Recent reviews by Understimulate

Summary: I played about an hour of this game after waiting for this product for nearly seven years. Here's how I feel. My opinions are my own, and you are free to have your own.


This game has horrendous performance issues at this time, with poor graphical fidelity to compensate. With its price point of $35, I would wait for either a sale or give it an extra 6–12 months to bake.

The Good: The sound design is genuinely appreciable. This is probably the best part of the game, and I cannot fault it at all. The wind, thunder, and rain sounds are all good and, at times, really enjoyable to listen to. I have no qualms with this.

The Mediocre: The world design is bland and boring, with highly variable texture qualities that further break the immersion of the game. Anti-aliasing flat does not work; I see pixels everywhere with 4x, and I do not know why. The cloud volumetrics suffer from graphical issues (mostly z-fighting with rain particles) that make everything look jagged. This is similar to a Roblox game, which the developers had a habit of slighting on their Discord server, ironically. The WRF model suffers from multiple issues, especially with how it handles convection and suffers from domain-border artifacting. These problems are similar to Cloud Model 1 (CM1) model runs, so I suspect that they are caused by the same problems.

The Ugly: The Performance. Oh my God, the performance. I'm looking at a supercell right now with no more than 15 frames per second. Reducing to medium settings, which makes some textures look straight out of an early 2000s game, and I still have frame drops to sub-20 in places. This game has pushed my GPU harder than the most intense titles I have played, and even harder than GPU fluid dynamics models. Currently, this is unacceptable. This game looks and runs worse than games like Helldivers, Warthunder, Beam NG, and GTA IV/V. Early access does not mean it is nearly unplayable.

Arguably worse, though: The developers decided that it would be a great idea to lock progression behind the online only mode. When I tried to connect to an online server this morning, no servers were online. This is what I had feared - players will not be able to progress in the game because there is no multiplayer servers to connect to.

Despite the problems, however, I still see great potential for this game. I intend on watching its further development closely and am completely okay with changing my review in the future. I really hope this product improves in the future - I've been watching for seven years, I will watch for longer.

170 hours, no idea what i'm doing, no war crimes yet :D
i go on like 2-3 week episodes of playing this game relentlessly followed by leaving it for 3-6 months
still love it tho

oh god ive become addicted oh god


(bullet hell monday franchise player, might explain a little.)

good news! they fixed the economy

*mostly
**enough to be playable and enjoyable

(edit feb 2025)
THEY ADDED AN AUCTION HOUSE BRRUHHHH

click cookies until your brain rots

This review is written solely because of my grievances with a large publisher buying out an indie passion project, and running it into the ground immediately after.


This update is "okay", however I have some grievances with it.

-the UI was not thought over at all and on most PC monitors is an objective downgrade from previous versions, especially in the camera. For most people that isn't too big of an issue, but I use the camera a lot for taking cinematic screenshots of the game and it is annoying.

-and a major, game breaking bug with the game itself.

For some reason, this game LOVES dumping dozens of gigabytes of memory during world generation now??

I did a direct comparison with the Minecraft Taiga Village map, a moderately sized modded map. It should be noted however, that this issue occurs for EVERY map now, modded or not. The following map is just a strong example of the problem;

Teardown 1.4 - Approximately 2 gigabytes RAM usage on world generation
Teardown 1.5 - Approximately 21 gigabytes RAM usage before game crashes due to the computer refusing to allocate any more

I don't understand why this happens, and I almost want to say that its a memory leak that never got patched, but it's very frustrating how most larger maps are no longer playable due to this reason, and I can't imagine how this is with weaker hardware with only 8 or 16gb of RAM. I'm really hoping the devs take a look at this, but I'm rather cautious, especially given the publisher's decision to start pursuing a season pass and paid DLC (10$ for 2 maps wtf lol) for the game.

I'll be honest, Saber buying out this game and becoming the publisher has really knocked my hopes down. Publishers like these almost /always/ suck and Saber itself has a generally lack-luster track-record. I just hope they don't destroy this game in favor of profit like so many publishers do to other games.

EDIT Oct. 12, 2023

Developers literally broke the ENTIRE game with the space DLC oh my GOD.



This game is incredibly fun //WHEN// it works.

50% of the game being basically unplayable, however, makes it impossible for it to be consistently enjoyable. Singleplayer works like a dream, and 99% of the time it is without issue.

Multiplayer however, is an unstable, buggy, laggy mess.

It is unacceptable for 3/4 players (not the host) of a stormworks game with one small vehicle being spawned (the TIV2) to be desynced by >10 seconds. The developers have CONSISTENTLY pushed this issue aside SINCE LAUNCH and have instead opted to add useless limited featured (like zombies??) and push mediocre/okay (industrial frontier) DLCS. I want to be able to play this bloody game with a gang of friends WITHOUT it crashing or getting incredibly unstable.

mf murdered my bunny so im gonna commit war crimes.



beat the game in like two weeks and enjoyed almost all of it
great game
9.5/10

game made me cry my eyes out

11/10

you murder things.

then go back and murder them with complex machines!