Subnautica... IN SPACE! WITH CORPSES! (so many corpses!)
The game is roughly broken into three or four parts. First, you start off in your shuttle, with no equipment or resources - it's basically Subnautica, if you could only restore your oxygen in your escape pod. Eventually, you'll make your way to the second chapter, where you'll upgrade your equipment to drastically increase your oxygen capacity, ability to and duration of your thruster burn, and eventually get vehicles that allow you to move at 5x and 10x your initial movement speed; drastically increasing your range. It's actually rather fun going back to the initial area - things that required multiple oxygen waypoints and additional supplies are easily accomplished in just a single air tank.
Thankfully, there are multiple areas in the second section where you can recharge your oxygen, so you're not stuck constantly going back and forth from your shuttle. You'll also get oxygen candles that can entirely refill your supply, giving you the ability to stay somewhere that doesn't have a handy recharge station while you look for whatever resources / mission objectives you need.
Your inventory is your constant enemy. The game is great in that, while it is _better_ to put things into containers, you can totally just dump all your crap onto the floor and it'll stay there. The biggest problem is that both food and water inexplicably take up 2 slots each in your inventory, and the game gives you _tons_ of the stuff. You'll routinely find yourself dumping bottles of water and/or packets of food to grab two more shards of titanium.
Speaking of, it's worth noting that although you've got both food and water bars, the only time you might (_might_) end up starving or dehydrating is the very, very, very start of the game. There's just too much ice and water goblets (which are used to make food and water), and just straight up food packets and water bottles lying around for it to ever become an issue. It's not unrealistic - you're exploring the wreck of a luxury liner, of course there's going to be plenty of food and water around - but it does almost entirely eliminate that survival aspect of the game.
After you've played the survival simulation for a goodly amount of time... it ends. You enter a working ship and blast off into the walking simulator portion of the game. It's sort of funny, because the game is still technically a survival game, so the game dutifully makes sure that there's plenty of food and water scattered throughout the maps you're walking through. They also don't assume that you've kept any of your tools, so there's _so many resources_ scattered everywhere. If you're a packrat like me, you'll probably end up with multiple suitcases full of crap in your spaceship - way, way more than you'll ever need.
Finally, there's a boss battle (technically, there are several, but only one of them is actually difficult). Luckily, the game gives you about half a dozen medkits before the fight. As long as you're not like me and prioritize the medkits over the refined metal (sweet, sweet refined metal), you'll be good.
The game tries to be "funny"... I'd say that it misses the mark more often than it hits it. It also tends towards the juvenile. Still, your companion AI does manage to keep up a good stream of quips and remarks that, at very least, manage to drown out the oppressive silence of deep space.
Final tally: First part was good. Second part was great. Third part was underwhelming. Forth part was annoying until I went back, dropped all the crap I was carrying and traded it out for medkits. Worth a purchase.
It's Stardew Valley, +corpses, -love interests, +zombie minions.
Pros:
+Good pixel graphics.
+Dark humor.
+Fleshed-out tech tree.
+Many different production chains.
Cons:
-Game takes a while to really open up (a couple hours before you get access to the church).
-Combat feels tacked on (there's literally no penalty for dying, save the time wasted walking back to the dungeon).
-End game can get very grindy.
To expand on the third con - there's an item that you need to complete all three main quest lines. This item can only be bought, and it costs 12 gold. This in a game where virtually all transactions are conducted in copper and single-digit amounts of silver, and the best way to earn cash (preaching to a full congregation with a top-level graveyard) only shows up once per in-game week. They could have made it cost 6 gold (or even 3, honestly) and it would still have been an effort to achieve, without the crazy amount of grind.
I also ran into the problem that some of the last bits of quest that I needed to finish up required me to give an item to the quest giver, wait a week, give the next item, wait another week, then finally continue to the next stage of the quest. This was after I'd completed everything else, so I was literally just waiting out the clock. I ended up making a bunch of high-endurance items to empty my stamina bar and sleeping a lot, just to speed things up.
I completed the game in 72 hours. I really enjoyed ~65 of those, and I put up with the rest to finish off the game.
Overall, I'd call this a worthwhile game, if you're a fan of the genre.
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Topic: XMAS 2024 GIVEAWAY -Under New Management Again! (Read 6547 times)