Recent reviews by MadeInTarth

I wanted to love it, but it just didn't quite do it for me. I'm a total sucker for survival craft games, space games, base builders, every part of this game feels like it would be up my alley, but sadly it feels like less than the sum of its parts. The idea is fantastic, but each system feels underdeveloped.

The base building is functional but far from compelling. I'm not really one to decorate unnecessarily in base builders so the limited ornamentation options didn't bug me. It's just that there's very little thought that you need to give base layout. String together identical rooms in whatever fashion, put anything anywhere, and you're done. I guess you kinda want to position storage close to crafting tables so you don't have to schlep stuff around, but it's far from a thought provoking exercise.

Resource collection is tedious, and I mean resource collection usually is tedious, but the inventory limits and general lack of visual polish make it a less satisfying tedium than is usual for the genre. You get some limited automation later on (too late into the game IMO), but without any way to transport resources other than you hoofing it from resource collector to storage it actually becomes more tedious constantly rotate resources around manually than it was to walk around and left click stuff as the latter at least lets you get some exploration in.

The energy mechanics work as a serviceable balance against production spam, but the simplicity of energy generation (gather X resources, plop energy building down somewhere out of the way, never interact with it again) means progression up the tech ladder feels empty. There's no smart vs dumb layouts or energy generation schemes. It's just amass resources, plop building down, forget about it. And energy production buildings usually require non-farmable resources (at least for as long as a given energy building is still relevant) so you can't even work around the limit by just overbuilding, you're forcefully energy bound at all times and unless you want to spam super inefficient prior-tier energy buildings you have to accept the scale of operations the game determines for you at a given terraformation level. This might have been a deliberate choice by the devs, but without any player strategy involved it feels pretty disempowering.

The shining diamond in the rough gamesystem here definitely terraforming. Seeing ice melt, the sky turn blue, plants start to grow etc is very satisfying. It's the emotional payoff in the game loop and the way it integrates and gates other game mechanics (e.g. you need to raise the atmospheric temperature to melt ice to get through some caves to get resources to build critical buildings) is really nicely done and gives non-arbitrary mechanical incentives to pursue the game's core progression mechanic. I think anyone who gives the game a positive review is doing it for this reason, it's fun and dramatic and (relatively) unique.

So I don't think the game is terrible, but I do think the core game loop is tedious and there are a lot of missed opportunities for player creativity and ingenuity. Maybe if I had gone in thinking of it more as an idle game (which is really what it is at the end of the day) than an automation game (which you'd be excused for thinking) I'd have enjoyed it more instead of constantly wishing for a little more challenge and a little less grind. But as it is I really can't recommend it.

Much dumber D2

first u get gud, then u get butter

Horatio Alger, feudal style: serf to sultan

autism simulator is DOPE