A game about terraforming a planet. “Wait isn’t that a lot of games?” Yes, but this one does it in a first person survival format, not an overhead strategy or management format. Oh and unlike most first person survival games, there isn’t anything that’s explicitly trying to kill you.
When you land down on the surface of your planet, you’ll be in a drop pod with a crafter, a chest and a few packs of space food, and your first goal is gonna be to gather some resources to make yourself an oxygen tank and building module. You can’t stray too far just yet, since you only get a measly 30 seconds or so of oxygen to start with before needing to return to the drop pod. After you’re past the start, the game gets a bit easier at least.
Once you have a building chip, you can grab 3 iron, 2 titanium and a silicon from the ground, and build yourself the beginnings of a base. And you’re gonna learn those numbers pretty quickly since this is going to be your main source of oxygen for the whole game. As long as you take or find 3 iron, 2 titanium and a silicon during any exploration expedition you go on, you’ll be able to drop down a shelter to recover your oxygen.
Your other two meters are food and water. While I’ve never had a problem with food, I’ve had a couple scares with water. A water bottle refills the entire bar, but that relies on having one, and my dumb inexperienced ass has gone out on several long excursions with only one spare bottle of water and had to panic hurry back home 20 minutes later to get more. You are going to need to explore. A lot of resources can only be found in certain areas on the map, and a lot of important stuff requires data chips, which can only be found in the game’s many shipwrecks.
The main goal of the game is to terraform the planet. In the top right corner you’ll see your Terraformation Index (Ti) to keep track of your progress, and this is a combination of the oxygen, temperature, and pressure changes. Those changes come from finding resources to create power generation facilities like wind turbines, solar panels, and reactors, and then using that power for oxygen producers, heaters and drills, and later on things like biodomes, grass growers and flower spreaders.
As you raise the temperature and terraform levels, large mounds of ice blocking entrances to caves, shortcuts, and new areas will open up, meaning that you can explore more of the map or quickly revisit areas, and one of the data chips you can decode will give you the recipe for a beacon, which does cost one of the uncommon materials aluminium, which spawns in small quantities only in certain biomes, but has the incredible effect of being able to place down a coloured and named waypoint arbitrarily on the surface, which is then visible at all times in world and on your map.
This game isn’t perfect. There is a lot of stuff that it doesn’t tell you, in fact it doesn’t tell you anything after a basic tutorial at the start, so you’re left to your own devices doing resource gathering, exploration, and building stuff as you personally see fit, and more than once have I been left unsure of what to do until I unlock the next thing and see new crafting recipes. The inventory is also pretty limited, you start with 12 slots, though this can be upgraded to 35, and nothing stacks at all. If you want to carry a spare oxygen canaster, thats one slot you can’t use hauling more aluminium back to base.
The biome blending is also a bit jank. For example, when you go into the aluminium fields, you’ll notice the skybox and lighting get noticably darker, and this is made even more obvious in the Zeolite field, where the skybox is replaced with a starry space looking skybox, even if you already have blue sky, even if you already have breathable atmosphere. Even entering a shipwreck or some caves changes the lighting effects to kill the lights, even when looking out into places that shouldn’t be affected by said lighting changes. It’s a weird design choice to be sure.
But after 20 hours, I’m pretty confident that there is nothing to fear from weird skyboxes or area effects. Nowhere I’ve been to on the map has punished me for being there, even sandstorms only affect visability and nothing else. Weird caves with yellow or purple or red gas clouds are just another visability hinderance, and the only ways to actually die is to let one of your meters run out, throw yourself into lava, or take an astroid to the face.
Pro tip: Build your base at altitude just means to look for local high points away from spawn (next to a shipwreck is a pretty safe bet in all cases.) Don’t be like me and spend 4 hours trying to cart your entire base up a hill in the early game, you have plenty of time to react to stuff and nothing to really be worried about.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1284190 £19.99 (Demo Available)
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