- Highly fun and engaging gameplay
- Unmatched creative building freedom
- Strong modding community support
- Repetitive and lacks content
- Slow updates and poor communication
- Performance and lag issues
Emotions
Players feel satisfied primarily due to the extensive creative freedom and robust building mechanics, allowing them to design and construct complex machines and vehicles. The game's overall quality, engaging gameplay, and the rewarding experience of seeing creations work as intended also contribute significantly to this emotion. Additionally, multiplayer experiences and the active modding community enhance long-term enjoyment and replayability.
Frustration stems mainly from technical issues such as poor optimization, frequent bugs, and significant FPS drops, especially with complex builds. Slow and infrequent updates, coupled with janky physics and challenging survival mode mechanics (like resource grinding and aggressive bots destroying creations), also contribute to player annoyance and a sense of wasted effort.
Disappointment is largely driven by the perceived lack of developer activity, slow update cycles, and unfulfilled promises, particularly regarding Chapter 2. Players express dissatisfaction with the game's prolonged early access status, lack of new content, and persistent bugs, leading to a feeling that the game has not reached its full potential or has been abandoned.
Excitement is generated by the game's core creative freedom and endless building possibilities, allowing players to bring imaginative contraptions to life. The anticipation of future updates, especially Chapter 2, and the engaging nature of survival mode, including challenging encounters and the thrill of making machines, also contribute to this positive emotion. The active modding community further amplifies the game's potential and replayability.
Joy is primarily experienced through the game's fun and addictive gameplay, particularly the creative building mechanics and the limitless possibilities they offer. Playing with friends in multiplayer enhances this feeling, as does the satisfaction of seeing one's creations come to life and function as intended. The game's ability to provide a relaxing and entertaining sandbox experience also contributes to overall happiness.
Verdict
Mostly positive
Summary
Positive 84% · Negative 16%. Score: 16 / 100
Positives:
- Players consistently praise the game for being fun, engaging, and highly addictive, often leading to long play sessions. Many consider it a masterpiece and one of the best sandbox or survival games available, offering significant value for its price.
- The game's core strength lies in its unparalleled creative freedom and robust building system. Players can construct virtually anything imaginable, from complex machines and vehicles to entire cities, limited only by their imagination. This fosters engineering skills, logical thinking, and problem-solving.
- The active and extensive modding community significantly enhances the game's content and replayability. Mods are easy to access and provide a vast array of new parts, mechanics, and even alternative game modes, greatly enriching the player experience.
- Both Creative and Survival modes are highly praised. Creative mode offers unrestricted building, while Survival mode provides a challenging and engaging experience with elements like farming, crafting, and combat, often exceeding player expectations.
- The game features an advanced and often humorous physics engine that allows for realistic interactions and unpredictable, entertaining outcomes. Recent updates have improved physics, making it a satisfying sandbox for mechanical experimentation.
Negatives:
- Many players find the game quickly becomes boring and repetitive, especially in survival mode, due to a lack of clear objectives, limited content, and excessive grinding. This leads to a short engagement period for many.
- A significant number of players are frustrated by the extremely slow and infrequent update schedule, particularly the long-awaited Chapter 2. There's also a perceived lack of communication and transparency from the developers regarding future content and delays.
- The game suffers from poor optimization, leading to significant lag and performance issues, especially with complex builds or in multiplayer. The physics engine is frequently criticized for being janky, unrealistic, and contributing to desynchronization issues in online play.
- Both creative and survival modes have limitations. Creative mode is clunky and lacks content without mods, while survival mode's building mechanics are tedious, resource-intensive, and restrict creative freedom, especially for large structures.
- The enemy bots are perceived as overly aggressive and powerful, capable of quickly destroying player creations and killing players in a few hits. This makes base defense and exploration frustrating.
Gameplay:
- The game's core strength lies in its highly flexible and robust building system, allowing players to construct a vast array of complex machines, vehicles, and structures. This includes everything from simple cars to intricate automated systems, emphasizing engineering and creative design.
- The game offers multiple modes, including Creative, Survival, and Challenge, catering to different playstyles. It also features strong multiplayer support, allowing friends to cooperate on builds or compete, and extensive Steam Workshop integration for community-created content and mods.
- A central element of the game, particularly in Survival mode, is combat against various types of aggressive farming robots. These bots pose a constant threat, attacking players, their bases, and especially their crops, often leading to challenging raids.
- The game has a significant learning curve, requiring players to figure out mechanics and engineering principles largely on their own. This self-discovery aspect can be rewarding, making players feel smart, but it also means the game is easy to learn but hard to master.
- Farming and resource gathering are key activities in Survival mode, involving planting crops, managing irrigation, and collecting resources like milk from cows. This system often leads to robot raids, requiring players to defend their gardens.
Performance:
- Player feedback on general performance is mixed, with some reporting good framerates even on lower-end systems, while others experience significant lag, FPS drops, and crashes, especially on less powerful hardware. This suggests inconsistent optimization across different system configurations.
- Recent updates have reportedly improved game performance and reduced lag for some players, even allowing them to run the game on higher graphics settings without issues.
- Running the game, especially on maximum graphics settings, can cause computers, particularly laptops, to overheat.
- The game's physics system, particularly concerning suspension and bearings, is inconsistent and can sometimes function unexpectedly or poorly.
- The game has issues with window management, such as fighting with other windows in fullscreen mode and causing GPU/CPU spikes when alt-tabbing.
Recommendations:
- The overwhelming sentiment is positive, with many players strongly recommending the game and stating it's worth its price, especially if purchased on sale. Some also highlight its value for specific player types or as a time-killer.
- The game is particularly recommended for players who enjoy building, crafting, and creative expression, especially those interested in mechanics, engineering, and physics-based sandbox experiences. It appeals to those who like to experiment and solve problems creatively.
- Many players emphasize that the game is significantly more enjoyable when played with friends, suggesting it enhances the overall experience.
- Players are eagerly awaiting Chapter 2 of the survival mode and suggest that community mods, like Fant Mod, can enhance the experience. There's also a desire for more in-game tutorials and content updates.
- Based on limited and somewhat vague feedback, there's a minor suggestion about playing on a specific game version (0.6.6) and a general comment about needing 'live brain cells' to enjoy it.
Miscellaneous:
- Players are eagerly awaiting Chapter 2 and other significant updates, expressing frustration over slow development and infrequent communication. There's a strong desire for the game to exit early access and receive more consistent content, with some humorously predicting very long waits.
- The game is perceived as highly creative and suitable for players with imagination, appealing to a wide age range from kids to adults. Its mechanics, while initially challenging, allow for complex creations once understood.
- Many players have spent significant hours on pirated versions of the game before purchasing it, often to support the developers. This indicates strong long-term engagement and loyalty despite initial unauthorized access.
- Some players feel the game's frustrations persist over time and hope for future improvements and content additions. There's a general sentiment that the game is 'just okay' in its current state and needs further development to truly shine.
- Overall player sentiment is positive, with many giving high ratings and considering it their most played game. This indicates a strong core experience for those who enjoy it.
