Recent reviews by Bearly Playable

No Bot :)

Remove repair costs

Fast and fun gameplay. Highly reccomend.

It's great, the updates are infrequent but not TF2 levels of crap and they have quite a bit of stuff in them. The mods are really where it's at though, the main game is fine on it's own but I have close to 50 QOL mods that do things from improving hauling AI to making colonists pick up their gun after they were downed. If you have a problem with the game chances are there's a mod for that. The only bad part is when an update comes out and you either have to play the old version or spend 3 hours debugging your mod list and even then it STILL doesn't work.

Actual review: Buy it. Seriously. It's good. Very good. The game does a good job of not slapping you with insane amounts of enemies or something early game and helps keep things feel fair, and the progression feels really good, my only complaint is that you can go from pistols to assault rifles (the second best weapon in the game) in like 3 quick researches. Defense is also fun as you can make a network of turrets and sandbags, though taking inspiration from the nazis in WW2 (rarely a good thing) and allowing the construction of manned machine guns, concrete bunkers, trenches, and barbed wire would be really cool. Sometimes fighting can feel stupid because your star crafter can take a single shot to the head and get killed instantly, but overall it's a good game.

Like a worse starsector. I personally quit in the early game, so if the game does radically change in the lategame let me know, but I spent most of the game just traveling between a few systems while refueling occasionally and WOW it is boring. It's literally just go to place, pick up mission(s), complete mission(s) by clicking on place you need to go to or furthest inhabited place you can reach with your fuel capacity. It's just constant monotonous grinding for cash. I'll just compare this with star sector real quick.

1. Travel. Endless Sky: Right click on place then wait. Starsector: Fly through hyperspace dodging hyperspace storms, pirates, and occasionally stealthing your way to planets to sell goods on the black market.

2. Trade: Endless Sky: Buy, right click on place that you can sell it for more, sell. Starsector: Buy, go dark and try to sneak past patrols to get to the planet undetected, sell, then sneak out.

3. Missions: Endless Sky: Bring X to X, do X at X location. Starsector: acquire stuff, haul stuff, bounty hunt, kill pirates, scan planets, scan artifacts, ect.

They're not big differences but Starsector makes sure there's some interesting part to nearly every aspect of the game and nearly everything you do is at least slightly based on skill to keep you even slightly engaged during the most boring parts (even travel can be fun!) but Endless Sky is a great example of why they did this. The vast majority of Endless Sky that I experienced was doing literally the same thing over and over again, just cruising around picking up and then completing missions.

Overall: It's not that good, but it's free. I mean, it takes a game being pretty unfun to mess up free. Try it, maybe you'll get bored, maybe you won't. It's free, what's there to lose?

A good game with a lot of problems. Honestly, pirate it and see if it can run on your system and if you like it. This game is extremely taxing endgame and requires a really good CPU. My 6 core i7 lags and stutters at year 2500 on a large galaxy and slows the game to anywhere from 1/3-1/10 of it's normal speed. But I'll get into that (and more) later.

The Pros:

A deep and pretty good planet building system that makes you balance many factors to build effective planets

A relatively high skill cap

Fun gameplay

A diverse economy that requires raw resource harvesting and manufacturing/refining

"Organic" planet growth where planets start out mainly extraction focused then transition to a more manufacturing/science focus

Fun and interesting anomalies, archeological digs, and great story

Hours of fun gameplay

Cons:

The game slows down massively even for me, a guy who has a $1400+ dollar gaming computer. It's stupid that 150 years into the game, what SHOULD be about the midgame, the game is unbearably laggy and experiencing massive slowdown. I've never managed to reach the crisis because of the extreme lag and just giving up well beforehand.

The AI is dumb as a brick and getting any challenge out of them requires giving them insane boosts, the hardest difficulty (which I can beat, as a casual player) requires giving the AI 2x as many resources, 50% more ship damage and HP, massively reduced ship upkeep and a bunch of extra stability, yet I can often manage to surpass all but the strongest empires by the 100 year mark and be the strongest guy in the galaxy by 150 (which is supposed to be less than halfway to the endgame). There were a ton of updates recently which totally broke the AI and they're stupid.

There's no way to be peaceful, the only way to win is just "control most of the galaxy" and the only way to do that is war.

All that matters is pops, having the most pops and the highest pop growth is absolutely necessary to win

And much more.

Overall: It's a good game with a lot of flaws, but honestly it's still a fun experience. But if you have anything less than an i7 and a good graphics card you're not gonna have a good time. Pirate the game and play for a hundred years or so to make sure you like the game and can actually run it, then buy the game.

Really great, but one of those games where it starts off going "HAHA BOOOOM" and then turns into "Okay now I've entered the moon's sphere of influence so now I need to turn around and apply retro thrust until I've killed my horozontal velocity" and then turns back into "HAHA BOOOOM" but with significantly bigger rockets this time. I wholly recommend, but you're probably going to want a tutorial once you start getting to that landing on the moon part.

I haven't played it much, but here's what I can say:

The coding is so simple that while the Autonauts can do anything you can do, the problem is telling them when. Want to have a bot start crafting something when you have more than 50 logs in storage? Nope. Want to have a bot that uses any sort of if statement? Nope. Want to have a bot that can control other bots? Nope! Even factorio does coding better than this and most players never use it! And whenever you want to actually program a bot you need to do the action, that's right, if you want a bot to dig you can't just drag over "dig turf" you need to grab a shovel, dig something, then put the shovel back. In addition if you accidentally delete the bot's code there's no ctrl z, the character moves pointlessly slow making programming bots to do things infuriatingly slow, and I currently haven't found a way to copy/paste code!

The UI just sucks. So hard. It hurts my eyes. It's way too cutesy and looks more like a game that a five year old should be playing

The game isn't challenging, just tedious. Setting up production chains is incredibly easy, most often just take from one chest, put in thing, then have another robot take that thing off the ground and put it in another chest. I'll compare this to factorio again. You need to worry about transporting the resources (which can, on it's own, be a challenge), you have to manage throughput, beaconing, saving space with belt weaving and various other things. What I'm trying to say is that while in factorio there's challenge, in Autonauts everything is formulaic and simple, the "challenge" comes in having complex recipes but doing something a million times to complete an action doesn't make that action challenging, it makes it take a long time.

The game barely explains anything. It goes "you want a tutorial for farming berries? Okay! Well berries come from hitting a bush with a stick. How do you plant berries? Is a flail more efficient? Do weeds appear? If they do how do I get rid of them?, well we're not going to tell you any of that!". The tutorials are inexcusable for a game like this and, guess what, the wiki's out of date too! So half of the things you see on there are wrong! With cereal farming absolutely nothing is explained!

On top of this the game has obviously never been playtested as annoyances are plenty, code sometimes just doesn't work, and the UI is stupid.

TLDR: Has a bit of potential, could be fun, but is destroyed by the many annoyances and the fact that even the hardest tasks aren't challenging, just an extremely tedious process of having bots do effectively the same thing over and over again with little variety.

Well the game got fixed. With the new update I'm actually loving the game. Server problems are completely gone and at worst there is 1-2 second latency which, while bad, in nothing compared to the 20-60 second latency that used to be able to pop up! Dogs are a LOT less powerful, meaning that blazing fast instakill wolves are no longer a problem. Overall enjoyable.

Pros: Gameplay loop is fun, zombies are relatively easy but special zombies (jumpers, spitters, things like that)

Game isn't grindy, you don't need to spend hours mining. I spend maybe 30 minutes mining and was able to build a relatively large upgraded flagstone castle wall.

Fighting is just fun, melee, ranged. It's fun.

XP system gives a better sense of progression other than just "forge=win" then locking steel behind an absurd amount of points. The new XP system allows you to invest in attributes and perks (as I call them). Attributes are weaker, but allow the further unlocks of skills that give you things like 20% more damage to heads (per level), ability to smelt steel, and 20% more resources (per level). It pushes towards specialized characters, but allows you to be useful for more than one job.

Picking your encounters is fairly easy as you can simply run away from most things. The things you can't escape from are often passive until you shoot them (like pigs, which are literal demons)

Cons: Walk of death to a friend when you spawn in is still a problem, but less so now that wolves won't hear you step on a twig from a mile away and sprint at the speed of your average car.

Ranged weapons sometimes just... miss? I mean, I have my aim on the zombie's head, the crosshairs are firmly around the head, and it misses. So I don't know.

Bleeding is crazy. I'd reccomend to the developers that it does the same damage, but stops once you get to 10 health. Still debilitating, but not an insta-kill for new players or people who haven't got bandages yet.

Edit: I'd actually like to take a minute to discuss how crappy this game was before a few updates. Let me reiterate, MOST OF THESE HAVE BEEN FIXED. Let me just list a few things off

1. Zombies would spawn in an already cleared room, not make any noise, and stunlock you to death.

2. The game was so heavily weighted towards multiplayer that you either specialized super heavily or became useless. Perks also cost WAY too much and leveling took forever, especially for non combat people.

3. Wolves were literal demons, hearing you from a mile away and rushing at you, far faster than you could run. They could often kill you before you could respond in any meaningful way and took multiple arrows to the face to kill, while also being small and extremely dodgy/fast.

4. Leather was near impossible to find due to animals being extremely scarce. Finding leather was almost impossible but once you did get it you basically won the game. You could craft near endgame weapons and tools that massively sped up resource harvesting, but then the game devs decided "oh but steel's too op, better lock it behind like 15 skill points (you got 5 per level) and high levels in a ton of expensive crafting skills, meaning getting it was nearly impossible.

5. There was input lag of up to a minute on servers and servers would randomly stop working, debugging the game could take hours and was less of a science and more of screwing around until the game decided to get its ass in gear and start working, at which point the only option was to play and hope that nothing arbitrarily broke the game.

6. Hoard night would be way too easy, even cranking hoards up to max had little to no effect, at least for my game, as I could easily have an upgraded flagstone fortress by week 2 and hoards offered very little challenge.

All of these have been fixed though, and the game is great, so go buy it!

I previously negatively reviewed this game, mostly because starting out with just a lander left a beginner resource starved but starting with a big base left them confused and bewildered. On top of that network problems were frequent, there were only 2 types of generators, plutonium and solar, and solar was really REALLY bad. In addition to the previous problem assemblers often didn't work together and large ships were just extremely unfun. The problem I had was basically that the game said "hey you can make huge ships" but it's mechanics made that a terrible idea. Network issues compounded the whole thing to make an extremely unfun game.

But a lot of stuff has been fixed. You now start with a refiner that can make basic materials out of stone, meaning beginners don't have it so hard. The beginning of the game is a bit slow but it quickly gets fun. Overall it's a good game, but unless you have a good PC it will make it sound like a jet is trying to land. The game looks beautiful on the highest settings but if you don't have a good PC it quickly becomes an eyesore.