Recent reviews by Perdita

Spent 10 years humiliated by my own rebelling people, forced to settle for status quo.
Spent those 10 years learning how planets rebel so I could prevent this deviancy from spreading, improving my technology immensely and repairing and rebuilding my shattered fleets.
Razed the traitors and their planet into a tomb world only 4 months after the 10 years of peace came to an end.
Easily the best revenge I've ever had in a game, let alone the most hatred I've ever felt for the little imaginary people that I once called mine. Let their destroyed world be a monument to their sins, and my own ignorance of game mechanics.

Stability issues galore, but at least the devs seem to care about the game.

This game is absolutely fantastic for engineers and creative minds alike. Admittedly, it comes with a rather steep learning curve in some aspects, such as how exactly negative inputs work with logic blocks, how scaling inputs and outputs affects the system as a whole, etc. However, in the end anything you set your mind to can be made.
Want to build a 0 powercore ornithopter? GO RIGHT AHEAD!!
Want to spam engines to see how fast your car can go? WHY NOT?
One of the cons I can say for this game though is definitely performance. I have a high grade PC, so oftentimes I don't quite know how good a game runs on average, but seeing some of my companions struggling to play this game concerns me just a little bit. As far as quality settings however, I haven't seen anything too different in gameplay besides FPS.
My last two cons are rather small, and are probably just bugs.
#1: Significant FPS drop when opening certain menus. It shouldn't drop me to 9 FPS to open the customization menu, and yet sometimes it does.
#2: I cannot see the names or titles of many creations in the workshop, for many people this means nothing, but getting super obsessed with the game makes me want to search for specific creators, see what other groundbreaking mechanisms I can learn from and use in the future!

Mod it when you get tired, but until then enjoy space-terraria with only marginally more confusing mechanics.
The mods you can install at first would be pretty much any race mod if the Novakid or Floran don't catch your fancy.
In all seriousness the game handles itself very well in vanilla though it can be a bit tedious to work through at times. Progression is nice, but I never really had to deal with some of the things I should've, so if you're new to the game, try to actually follow what they say instead of taking on mother pop-top in the most ridiculous ways you can manage.
Base-building is a mechanic I'm exploring right now and am currently unfamiliar with, though from what I've seen its very fun. Besides building on ocean planets. Don't try that immediately.
The bounty missions seem a little off, but the idea is don't leave until you're told to, even if the bad guy clearly stated where he can be found, the game itself wants you to find x amount of clues before it'll trigger the bounty being on the other planets.

No performance errors in vanilla, adding some mods has taken more than a toll for me since I've added quite a few.
EPP's seem to be a little odd in that as far as my experience has shown, they only protect you from one environment at a time.

If you want something over-powered that isn't using admin mode, just get the woggles race mod and make some of the armor from that, it'll give you more survivability at the cost of some of the genuine feel that comes from playing.

When you do get bored of the game vanilla (you will, trust me) I'd personally recommend the Avali Triage mod, as it adds a lot of materials and weaponry to work with.

This game is incredibly beautiful, I don't think I've ever played something so incredibly well-executed. I don't want to say anything about it, just play it and pay attention. Think about what happens, and then what doesn't. As typical for games, wait until a sale to purchase it.
Computer? Light.
Performance? Fantastic.
Play speed? Slow, but intentionally so.
Play time? I played it in three hours. Finishing the game unlocks the chapters, don't worry too much if you miss something, just go with the flow and play at your own speed. It's an experience more than it is a game, but getting new abilities makes you wonder what's going to come next.

Okay normally I don't leave bad reviews. Remember this.

For once, a game out of my style proved enticing enough for me to download it. A few minutes into the game, I had my first character set up. The graphics were on Ultra, but still looked worse than ark when I run it on it's lowest graphics settings. Wanna know a secret? Ark ran better. There's ridiculous amounts of lag when I move, and i often overshoot my destination despite the fact that you move by clicking. Attacking? As far as I can see, that's the only part of this game that seems to work normally. Not much lag, a little confusing, other than that it's fine. The crafting and levelling system seems very unique and I would like to have played more of it, on my second day of having it. Then I began to see why others left bad reviews. The server was full, and I was 2869th in the queue. If I had premium? I would've been first. If you want to pay money for premium days, I would gladly recommend this game to you if you've got good internet connection and processing capabilities, but remember this: My potato can run ark on it's lowest settings and managed to make that look better than this on it's best settings.
Now, I know I haven't played long on this game. I know that. But the reason I left this review with so little time was simply because of the little gameplay I did have was awful and I couldn't have anymore since the server was full.

Incredibly fun game, but I think it'd be best before purchasing to watch someone play it a bit.
Pros:
Limited in a way that forces ingenuity
Enough freedom to build pretty much anything
Requirements and transmitters force you to rethink your designs
Factory allows for low stress play, allowing you to feel not so high-strung about the security of your drone
Motors, hinges and springs allow for exploration of new mechanics and new combinations
The multiple variations for sensors allows you to build drones that can follow your mouse with no other controls
The fact that Melee weapons exist
TNT and other weapons for use, such as heaters and coolers
Camera trackers & Logic gates for the more experienced players

Cons/Suggestions (minor)
Temperature below setting on the temperature sensors, just another output so you can have one fully stabilized
Resource can be tedious to find, but not as tedious (with practice) to harvest
I kind of want to see a cold world, to put in a more frequent use (besides simply keeping your drone warm when using cryo weapons at close range) for the first suggestion
A buff on the melee weapons, as it's not worth the time and effort to use them if they prove to be so ineffective
A VERY minor buff on the shields, without a larger number of weapons it can prove difficult to withstand the firing of the hives
The Corp's little drones follow you for too long, I feel like they should be giving up at a certain altitude or distance away from the transmitter
The little baby hammerhead things. They aren't that hard to deal with, just so annoying. Maybe slow down the fireballs? It's hard to keep your mouse on them so a sufficient number of weapons can take it down, it keeps getting out of the mainstream before I have a chance to see what's going on behind the blinding light of laserfire
Although I don't want this, it probably needs to happen. A minor nerf on factories, maybe it uses 1/5 the amount of fuel and energy being put into the product? It uses energy to produce things? Using them, I can spam in a whole bunch of little robots each equipped with shields and lasers and heaters to not only self destruct when I'm done, but also as cover from hammerheads and shields from hives. Not to mention the sheer quantity leads to abusive amounts of firepower. With the requirement of a decent amount of fuel and solar panels to build stuff, I feel like that scenario would be less likely. (Srsly, I barely even have a weapon drone, just a little one that spawns in more and more)
EDIT ON PREVIOUS SUGGESTION: DO NOT DO THIS SUGGESTION FOR FACTORIES DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO THE DRONE CORE, I REPEAT: DO NOT. For scenarios on disposable mini-drones, this suggestion is amazing. For replacing bits of armor and using different types of armor, like cryo weaponry gets discarded for plasma or kinetic, not so much.

Cons (Major):
It gets repetive quickly, so I play it now and again building drones that I'll never use to their fullest potential. Honestly sumo and building drones has kept the rest of the game decently interesting, if I hadn't been as invested and pleased with sumo and building drones, I would've already stopped playing it. Sure, there's something new after a few wormholes from the beginning. Oh wow! The Corp lab needs destroying! Oh wow! It needs destroying on a different planet! Oh wow, it's here, too?
I feel like there should be something more at stake, optional worlds that cost resource to enter and if you complete the mission first try, you get double the entry fee or something. But if you fail... you lose the resource you used to get in. I think that would be neat and make me much more willing to play all the worlds instead of just beating every sumo arena I come across.

Suggestions for you, Reader!
Learn some basic logic stuff
Watch Lathrix/Lathland play Nimbatus, it helps you get a grasp on what's going on.
Stick with the building system, it's tedious at first until you learn how to do Ctrl C/V/Z automatically
Do not be frustrated by the orientation thing, if it messes up, just flip the two outputs
Go ahead and subscribe to other people's creations, look at the logic and break it down. Look at what's connected to what and break it down. It helps you build better.

This game is fun, and I'm giving it a positive review, however, if you're not willing to do a few quick tweaks to make it run smoother, then you shouldn't get the game. It takes only five minutes to go from 5 fps to 60 fps. I've never used steam in my life and I was able to do it, with the help of the internet's guidelines. I recommend it to those who are willing to actually try to make it better. EDIT: Now that the price has jumped, I would recommend buying it in the summer or winter months for the cheapest prices. If you're thinking about getting it, check the price every day. I got it for ten dollars. Like I said earlier, you will need to make a few tweaks to allow your computer to survive if it's not one of the better PCs or computers. Most of these tweaks are really simple, like using d3d10 in the launch options. Some of them involve lowering the graphics.

The game itself:
Good:
Ark has a very challenging setup if you're going to play it without changing the settings. It would be impossible to survive, resources seemingly extreme for a simple saddle. But, changing some of the settings, like harvesting settings for example, can make this kind of thing really quick. Baby hatch time and taming time can be sped up too, as well as a day/night cycle control. These all make it more enjoyable for people like me, who just wander about and tame Megalosaurus and nothing else because they're pretty and cute.
Bad (Also how to deal with):
Even with the change in settings, some of these things (like taming) can take up to twelve hours. It's a little annoying, so once I knock a dinosaur out, (Or set down an egg) I tend to it in my free time on ark and until it's tamed, usually spend my time typing (Do whatever you want) and set an alarm for every five or so minutes after building around it with thatch to keep the unwanted ones out. This can get taxing though, and it's hard for me to organize my resources. For example, storage just simply isn't big enough for me to do what I want to. I end up having to drop lots of items that lag the game so that I can collect the loot crates I run into. The loot usually is worth it though, except for when I think that it's going to be fantastic and it ends up as thatch and wood.

Anyways, overall I'd give this game a 9/10, although the price now is quite steep.

Further edit: DEVELOPERS FIX BIOME TRANSITIONS! I don't want to sit for so long watching as I can't do anything to help my Megalosaurus when I leave the cave for a hunt at night, or when I jump in the water and end up being knocked unconscious by Titanoboa. (Cause I get stuck, screen freezes, and then when my game starts to respond again somethings happened to me, like being unconscious underwater with a titanoboa attacking me and leaving the cave where I live to hunt, only to end up with my megalosaurus seriously injured because it couldn't move. This has also happened with transitions to the Frozen plains areas and the swamp biomes. The two most frequent and strongest lag spikes though are entering the water and leaving or entering caves, but mainly leaving caves.)

Further editing: (This went good, so don't stop reading here.) Recent update has rendered game completely unplayable. I don't want to say anything bad, so I'm going to look for more tips about this to fix it, for example the same way I made it playable the first time I got it. I will return to this later to report on whether or not there is a good fix for this bug. I have discovered the problem with it, and it is on my end. I have changed a few settings and I am now able to play this game without the problem I had before. The fixes I am working on currently are because of the age of my computer, and despite it's age it can still manage fairly well. Fixed! I am now able to play it again. Yoi