It's like Eden Crafters but with curved terrain, it's a more active game, and the terraforming is more detailed and also less detailed. Oh also basically dungeons to salvage resources from (aka wrecked ships) and less QoL features, wierdly enough.
First off, targeting ores that are underwater while you are unable to have your view also underwater takes a second or two for the multitool to actually mine said ores. Otherwise it's more or less instant which is nice. I like how mining is a single click, and while the items being unstackable is really cool, the inventory is very limited at just about all phases of the game.
Second, I'm really not a fan of how everything is only interacted with Left mouse button. The fact that recipe pinning is very limited kind of sucks out loud, the game fully lacks anything like a Crafting Guide, requiring you to mentally keep track of the specific resources you need to find amid all the myriad of other resources the game will gleefully throw at you on the easy planet.
I'm not a fan of how Iron looks very similar to Titanium from a distance on account of the fact that Iron can look nearly identical to Titanium, despite the icon of Titanium being a dark brown/black color as oppose to Iron's light brown/black. Honestly if Iron was light brown and rusty red instead, it would help distinguish them, but as it is, looking for Iron in the early game is severely annoying.
Another bit of QoL the game sorely needs is that when you deconstruct a doodad within a wreck that ends up dropping a blueprint chip for that doodad, simply holding one of those chips should disable the dropping of additional copies of that chip.
Yet another this game badly needs is multi-crafting. Repeatedly crafting items one at a time really sucks when choosing a crafting recipe closes the crafting menu, so if you need to craft something 10 times, well you're clicking 20 times instead of once because you have a multi-craft option (could just do modifier keys). there's also no way to mass-scan blueprint chips, so if you pick up an inventory full of them (like 40 of them because of the above point not being a thing), you literally have to click into the Unlocks Screen and then click the "Scan Blueprint Chip" button" every single time, have fun clicking 80 times. This game seriously hates you if you have carpal tunnel syndrome.
Another QoL it needs is the ability for holding your mouse button to essentially "turbo-mode" the act of mining and gathering items like Algae or dropped items.
The wierd part of comparing this to Eden Crafters is that both are ultimately very similar games. Your player character looks pretty similar as does the multitool itself, but it's weird. This game is less jank in terms of movement of vehicles, but it also in many ways feels less satisfying in the realm of terraforming power fantasy.
There's no aspect where you get to see your growers slowly spreading life across the barren planet surface, or see the toxic oceans slowly purify, but you can grow plants, insects and eventually animals and even launch rockets to speed the terraforming process.
Inventory Management is extremely jank. Because every building costs individual resources instead of certain amounts of said resource within a stack, mining mass amounts of a certain resource is, in simple words, annoying at least.
The worst part is when you need to craft Super Alloy, a material that costs 1 Aluminum, Iron, Magnesium, Titanium, Cobalt and Silicon each, and later buildings will cost 3 of these things. On the easy map you never need ot craft them, you just need to explore enough and you'll inevitably find naturally-spawning Super Alloy and there's enough of them that you functionally never need to craft them. On harder maps, you will have to craft most of it and it's then when the jank of inventory management in relation ot recipes and crafting will become more known to you. Namely playing the smaller moon map (which really isn't smaller than the other map by the way, it's actually larger even if most of it is more or less huge hallways until you get better mobility options).
Also there's a bug that occurs pretty frequently for me, when you hover your mouse over interactibles, there's a chance that your selection will hang over items your cursor is no longer over. This happens most often when you have Golden Effigies on the floor under Desktops that hold Screens ontop of them. Sometimes you'll pick up the effigy instead of clicking on the screen that you are point at. This happens much more often with the nameplate of a locker which is another way in how the "left click to interact with everything" design completely sucks my ass raw because you could just have the name customization be an option used while looking at a container's inventory and it wouldn't even be hard to implement for controller either. Lockers are massively jank due to this because sometimes if you accidentally click on the name plate, the cursor selection will hang on the nameplate until you move your cursor off the locker entirely, which isn't a big deal until you're late-game and moving rapidly throughout your storage room(s) and the hanging on nameplates repeatedly happens and annoys the piss out of you.
The progression is fantastic though and it's a genuinely addicting game that always rewards you for exploring (except the moon map in most cases honestly. The facility needing you to lift the lockdown with all you get is a chest with basically trash in it, really sucks. I get that their contents are random, but I think proximity from the spawn location should more heavily value the in-the-open chests more than the "wrecks next door to the spawn point that require nothing to access" chests.
I have other critiques, but it's probably more personal preference, like how expanding power eventually gets really annoying because everything costs sulfur and the cost in common metals basically falls to 0 outside of Super Alloy costs which itself falls in favor of Sulfur, plant and Irridium/Uranium costs. Another would be how you can't place storage buildings outside or you can't place most of them outside when you will find at least container chests outside very frequently.
Honestly though, I would like if there was some form of global storage by the Osmium stage, it would make crafting and building a lot less tedious when you're literally juggling multiple different recipes ontop of going on resource runs for resources that spawn in very little amounts like Zeolite. Also the inability to pin a map Point of Interest to see where the game is expecting you to find those areas would alleviate some player-frustration.
My recommendation is to honestly play this and pace yourself, and probably bring some friends with you. Unlike Eden Crafters, you can actually do that, and I'd say at the very least the Toxic DLC is worth it if you get it on sale for cheaper than the bundles would give. Idk about Humble, it just seems like a more tedious moon map with a much more confusing environment on account of you having to get most of your common materials via breaking down a map-exclusive ore into said common materials, and the idea of adding yet even more individual-item crafting to the Super Alloy loop is genuinely only an idea that developers who don't play their own game enough would come up with.
Finally, the one thing I'm not a fan of is the fact the torch upgrades barely feel worth it. The T2 torch barely illuminates more than the T1 and it's not like it has a greater range, the range of the torch is pathetic to begin with, and the T3 Exoskeleton really takes too long to unlock. I also hate that there's no building hotbar. The lack of inputs for players to use compare to other games in the genre genuinely keeps giving me the feeling that I'm either missing numerous huge and important controls, or the game's not finished.
It's only a good game.
