Đánh giá gần đây bởi Naive8A | Life Before Death

Fantastic theming and very smooth gameplay. Though it inherits DNA from Rimworld and Factorio, it doesn't yet reach the level of either, but it still excels as an AI overlord simulator, and the potential for engaging storytelling is definitely already in the game in its current state.

This game really sells you on the idea of being a godlike AI. Every time the humans you're in control of get themselves killed, take up arms against you, kill one of your favorite robot workers, or get space diarrhea, you take one step closer to wanting to be an AI ethicist's worst nightmare.

And the game gives you some tools to live out that fantasy. Throughout my 20 hour playthrough, I found myself increasingly concerned with expanding the capabilities of my robots and computer brain, neglecting my humans as an afterthought, despite the objective of the game centering around them. Why expand their living quarters and build furniture when that steel or titanium could go to more memory and disk modules? After all, it's my job to colonize a planet, not run a luxury resort.

And while I put my foot in the door of using humans as living batteries, I never committed to that playstyle; but that's something I could indeed have done, taking care of the humans just enough for them to drive the ship and operate research labs, essentially enslaving them to further my progress to my ultimate goal.

These, of course, are just a couple ways to play the game, and it's far from impossible to play as a totally benevolent AI, protecting your colonists at all costs.

That said, there are shortcomings in the gameplay's feeling of tension, danger, and reward which I don't think are found in the likes of Factorio or Rimworld.

In Factorio, the threat of the alien fauna to your automated factory only ever escalates. You are racing time, lest the bugs' numbers become truly unmanageable, and always hunting for more deposits of resources to fuel your production, a task which forces you out of the comfort of your base's established boundaries, This constant drive forces you to always expand your factory's capabilities, always engage with the dangerous elements of the game, always seek ways to optimize your methods further.

In contrast, in Stardeus resources are almost limitless, once you have access to certain technologies. If you need more ore, just fly to a planet. If producing steel is too slow, just buy some from the merchants. The only pressure to upscale production as you are in the final stages of colonizing a planet is the pressure of time. You could sit there and wait for one of each type of terraforming building to do its thing (if you even build all four at once, since you could just as easily do each terraforming objective one at a time); it would take longer than having multiples would, yes, but there's no rush. And the threats your ship faces come from randomly generated events, such as meteor swarms or pirate invaders, and are disconnected from your reach for more resources except that they seem to scale based on your net worth.

This alone isn't the problem. The size of raids in Rimworld are similarly scaled. But in Rimworld, a raid is not just a punishment for doing well or a challenge to overcome; they are often opportunities. Raids can be a source of new pawns, which are at the center of Rimworld's gameplay. In Stardeus, you might get some new space suits or scrappable corpses, but there is none of the bittersweet excitement of capturing and recruiting (or harvesting) someone who killed your best brawler. Stardeus's raids are, in effect, just materials to be processed, much like the meteor swarms which drop uranium and other ores. A windfall or a nuisance, with little to be excited about in either case. And when you send miners out to extract resources from planets in Stardeus, the only risk you run is that there will be fewer bodies to defend your ship in the case of a pirate raid. In Rimworld, every expedition can fall to ambushes, disease, or starvation, making such endeavors a tense way to engage with more of the game's core systems.

Ultimately, what I think this game is missing is something to do and look forward to outside of the main objective of colonizing a planet. When the credits rolled and I had the opportunity to continue playing, I thought back on my 20 hours and tried to think of something I didn't get to do, or wanted more of, and came away blank. "Explore the universe," it urged, but what would I find? More iron ore on another planet that looked weirder than it actually was?

If exploring the universe is truly the game's core appeal--and I think it can be, given that your goal is to colonize a planet, which usually means finding a planet in the first place--there needs to be more incentive, risk, and structure to planetary exploration than "click here, mine ore, repeat." Tying more events to exploring a planet--ambushes triggered by sending an away party, mysterious illnesses tracked in by your miners, derelicts that give research progress, or marooned colonists happy to join your ship--would add variety and flavor to an otherwise mundane task. Additionally, I think that the telescope, which tells you where to go to colonize a planet, needs to be reexamined. After all, why should you explore space--something which is normally a grand and romantic endeavor--if you already know where you need to go? At best, it should narrow down your search, let you know when you're getting close to a something which might be colonizable (even if it ends up being a false positive), and provide guidance, but not a coordinate.

In conclusion, do I think this game is worth buying for $30 dollars? No. Do I regret buying it for 30 dollars? Also no. Stardeus tells a unique story in a way that epitomizes the phrase "ludonarrative consonance." I don't think there's anything like it out there, and to me, that's worth the price tag. But there are games that are already finished in the genre with more compelling and tense gameplay, capable of telling a wide variety of stories. Compared directly with Rimworld, which is only 5 dollars more expensive (ignoring DLC), this doesn't quite live up to the price. Yet.

Final verdict: Wait a year.

I feel very conflicted toward this game.

When I was little, I loved building custom Lego spaceships and deathmachines, racing them around the house, and smashing them into furniture (for which my mom beat my ass) and other Lego contraptions I had built. They were hodge-podges of ideas and build philosophies (those available to a seven-year-old), with rail guns and turrets the lengths of the ships, literal glass cannons with thrusters attached to them. I imagined the unobtanium engines and weapons systems sending fracture lines through enemy hulls and splitting them asunder, bolts of cold lightning shattering the ships I had built and sending pieces flying across the floor.

This game is that fantasy given form.

The game's shipbuilding system is, undoubtedly, both the best thing about this game and the best shipbuilding I've found so far. I have lost hours in this game building the perfect ship, balancing weight and speed and sheer firepower in what amounts to a tin can of my own demented design floating through the void. The game rewarded me with a beautiful, baleful rendition of my vessels, and then showed me how quickly my dreams could turn to dust under the combined hellfire of a hostile fleet.

And I could revel in that swift destruction. Watching my ship crack in two, its wreckage mingling with what hostile vessels I'd managed to take out with me--moments like that showed how well this game understood two sides of the same coin: creation and destruction.

But one coin a treasure does not make.

The game lacks character. I mean this in a quite literal fashion: the game lacks memorable agents which drive the world and the story you interact with. There is a dearth of NPCs to interact meaningfully with, and it never feels as if the world is alive.

Of course, I'm not suggesting that I came to this game looking for a visual novel or even a CRPG. But this game, at the moment, is very true-to-form as a sandbox: there's nothing but sand, a few insects, and the tools you have to build things up and knock things over.

I found this game shortly after finding Starsector (which I found before Sseth made it cool). That game's factions and worlds were worth visiting, worth interacting with--and often, they would come to you instead, pose a threat to you and what you'd built. This game appears to have neither. Other agents in the game are there merely to be shot at and plundered. There is nothing at stake except time and pride when they shoot back--pride especially, since your foes are too bland to be called rivals or villains.

I use Starsector as an example here because, despite the existence of a main plot in this game, it begs to be an open world sandbox and trading sim, and steps have clearly been made to facilitate its evolution towards such. But as it stands, it falls woefully short of that admittedly lofty mark.

In the end, however, I still recommend this game.

It's clear that the developers understand that the current strength of their game is in its shipbuilding and combat and are trying to build around that. Integrating them into the game's economy and world are goals they've shown they want to work toward, giving players a reason to interact with the world.

I just hope that the world becomes a bit more flavorful once the game's purely mechanical needs are met.