Many of the bad reviews are from players that did not play the game for too long. You can find reviews of players that played for 15 minutes and downrated the game. That's most likely from false expectations. 'Out There' is not a simple indie game in which you can quickly click your way to success. It's a strategy game. You can learn to play the game in three minutes but it will take you hours to master the game. That's because you need to learn how the game reacts. In order to beat the game you need to find out which actions to take in which phase of the game and you can only learn that by replaying the game several times. This takes patience.

Players who do not want to invest time into this game will be disappointed because 'Out There' is not an easy game. Playing it on 'normal' difficulty is hard. Maybe the game was on sale and people bought it cheap. I guess people are likely to invest more time in a game if they paid more for it.

Originally posted by Chane:

Many of the bad reviews are from players that did not play the game for too long. You can find reviews of players that played for 15 minutes and downrated the game. That's most likely from false expectations. 'Out There' is not a simple indie game in which you can quickly click your way to success. It's a strategy game. You can learn to play the game in three minutes but it will take you hours to master the game. That's because you need to learn how the game reacts. In order to beat the game you need to find out which actions to take in which phase of the game and you can only learn that by replaying the game several times. This takes patience.

Players who do not want to invest time into this game will be disappointed because 'Out There' is not an easy game. Playing it on 'normal' difficulty is hard. Maybe the game was on sale and people bought it cheap. I guess people are likely to invest more time in a game if they paid more for it.

That's certainly true. However, the game is fairly rough at the edges. A bad start can easily destroy your run and most tasks are very repetitive. Of course I could have drained the gas giant by every hydrogen it has left to survive, but then your death might happen a system later. It's just too much wasting time to get to the actual content (which is quite enjoyable). In light of that I think mixed reviews are appropriate.

There are also several bugs (drag and drop, black screen) that make it impossible for some of us to play for an extended period of time -- or at all.

I wanted to like this game. I wanted to like it enough that I came back to it after giving it a bad review and finally dozered through a bunch of losses to finally win. But even after finally making it to one of the endings, hopefully the worst one, it still feels to me like a game that is essentially about running out of gas. Or your hull exploding because after 4 gas giants in a row with no iron to be found in between for repairs you were still running out of gas and had to keep risking structural damage to try and get more.

So, it's a game primarily about running out of gas which is something that is about as much fun in gaming as it is in real life.

Furthermore the writing is badly translated. If it was well-translated, it would still be badly written. If it were well-written and well-translated, it would be still be really bad science. Like since when did folding have to contend with relativity and what is the deal with all of the space spiders? And why would the progenitors invite me on a suicide journey across the galaxy only to tell me, well, spoilers, what they did, which was ridiculous.

i love th emusic though. very relaxing. I can just chill.

I like the game very much but i gave it a bad review because of constant crashes.
I have fullm game folder of stuff they say to send after crash, but they dontn say to who or where... :P
I dont have problem with difficulty or constant restarting... but because of crashing that restarting is even more frequent. I barely got 5 systems out every time...
I will keep playing the game, but i wont change the review because its barely playable like this, it works purely on my stubborness to ignore crashing.
My goal is to get the embryo thingie so i can play a bit longer with stuff left from previos run, and i dont even know will the embryo thing keep stuff after crash unlike autosave... Bottom line, the game is great, but your goal playing the game should not be to get some item that can maybe help you have better gameplay in face of constant crashing.
I think its a testament how i like the game by keep playing despite that... But i wontnchange my review untill it stops crashing... :P
I think many other people are experiencing similar issiues.

P.s: even fuel and all is managable with a little luck...but i have to restart game very often with full hold of fuel/oxygen omega molecule on board and cool tech i would build if the game didnt crashed when i entered the new system :(

Also, I like this game, but I gave it a bad review. Because only two days past, I found there is no interesting way to replay for me.
When I reached two endings in the first 6 hours, I was told it is only 4 endings.
I felt it a text-game which I already knew some short way to finish, repeat actions, and end up with nothing left from exploration, a little disappointed. Im not pretend to show my IQ, Im an old man.
I wish there is something such as, record aliens ever meet, review the journey or something special I'd done, or sanbox game mode to play it endlessly. Maybe because I just donnt know them.
I hope someone could tell me.

P.S. there is really a Bug of interface, when you dropping fuel between fields, game stucks at recharging. I have to play game in window, when it stucks, I click desktop to call menu to save and quit.

pps chinese translation is good.

I haven't reviewed it myself yet, but honestly I haven't decided how to review it if I do. I played it for a bit over an hour today and I can definitely see why people might give it bad reviews. It looks nice and some of the mechanics are VERY interesting (the slow translation of the universal language is quite cool and I like finding new ships), but the core gameplay is just not that interesting.

It's just juggling a few resources endlessly while you hope an interesting event like a garden planet or a derelict ship comes along. It seems almost inevitable, barring good luck, that you run out of something and die, unless you play the most boring way. Your main choice comes down to either filling your ship with essentials to guarantee you eventually crawl across the galaxy or picking up other materials and building new technologies that might unlock new options. But probably not.

IMO, it was an INCREDIBLY bad design choice to make ugrades to existing equipment take up entire slots. It seems to make advancing your technology a losing proposition. I found it wasn't worth it to upgrade the range of my jump drive because it cost me two of my vital slots in terms of collecting resources to craft and maintain the upgrade and it ultimately didn't DO much. The map already generates the systems close enough together for your basic drive and I found few new systems at a distance that saved me any jumps.

So I'm already looking at future games being potentially even less interesting because it doesn't pay to upgrade your ship and it doesn't pay to do unnecessary exploring.

Now admittedly, I'm still going to go back and play some, because the game is in my favored genre and I am interested in the further material. Might play on easy for a while to see more of that story. I don't want to pass total judgement on it right now or anything. I'm just saying, I see why people might not like it; it's no FTL.

Also doesn't help it's weird cosmicy sci-fi, which is probably the least popular subgenre of the genre.