Recent reviews by LucidLethargy

The game is really great, but the developers have completely failed to establish a stable method of playing the game with other people.

1) Multiplayer "hosted" games are wrought with problems... for starters, anyone can pop into your game and cheat without the need for extra mods or hacks. Second, the game can't be saved by anyone but the host... so if you're not the host, you're 100% reliant on the person hosting.

2) So let's get into dedicated servers... the obvious choice here, considering hosted games don't work, right? Wrong. After less than 12 hours of hosting my server, all of the buildings on the entire map vanished. At first, restarting helped, but then they vanished a second time for good. Apparently, this bug is well-known to the community, and has been around for at least TWO years. The devs simply don't care...

PROS:
Lots of complex mechanics (housing, mounts, pets, etc.)
somewhat satisfying combat

CONS:
Massive queue's, and if your game crashes (which it will), you get to wait in them all over again.
Unintuitive mechanics make the game feel clunky, and disconnect you from the characters
The graphics are poor for a game that launched back in 2014

So after two solid weeks of playing every-single-day, and frequently engaging in highly competatively pvp, here is what I've found:

PROS:
1) Excellent concept. The game plays like a more complex, more involved Sea of Thieves.

2) Overall, a good playerbase. I expected a lot of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, but these are not as common as most reviews make you think. Stick to the edges of the map, and you *should* be alright for at least a few hours.

CONS:
1) Your graphics card will dictate success or failure more than ANY other aspect, or ANY amount of planning. My crew recently lost a masterpiece of a ship during a perfect pvp run (we did everything right, and we knew exactly what to do during every moment of the fight). The day we lost it we thought we made major mistakes... then the next day we reviewed a twitch stream from the enemy ship...

I've got a GeForce GTX 980ti - not the best card, but not terrible either. This said, I suffered constant spikes of lag bringing me down to an average framerate of 5FPS or worse. The enemy had zero lag by comparison, and they were streaming on top of playing. We'd be swinging for over a minute on their ship, trying to compensate for the lag spikes, and they would be easily hopping over in a single bound. Lag dictates everything in a game where mobility is vital. Even shooting cannons is pointless if your not able to aim, and aiming is next to impossible at low frame rates.

2) There are a few veteran small crews constantly decimating low tier areas. We actually lost our own ship to one of these people (we were hunting them via their twitch stream, thinking we'd get a good fight and maybe hault their griefing for a few hours). These crews not only have the graphics card advantage, but also tend to predominantly destroy smaller, and/or less capable ships. This is a huge cancer to the community - so much so that the developers themselves have spoken out against it in a recent announcement, asking players to stop this sort of thing for the sake of the game. Obviously, these players are not stopping.

So far I enjoy this game more than I do Terraria, Starbound, and Dig or Die. It seems well-rounded and has a good mix of components. Starbound had too much, Terraria not enough, this one is right in the middle.

Here are my impressions from the first 12 hours of play:

Overall my impression is that this is in NO way worth the $60 price tag, but it's a fun game if you can forget about that factor. I hope they are going to add more content and veriety, but I don't see any reason to hold my breath on that. If they do add more stuff, then this might become an AWESOME start to what may be one of the best games I've ever encountered... if they don't, then it's a nice idea with a pretty lackluster execution.

Pros:
1) Fun, balanced combat
2) Awesome, seamless gameplay while moving between land and space, and different planetary systems
3) Pretty straightforward and intuitive learning process - It felt like I was learning as I go without feeling like I was stuck in a tutorial

Cons:
1) It feels like your crouching at all times. It's very clunky and frustrating how low the default camera is.
2) It's frustrating how limited ones inventory is. I think this was a deliberate move due to the fact there aren't many other aspects of the game to work towards. So the driving factor is often a struggle to get inventory bonuses and larger ships to hold more.
3) No ability to build or construct your own home
4) Everything is procedurally generated, but there is VERY little veriety so far. It's essentially the same planet every time, with the same general building layouts. This was very disappointing.

This is an amazing game, and I find myself constantly coming back to it. The developers have done WORLDS of good making the servers more viable, and easy to host. This game is a HUGE success story where early access games come in. While many cash in, this one invested every penny and they continue to put out cheap additives (new blocks and scenarios) for a great price point (the latest are $4 each). This is a great model, and I think everyone is happy with it!

I highly recommend this game to anyone who loves creating things, and loves playing with other players. The worst I can say about it is that it's tricky sometimes to find active communities to play with that withstand the test of time. Mod support is also hit and miss because updates often break everything without warning. This makes it hard to play online sometimes, and it contributes to the short lifespan of most servers. If the devs made things a bit more mod-friendly, it would go a long way!

This game is virtually unplayable with a high resolution computer. Even adjusting the resolution fails to make the absolutely tiny menus readable. Complete failure by the lazy developers. This is NOT an "HD" version of this game, the higher your resolution the worse experiance you are going to have. Totally and completely disapointed here...

Update: Years later and nearly 1200 hours into the game:

It is NOT worth playing this on the official Wildcard servers, so i'm still not recommending this game... this said, if you find a great private server you may have a good time! I'm currently playing on a private server that's well worth it due to fierce anti-cheating enforcement (officials are full of cheaters and exploiters), sensible raid protections, and offline raid deterrents. Look for these very important features if you're going to play this game!

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Update: After nearly 900 hours of playing this game I can safely say that the devs have completely blown it. They never listened to the player base, and they kept adding stupid dinos in rather than fixing serious problems plaguing the official servers.

In the end, hackers were the final straw. The official servers never had any moderation whatsoever, so it's safe to say somewhere around 2/3rds of the hours I put into the game were completely wasted by hackers destroying the progress of my entire tribe (a philanthropic alpha tribe that was around since day one.)

If you have a great private server in mind, the game might be worth it... but the official servers are toxic, and completely unmoderated.

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While this game is undoubtedly a lot of fun, you can't expect your hard work to always be rewarded. Sometimes you'll lose all your items, or your dinos to glitches. It's a bummer, but if you take that sort of thing in stride, you can really enjoy this game and everything it offers.

PROS:
<> Amazing graphics, if your computer can support them
<> Great leveling system, doesn't feel too grindy, especially if you join a tribe
<> Awesome buildings and items, and although the placement of buildings could improve it's not too bad as it is now
<> Very, very active devs... I'm excited every time I hear about a new update! This is the only reason I changed my "not recommended" rating to "recommended".

CONS:
<> Still a long ways away from resembling an optimized video game, only the best computers can play this game on anything but the lowest settings.
<> Both your body, and your dinos often glitch through ceilings and walls. You can spend days building a pen for them, but it's always possible you're dino you took 5 hours to tame will be gone the next day. Never store anything valuable on either one before you log out.
<> Base defenses are extremely difficult to set up for offline safety... there is an automatic machine gun, but it's relatively expensive even for the largest tribes. Most people get raided when they log off, and only the alpha tribes seem to keep their bases in tact (due mostly to people fearing them.)

First and foremost, there are some things about this game that are VERY well done...

PROS:
<> Awesome graphics - the movements, the models and everything else looks well polished
<> Great amount of customization - you can customize your character in-game using pieces from all the people you find

But the things that are lacking are numerous, and easily make this a waste of money at this particular time...

CONS:
<> The controls suck - the basic movement isn't terrible, but trying to drive a car is extremely frustrating with a keyboard and mouse. Camera angles also frequently become a problem as you get a face-full of lego bricks instead of what's directly in front of your character.
<> There's nothing to do - At night the skeletons come out, but never fear... they can't hurt you unless you're seriously stupid, or intending to be hurt. Just clicking one a swarm of these guys one at a time will end in 100% success - no injuries and all the skeletons die.
<> Building is limit-less. It's great to have options, but when you can cover literally an entire land mass in new bricks within 5 minutes of starting a game, the entire process becomes trivial. You don't need to earn bricks right now, which I find silly. Also, once you unlock buildings you can place them indefinitely anywhere you like - the same goes for vehicles... you can endlessly spawn them until you have a mountain of cars and boats. It's amusing the first time, but then the cheap-ness of it all sets in...

All in all, there's a lot of potential here, and since I already bought this game I'm rooting for them to do something with it... but right now it's not much fun. It's worth perhaps an hour of somewhat enthused play, but after that you're going to wonder why you spent fifteen dollars on that hour of amusement. Also, why is Lego releasing an early access game? I feel like they have the money to avoid half-baked concepts like this one. Anyway... here's to hoping things get better, it's only day one after all (although considering this is Lego, that doesn't bode well...)

Very promising game, however it's not for everyone in this VERY early alpha state. As of the second day after release it only includes around two hours of playing max - significantly less if you learn quickly. The future is very bright, however, if the developer(s) continue to work hard on this!