Recent reviews by H.Tuttle

significantly harder and more challenging than the original.

Very faithful to the spirit of the original. i sincerely hope my dad plays it when he upgrades his mac. He'd get a kick out of it.

TLDR: Great game; which, i CANNOT stress this enough: BADLY needs a tutorial. If i werent extremely in love with this game, I would have given up after about an hour of spinning my wheels in the mud.

This game as a whole is great and it deserves a big thumbs up from me at the end of the day. I'll be playing a lot of it, and hopefully so will my daughter in a year or two. HOWEVER: the complete and total lack of a tutorial as of October 8th 2021; makes it unplayable for new players unless they either 1) sink many hours into researching the basic mechanics of how to do things and how things work online, or 2) are literally certified ikea furniture assembly professionals who thrive in an informational vacuum.

Look- I love their game. I knew i would. Its the civ 6 of minecraft; its adorable and gloriously complicated and very Stem meets sci fi and I love it. I really do. That said: I have had to sift through literally dozens of terrible youtube tutorials, wikis, forums, discord channels, for hours. HOURS- just trying to figure out the VERY basic mechanics/controls of the game. I get that to a certain extent, figuring stuff out is half the fun- but I shouldnt have to drive myself insane trying to figure out, oh, how to *land* the ding dang rocket, as in what button do I press to land, and why will it land some places and not others. Or how to SELECT a frackin' PLANET. I did eventually figure out all of that- but it was WORK. DAYS of frustrating, Straight up academic research on my part. Not a whole lot of people playing astroneer on youtube actually tell you what button they are pressing.

Sure, theres a "help menu" but Opening up the "astropedia" just gets you about 20 UTTERLY useless infographics that read like IKEA assembly instructions. As a technical design person, I appreciate the aesthetic of it, but, they Dont help you actually know how to do a thing- much less how to do a thing to another thing, or set a thing up to do a thing with another thing.

If you are one of those lucky people who breeze through 20 page ikea assembly manuals, like my wife- cool. Maybe *you'll* be fine. I am not one of those people. Me? I was very very lost. I was very aggravated, and I very nearly quit the game because it doesn't explain HOW to do much of anything at all. I can live without being told WHAT to do- adds a bit of mystery to the game, I like and respect that- But at least 50% of the HOW should be mandatory. The answer to "How do I ____?" is 90% MIA in this game. Just. Wholly. Inexplicably. Inexcusably. Unforgivably. NOT. There. Zero answers to be had.

Here's the kicker: this morning, I was reading the historical patch notes trying to figure out a workaround for a small bug; and when i saw that they HAD a tutorial and REMOVED IT? I was LIVID. I made an audible noise that startled my dog awake. I get it- you update enough times and now your tutorial no longer makes sense. THATS WHEN YOU MAKE A NEW ONE AND RELEASE IT WITH THE PATCH.

Theres nothing I hate more than 50 hours played thumbs down reviews- I'll not be that guy. A note to the devs though as a fellow tech person: PLEASE,; PLEASE put the tutorial back in and expand the in game tool tips. I didn't even figure out how to use the terrain tools' additive or mod functions for several days. PLEASE make sure your QA and beta testers include a new user or two with every update. I feel like you have lovingly been updating this game for years now, and as such, the new user experience got pretty far away from you. It felt a lot like being dropped into civ 6 without any tutorial on the nitty gritty city mechanics or war mechanics, or movement and research. It felt like trying to play chess without knowing what the object of the game is or how any of the pieces move.