarching grow-to-independence-narrative is still linear, BUT all tutorializing is OPTIONAL quests, with no time limit to them, you just want to get the reward fast, and so you just prepare for the quest-objective. the narrative-choices in the crust are still pretty good. the procgen-replayability of "the crust" is a lot worse than it is in "whiskerwoods" - You may research "blockchain-servers" that convert energy into money, within "the crust" mechanically a great game-system, BUT 100% fraudulent as a concept by its in-game-label reference to cryptocurrency. they should just get rigd of the "crypto" reference here, but they are dumb enough to appeal to dumb people here. - an update added the resource "argon" to a recipe, the factory only stores 10, the recipe says it needs 10 overlay in its tooltip-overlay. so you build the factory, activate the recipe, and there it says "it needs 30 argon, in a factory that will only take 10, so the recipe is IMPOSSIBLE and BROKEN. its like this for 2 weeks now. - trading UI has minor UI-bugs, as it keeps generating long lists. and clicking trhough those trade-deal-lists AND navigaging rovers for moon-trade and moon-exploration and moon-repairing later on makes up more than 40% of your play-time, if not 80% quite often. - the game is dumb for falling for "kitchen sink design" way too much, it is a constant "too many cooks" experience. not as bad as late-versions of "starbound" ended up becoming, that were full of child-labor-modders gettign hired to just add more incoherent stuff to a great game, making it a ♥♥♥♥♥♥-amalgation, but "the crust" feels eerily close to this starbound-kitchen-sink experience.. - the UI for rooms for population is PATHETHIC, because those rooms are ALWAYS build from south to north, very slowly, and you can priorize this, but the game never tells you how to do that (richt click cheel menu, upper right icon, works on room construction), and because you can OFTEN not PLAN extensions without destroying a previously build room partially (you can not remove externall doors without destroying the room), venting all its oxygen, unpowering all ifs buildings, striggering a LOT of unhappiness and vacancy-inefficiency. you can not build a room-wall nect to conveyors, but you can build conveyors next to a room wall. the game is full of minor nonsense, and it calls itself v0.99 by now. DELUSIONAL.