Recent reviews by iamflip

This game feels like a mobile game. There's some things it does well, other things that it does badly, and the rest requires payment to unlock.

The basics are mostly solid. You can choose how many pieces you wanna do and the auto-sort is so helpful. Controls could use some work and I would prefer using WASD to move the camera while using the mouse to manip the pieces only. When it comes to moving pieces in a group, you have to select every single piece you want to move. An area select would make this process painless.

The multiplayer experience is the most important part about this game, and it's scuffed really badly. De-syncs happen frequently, often resulting in disconnects and lost progress.

While this game is free, the amount of puzzles it has for free is limited. The rest is locked behind micro-transactions. Being able to do custom images for puzzles seems like a neat idea, but it costs money to turn it into an image you can use in-game.

For now, I do not recommend this game. Multiplayer is unstable still, free content is limited and micro-transactions are plentiful.

Updated review 01/17/21

I'm editing this review based on the updates the developer has put out throughout last year, including the latest patch that was released today at the time of this review.

I'm glad to see that a lot of things have improved. Physics are working a bit more nicely and costly bugs regarding items and structures going below ground has been fixed. The vehicle experience has been vastly improved thanks to easier turning and faster reverse movement. New items and content, including new areas to mine and shops to explore, were added in to vary and expand gameplay further. The addition of the Steam Workshop gives the possibility of expanding the game further and easier.

A few glaring issues still remain however:
- The camera closely following the movement of vehicles still presents a problem even though flipping over isn't one. The camera still wobbles exactly as the vehicle wobbles over uneven terrain.
- Despite the vast amount of content to further progress new tiers of mining and automation setups, there's very little progress in any kind of story content (if there is intending to be one). The relics and the cave that houses them still serves no purpose right now.

With much of the bugs gone and with more stuff to do now, I'm willing to change my review and say it's now worth getting this game. However, if you want a goal to follow... this game doesn't provide it yet and you're better off wishlisting this game until it goes on sale.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW:

This game is pretty nice. It shares its inspiration from games like Factorio, modded Minecraft, Fortresscraft, etc. You just mine for stonks and get rich without having to worry about enemies or stamina... or much else actually.

I like the concept and I've had fun playing it so far, but this game is far from polished and filled with content. It's actually deceptive to see this game being sold like as if it's a full game when the game is in an "Early Access" state. Here's a few problems that I have so far (in no particular order):

- The physics are broken in many places. Despite a few patches, items can still get yeeted when I drop them. I've lost a few expensive items this way.

- Driving mechanics and physics are similar to how it is with... bad simulator games. It's easy to flip yourself over, get yourself stuck into objects, or drive yourself off the bridge. Sure you can easily get yourself unstuck with the click of a menu option, but I find myself with two choices: drive slowly and defeat the purpose of travelling by truck when I could just glitch all of the objects into the pan and carry it, or go fast and risk having to get unstuck and redo the travel back again. Also... why does driving backward seem so painstakingly slow? I dread doing K-turns because of how long it takes for me to back up.

- The 3rd-person camera follows the vehicle's movement exactly so driving fast means the camera wobbles hard, and flipping over means you get to see the world spin like a roller coaster. This would make sense if you're driving in 1st person, but you're not and people who are prone to motion sickness won't like trying to drive in this game at all.

- Game progression is short in a few, but long tedious steps. Once you gather enough funding for an automated operation and rake in the money... there's not a whole lot else you can do for main content. Building a house, fishing, and hunting for treasure are nice distractions but don't add up to a lot of additional side content.

- Regardless of how much water pressure goes into machines, they spit items out at full blast. You literally have to wall off the output and have a hopper collect at the bottom... which means more money making your automated setup work.

- Going with the above point, where the drills and the harvester outputs items are different and requires additional infrastructure (and thus more money) to deal with handling the position on those outputs. I can easily just have a belt next to a ram drill and it'll output to that, but the harvester's output is below the belt. It was probably intended for the items to be dropped into a pan, but even that's absurd thanks to how powerful those outputs are...

In summary, getting rich and building up to an easy automated setup of getting rich is nice and fun, but the various bugs, bad physics, and lack of content is frustrating to deal with for a game that should not be advertised as a full game yet. While the dev looks pretty committed to updating this game regularly and thus the game should improve over time, as it stands right now... I cannot recommend this game.

Just gotten as far as I could with the Wanderer story line as of the 0.9.4 version of this game, and I have been loving this game to bits. As long this game has the support of the community to keep adding content (since this game is open-source), Endless Sky has potential to be an expansive enjoyable space exploration / action game.

I hope to see more storylines (esp. branching ones) and more essential choices to keep pushing this game further and further (and to keep replayability quite high).

Plot twists. Enthralling storyline. Relatable characters.

This game needs the “I'M NOT CRYING, THERE'S SOMETHING IN MY EYE” award, It is THAT good.

If you loved Terraria, then this is the game for you. Simply put... this game is Terraria in sppppaaaaaacccccceeeeeeeee.