Recent reviews by AlexFDR

This is just a not very good game, the overall concept is ok, but it's just not worth playing.

Traversal feels terrible, game runs horribly, menuing is atrocious.

Basic gameplay loop revolves around the building of a skyship in order to explore user generated islands. You solve puzzles in said islands for skill points that are used to progress in the game's research tree, so that you can upgrade your skyship and explore more user generated islands with the same 4 puzzles repeated ad-nauseam. If the execution of what i just described was done properly, but it really wasn't.

Starting off with the basics of traversal, the grappling hook and the glider, they're infuriating. Miniscule stamina (can be fixed with food) and arbitrary stamina usage rates just make traversal and exploration a drag since a lot of the movement tech feels very physics based, which will just make move in unpredictable ways, like being flunk backwards when you're trying to jump forward, or just brushing against a wall in your glider will just put you in a death spiral where you will go to the very bottom of whatever wall you collided with, which in the specific example I'm thinking of, was a jumping puzzle with a floor of spikes that will put you in a semi permanent ragdoll state.

Once you're done with all of the traversal bs, we get into ship traversal bs. Flying the ship's ok but visibility is basically non-existent because of how much the game abuses volumetric clouds, which break at lower graphical settings, specially with dlss, where close islands will still be occluded but distant objects will sort of clip in an out of view, which makes it seem like those islands in the distance are where you need to go, but most of the time it isn't.

Afaik, the game doesn't tell the player, but there are a multitude of separate, randomly shaped, areas on the map, all of which require a specific objective to be completed before you can go through them, having a "storm wall" that just sets your movement to 0, problem is that if you're not perfectly diagonal to the wall will just have you slowly drift to the left or right, giving you the impression that you're actually moving through a rough patch of wind or something, but no, you just got to somehow know these random walls are actually progression gates. There's no map or anything that actually gives you a hint of where to go... Well, that's a lie, there is a map, but it's one of the most useless things in this game. They decided to do a table similar to what a game like Sea of Thieves has but it has no marking, no coordinates, and the kicker is that they don't even show unvisited islands on there which means you can't even use it for traversal, it's also has a holographic map aesthetic which once again just breaks with the use of DLSS, it is completely unusable and I'd recommend anyone that plays this game to just download mods and use third party websites for a map just to have a non frustrating way to traverse the map.

I've mentioned DLSS a couple of times already so let me touch on the performance, it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ terrible. This game has no right running this bad on a 3070/3600x combo. It looks terrible at the lowest possible settings with DLSS on Ultra performance, and it still doesn't manage more than 30 fps. Note that a friend of mine on a much better pc wasn't having as many issues with framerate, but the game was still not running as well as it should even on his machine.

Now, lets say that after dealing with all of that, you finally get to an island and, after completing the often "copy paste"-like puzzles, you're ready to start heading out to a new island, well, this is where the game really started to get on my nerves.
Like plenty of other survival games, storage/interacting with stations is something that you're going to have to do often and this game just decided to make this part as humanly obnoxious as possible.
Want to move an bunch of items to a chest? Enjoy dragging each and single one of them individually because fast transfer isn't a thing, also, the UI just bugs sometimes and replaces a random item in the chest instead, also there's no sorting, you also can't see stats of equipped items without unequipping them, it's just a mess, but the thing that has annoyed me the most with this god forsaken game is interacting with stuff.

Storage in this game is not something you have a lot of, chests and stuff are usually small so you try to optimize and stack various chests in close proximity, well, good luck trying to access any of them specifically. Instead of using a system that prioritizes where your mouse is looking, it just picks 4 random chests around you and puts them in a list that you need to manually scroll for, list which is often not sorted properly which means you'll scroll from the 1st chest to the 4th, back to the 2nd, then 3rd, and that 5th one? not visible unless you move away from one of the listed chests.

I could keep going but there are too many things wrong with the game to keep listing them, like how limiting the ship builder feels like, even close to 40 hours in, or how the chests just spit out loot in front of them, making you have to chase random blueprints across a room, or worse, lose them because they either get stuck somewhere or fall off the map.

I tried to list the ones that are the most annoying to constantly deal with but i couldn't get all of them. There are other games out there that you can seek out that just do this kind of concept in a better overall way, even if some stuff like the modular ship parts, or even the general ship builder are really cool, it's just wrapped in an, at best, mediocre game.

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Game's unplayable, wtf happened since launch?

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I played for an hour and a half and i was still stuck in those "You're too stupid so we won't let you do anything by yourself" kind of tutorials, Yea no ♥♥♥♥ off lol.

yea, no.

Edit: Still no.

If i could refund it, i would

Single use paints lmao

While the game still has some issues and the update cadence is still slow, i was overly harsh on the game because of being frustrated at the performance issues i was having, turns out it wasn't game related.

In the time between the original review and now the game has received 2 major updates and 2 great DLC releases so i'm hopeful for the future. I can 100% recommend the game right now as a lot of the good points i mentioned on the original review still apply like the ability to try out drumming for basically nothing if you already own a VR headset and the rapidly growing custom tracks scene.

Just buy it already.

I'll leave the original review under here:

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I ultimately recommend this game, but if steam had a neutral option that's what i would most likely pick for this review.

I've been both playing and making content for this game for a couple of years now and I've been loving it from the very beginning, but... the bugs and the performance issues I've experienced, paired with the absolutely glacial pace it takes the dev to address any of them, really put a damper on any positive feelings i might have for this game.

I would still recommend the game as it gave me the chance to try out drumming for a fraction of the price it would have cost me to buy a physical kit (which i am going to), but just know that there are a few caveats you'll need to keep in mind.