Recent reviews by Aaron

The closest you will ever get to flying military aircraft with your loser genes that won't get you accepted in the real Air Forces

8 hours for finishing the campaign, there is is a hard mode to play again but since I have seen everything the game has to offer it does not motivate me to retry

I have to give a Negative review since I cannot support the amount of wasted potential in this game, even if on its own its a decent survival adventure, here is why:

(spoilers are hidden)
Which apparently only 0.3% of people got the archievement for but I can see why with all this backtracking for resources at the ever slow speed of the truck, at least in the original game (OG) you got to activate teleporters at key locations to reduce this a bit so here it took a lot of traveling getting me up to about 22 hours of playtime but at least the seatruck had a jukebox I guess.

I didnt touch the game much before the full release now so I can experience it all in one go without dealing with bugs/glitches but during my playtime I had to make regular use of the Feedback F8 key 11 times where I found bugs and a few obvious gameplay oversights which disappointed me with this being the full release of the second game on the same engine with mostly the same assets, you can only wonder how this managed to stay with the final product, a few examples are:

leaving the prawn suit on land often lets you take fall damagethe headlamp replaces the rebreather, making it unsuable at depth where its dark enoughthe seatruck jamming together with the player or prawn suit and accelerates quickly which even instantly killed me once

when docking the prawn to the truck, I sure am happy I didnt play on permadeath mode, like I did in my OG playthrough (can reccomend, its a tense experience and totally possible if you keep your vehicles close at all times)
but the biggest mess was the Ice worm fight, I really liked the buildup where its scripted especially when walking through its tunnel the first time, but once you reach the "arena" area, it was instantly apparent that little testing had gone into it, as the worm kept unburrowing right below my Snowfox hoverbike, teleporting me off the bike several times a second and constantly clipping its model through me, meanwhile dealing no damage at all but also it didnt make apparent how it should be avoided so I kept jumping back on my bike a hundred times until I passed the area.

the on Land sections in general were the worst part, only containing a few plants, the bear like predators and a some penguins hidden away in between. with the unnessecary amount of verticality of the landscape slowing you down and confusing you for no good reason I feel.

I appreciated the PDA voiceovers, letting you listen as you keep exploring the ruins, tho their content was nothing serious or memorable really, introducing you to a few characters but ultimately not doing anythign with them, I feel it mostly served to joke about sterotypical personalites like the Research Manager at Delta for example. the PDA voice with the slight indian accent angered a few people because they suspect some kind of diversity quota at play but I just hope thats not the case but I think the actor was a really good pick, the slightly sarcastic commentary with the accent was suprisingly fitting (try building the scanner room for the first time, its a perfect example of the character lol).
finally coming to the conversations between the architect and the player character Ryley, again the writing was going for a very casual tone, with superficial pokes at philosophy and existentialism but after finishing the game "Soma" nothing can shock you anymore I guess, the architect lacks personality, he doesnt show any sign of his civilisations culture or anything else interesting, he only serves as an agent to drive the adventure forward.

AS with OG it is the crafting recipies forcing you to explore the different biomes, flora and fauna is what really sells the game, and here they have done a great job again, with most biomes having semi realistic and really creative ecosystems that are very pretty to look at each giving off a unique mood, I think they have nailed it in this game again, except for the inland part as I mentioned which felt very empty and couldnt even be looked at through all the snowstoms anyways.

The ending of the game definately points to a sequel which begins on the precurser homeworld. if this is the case, I can only hope the devs recognise their weak spots and show the true potential of the NS2/Subnautica Universe they have created.

The Game has great polish for Early Access, could be a great alternative to factorio when it gets multiplayer and modding

Seems more daunting than it really is, the game takes control away from you in the early game so you dont get overwhelmed. You cant setup everything in the first turn like with many other 4X but instead your delegates slowly ask you troughout your first turns and beyond. If you want to min max every aspect of the game tho you should be scared.

servers instable

The UI is a compilation of bad design, The camera is too fast when zoomed in and too slow when zoomed out and the AI pathfinding is about as good as my 10 bucks vacuum cleaner robot that keeps running into every wall of the room

They just released a small "hotfix" which had one barely mentioned bugfix that casually fixed multiplayer which had been broken since release and is now actually playable.

Downgrade, I didnt pay for this

I finished the tutorial after 20 hours