Recente recensies door SeventhSandwich

Short version review: Ostranauts blends together elements from niche games like SS13/Starsector/Delta-V Rings of Saturn/Neo Scavenger/Rimworld into a wholly new style of space salvaging game. If you have ever played Space Station 13 and enjoy the learning curve, you will be easily addicted to this game. Bugs are relatively infrequent in my play-through, but many of the game's unique and skeumorphic controls are counter-intuitive in ways that may confuse a beginner player. It's really good, but the number one thing the game needs to improve is a stronger, longer tutorial and adding regular tool-tips that clarify points of common confusion. The game is absolutely worth buying in the current version, but you should join the Blue Bottle Games Discord so that you can ask people questions if you need help. They are nice folks too.

Long-winded version review: Ostranauts is a derelict space ship salvaging game that blends a mix of elements that worked really well in other cult-classic modern games. In each case, the game implements them in a wholly unique way, and I'm drawing the comparisons here mainly to give an idea of what the mechanics are like to someone who has never played before. Specifically, the ship building, deconstruction, and meticulous atmospheric/electrical simulation are a lot like Space Station 13. The setting, economic simulation, and aesthetics are a lot like Starsector. The ship piloting, Newtonian physics, and realistic simulation of fuel economy are a lot like Delta-V Rings of Saturn. The way that the hand-crafted open world, inventory, action, and dialog systems work is a lot like Neo Scavenger (another game made by the same devs). And the ability to pause/speed-up time and manage multiple crew members through assigned actions and schedules is similar to Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress (more so the former).

The game introduces a lot of mechanics that are brand-new concepts for this type of game. When you start out, you build your character's history, skill-set, and social relations (like friends and enemies who will be present in the game world) through what's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure minigame that gradually awards your character more starting cash, skills, and history at the cost of aging your character. For instance, in my first play-through, I built a character that was 28 years old, skilled in hacking, electrical engineering, and armed combat (the latter through betraying a criminal that won my character more starting cash and skills but gave me an enemy). I much later had that enemy board my ship and try to kill me. It is similar to how Mount & Blade's character story creation works, but Ostranauts does it better and with greater depth and consequences.

You start the game dirt-poor, with a hefty mortgage on your ship, space station docking fees to pay at the end of the shift, and a lousy pressure suit that can't even fit an oxygen tank (effectively an air-tight fish bowl you can use to prevent death in zero pressure which stores exactly as much air as the suit and helmet holds). The game starts on a planetoid-bound space station called "OKLG" governed by a hyper-capitalist, corporatorist, dystopian, etc government. You un-dock your ship from the space station and point the thrusters towards a nearby derelict (with instructions provided on a hand-written piece of paper stuffed into the bottom of your nav console). After a brief docking mini-game, you can board the derelict ship through the airlock and plunder all of its stowed loot. Anything on, inside, or a part of the ship can be ripped out by your character and sold for cash back at OKLG. This process of visiting a derelict, looting it, and bringing back your spoils to sell is the main game loop. Gradually, you will acquire a proper space suit, a gun to shoot pirates, and other hired crew members to split the labor of repairing your ship and stripping loot from derelicts.

Much like piloting a real space ship (or what I can assume it is like), the game gives few safeguards to prevent you from killing yourself if you do something stupid. If you uninstall the floor fuselage of your ship, the entire atmosphere will vent out into space and suffocate you. If you attempt to fire your thrusters at full strength while docked to a derelict or station, your ship will rip itself apart (although the game will briefly warn you beforehand with a big red flashing message). If you are harvesting your first derelict with only the lousy pressure suit and let your oxygen run out, you will pass out and die. If you get stopped by the space-cops for salvaging without a license and try to kick them off your ship, they will ram your ship. If you do not regularly maintain parts of your ship, a vital piece will break at just the wrong moment and wipe out both your power and atmospherics.

In its present state, the game has a lot of depth and more than enough content for the price point. It is quite stable and has only occasional bugs and no crashes in my current play-through of ~8hrs. What's planned in the roadmap is really exciting and development seems to be ongoing with major updates coming out roughly every half a year. Understanding the jankiness of the space ship controls and game mechanics is part of the fun (and eventually everything makes sense), but the game doesn't really offer an ample tutorial for a new player to learn how everything works. Unlike Space Station 13, which has an extensive community-curated wiki that can fill in the blanks on especially obtuse mechanics, Ostranauts only has word of mouth. For that reason, I highly recommended that you join the Discord for Blue Bottle Games where friendly players can offer help if you get stuck or confused. The developers must eventually flesh out the tutorials and instructions to have the game reach a wider audience and get better reviews. However, what they have already built is a spectacularly unique game that's worth the effort of learning to play - even if you have to ping someone on Discord to figure out what a button does.

It's rimworld. Everyone likes this game.

It's a mind-bogglingly deep simulation of a fantasy world with a fun colony management game built on top. Before this release, if you wanted to learn how to play, you had to commit to at least a few hours of watching tutorial videos and memorizing trees of hotkeys. The new UI drops that barrier to entry substantially (bragging rights begone!). Anyone who is familiar with colony management games (Rimworld, ONI, etc) will have no problem understanding how this game works and building a fortress. It's a must-buy if you enjoy these sorts of games.

There are still some things with the mouse-based UI I'd like to see the Adams brothers and Kitfox take advantage of. For instance, putting together a military is still a bit of a hassle and dwarves will often refuse equipment for reasons that could be more clearly shown in the respective window. The labor window has presets that dramatically simplify specializing which dwarves do certain things, but there are some obvious categories of labor that are missing (like metalsmithing, jewelry, etc) that should exist by default. Furthermore, there is currently no way to follow along with a battle between two creatures step by step, which is a favorite activity of a lot of veteran players and something you could easily put really compelling graphical animations for.

It's great. The new interface changes the way that the game plays in a good way. With more updates it can be even better, but straight out of release, it's impressive.

I don't understand this at all but it seems like the kind of thing a Civ nerd would like, so I guess I recommend it if you're a Civ nerd

This game is fantastic.

>Be a badass warrior
>Plow through two levels of the dungeon with ease, hit up the vendor and get tons of parts to smith a new weapon
>Lucky! Third level of the dungeon has a smithy this time
>Build "Sev's Murderwacker", legendary custom axe with lifestyle, fire, and intelligence boosts
>Decide to test it out on a low-risk mob, see how good it murders/wacks
>Start swinging at him, damage is great and he catches on fire
>Don't realize I'm on top of an oil slick
>Oil catches fire, had no clue that was even possible
>Kills me instantly

10/10

This game is really good. It reminds me a lot of Banished but with more variety, deeper skill trees, a much larger map, and a much greater variety of potential hazards and challenges to overcome. Definitely worth a buy.

Right now (one day after release), I feel like the biggest drawback of this game is simply the lack of a lot of quality-of-life tools that a resource-management, Dwarf Fortress-esque game needs to have. For instance, the ability to designate certain villagers to certain positions, assign them tools, generate uniforms (like in Rimworld, for instance), and create groups that you can, for instance, rally all at once to go kill a wooly rhino near your base. Also the ability to pull up every different menu and select different things using keys on the keyboard, rather than clicking the icons individually.

The work areas for resource gathering are useful for lowering the amount of micromanagement, but they don't tell you anything about how many selected resources remain, whether they're eligible to be harvested (like when you have a tannin area set down, but all the trees have been drained). Also, their icon on the UI in primal mode is really /really/ small.

In general, I think this game could stand to be improved by just making the UI and management tools easier and adding hotkeys and such. I also think it would be nice to add some more personalization to the villagers themselves, since, besides their names, they're all more or less the same generic AI.

I can't recommend this game. While it's a good buy for 90% off ($1.00), I know that it won't be on sale forever and people will use these reviews as the basis for whether to buy it for $10.00.

This game has a pretty rare problem - which is that the art direction is fantastic but the map design is terrible. In other words, the scenes that they've created with miniature environments are very well done, but every single map is extremely linear, Point-A-to-Point-B gameplay. There are no twists or turns or secret passageways or anything. You have exactly one choice where to go and that's that.

As a result, every game I played for roughly ~1 hour ended in a stalemate because nobody could exploit the map to get past chokeholds. I imagine winning is possible if you play on a less crowded server, but with 20v20 there's no chance.

Other miscellaneous complaints:
-Rubberbanding/latency issues unrelated to my ping or connection causing me to teleport or fall off the map
-Green team sticks out like crazy on most maps - whereas tan (brown?) team has good camouflage
-Game lacks feedback mechanisms for the weapons - no sound when you hit someone, no sound when you get hit, no ricochets when snipers are firing at you

Addictive, challenging roguelike gameplay, but most importantly - really awesome devs. All the DLCs are free, and when I encountered a crash bug, I emailed the developer who proceeded to fix the issue and push a patch within mere hours of sending the email. That kind of bug-fixing turnover speed is rare even within the realm of triple-A games.

You may notice that my gameplay time is 13 minutes. This is the only game I have ever sought a refund for, and the reason why has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the graphics (although the graphics are terrible). I don't recommend this game because, in 13 short minutes, I managed to figure out that every facet of the gameplay is terrible. Read on, and I'm sure I'll convince you why.

First of all, when I purchased the game, I noticed that the server list was almost completely depopulated. That was the first red-flag. This game appears to be getting a wave of purchases right now (many from people on my friends list), and to see the game almost entirely vacant was very jarring. However, I've enjoyed lots of games with small, niche communities, and there were two servers with decent playercounts.

What you'll notice first on entering the game is that the sound quality is really, really bad. As soon as I spawned, my headphones started buzzing with this annoying, synthetic rumble that only played out of the right side of my earphones. It sounded like some sort of cheesy 1980s spaceship sound-effect, but in actuality it was a single-car box train that, for some reason, carries players from the spawn area 2 miles away, to the city where the actual game happens. Why? Beats me.

So I hop on the train right, and while I'm doing that, I notice that my mouse is slow. Really, really slow. Like ripping my mouse through literal molasses. So slow that one swipe of my mouse across my mousepad only manages to move my character a single quarter-turn. I go into the options to take care of this, and low-and-behold, there is no option to change mouse sensitivity. In fact, there are basically no options at all. You can change the resolution of the game, enable ambient occlusion, enable 'cpu affinity', and that's about it.

I walk around a bit to try and find some help from other players. It takes me about three or four minutes to find anyone because my character moves at 1MPH (I later discover you have to use the scroll-wheel to change player speed. Who the ♥♥♥♥ thought of that as a control scheme?). The first guy I find is no help to me. He merely yells at me in Portuguese. I try and reason with him and ask for help with the mouse sensitivity issue, and all I get is "NAO RETARDADO" "NAO RETARDADO" "NAO RETARDADO".

So I abandon asking him further questions, and I move on to someone else. This next person was a little more helpful - explaining that there is, in fact, no way to change the mouse sensitivity in this game. Instead, I have to change my computer's global mouse sensivity from my control panel to a number way, way higher than I actually want to use outside of Sub Rosa.

While we're chatting, I move my mouse up to the sky, and sure enough, my character falls completely backwards like a drunken fratboy off of a Zeta House balcony. I stumble around like this for probably a minute or two, completely unable to regain control of my character. The helpful guy explains that you have to press space. So I do that, I jump, and I'm suddenly upright again. Why this feature took priority over a mouse sensitivity slider? Beats me again.

I ask him some more questions, but unfortunately a wandering group of idiots with assault rifles come over and blast the guy helping me to death. I explain to them that he was trying to help me with the game, and I ask them about the control issues. They respond by telling me, (this is ad-verbatim btw), to "eat ♥♥♥♥ you retarded ♥♥♥♥", and then proceed to ram me into a building, where I then get glitched into an enclosed area with no ability to escape. As they're driving off, they wish me "good luck with that ♥♥♥♥". Real nice folks.

Anyway, at that point, I realized that this wasn't one of those neat, jewel-in-the-rough games with terrible graphics but highly innovative gameplay. It's just a turd all-around. The client is barely functional, the controls are nonsensical, the features lack any meaningful purpose in the gameplay, the community is seemingly toxic to the point of ridiculousness, and of course, on top of that, it looks terrible.

Summary of my review:

Cons:
-Controls make no intuitive sense at all
-Has a bunch of seemingly redundant features that detract from gameplay
-Community is toxic
-Non-toxic members of the community get trolled by the toxic ones
-Game client lacks the most basic settings for players
-"NAO RETARDADO NAO RETARDADO"
-Game just looks really bad, overall.
-Somehow manages to get sub-perfect FPS on my GTX 1060, despite having graphics sub-par even by 1990s standards
-Apparently the developer delays the game development over politics? (From what other users have said here)

Pros:
-32MB download size is convenient if you still use dial-up or live in the year 1989
-Would work great as a case-study for game design classes about what decisions not[/n] to make while developing a game.