A.R.M. PLANETARY PROSPECTORS EP1 Asteroid Resource Mining

Very interesting concept, very weird decision to enable Early Access on such a "Pre-Alpha" early stage. A space game with decent simulation and an actual interesting plot which challenges you to break away from its chains? Definitely interesting. In A.R.M. you are a (possible) criminal locked up in a Mining Barge, and mining asteroids with a mech for as long as the system tells you to is your sentence. If you try to misbehave, they come for you. If you try to escape, they come for you. Your mech has upgradable parts, and there's a modular damage system. There's a really cool system by which you use the ARM tool of your mech to pick things, like bombs, wedges or other tools, and you can also activate a jet on the "hand" in order to propel whatever you're holding, or use it as a reverse thruster. Never seen that before - very interesting. There's other simulated variables, like heat, oxygen, fuel, energy, battery, and newtonian flight. However, this is all there is to this game at the moment. When I first bought it, you couldn't even play for more than 5 minutes without something breaking. Now it's a little bit better, but all you get is a very little sample of what the game COULD be, with some weird gameflow issues. In my own, personal and honest opinion, releasing a game this early is an horrible idea. There's not even an actual clue to where the game is going - it could become a Sandbox game, or a linear story game with open-world elements. It doesn't seem like the devs have a consensus about it, either. ARM is all concept, no game. I wish all the best for the developers, which seems to be a brand new company. They seem really interested in making something good. And for Early Access games, the developers matter more than the current state of their product. But, again, you can't just release something in this state. It's more of a weird Kickstarter than an Early Access purchase. And as a reviewer writing for fellow gamers, I can't just pretend it's not.

Kinda creepy, claustrphoic and mysterious being locked inside a prison, then being forced to work as a mining slave for a strange and humurous Ai. Kinda reminds of 2001 space movie. Then when I try to escape these Xterminator robots chased after me, warning me to return to the barge.So I disobeyed and tried to attack the barge and they blew me up! The survial and managment of systems is really instersting, the devs did put a lot of work in the amount of things going on under the hood. Can I get to the planets? They seem far away, and the MRRM seems too damn slow...hopefully I can commender the Mining Barge and fly to the planet? How do you escape the jail, I can't find any materials for the lockpick? Hope there are freaky aliens like xenomorphs or something There are lots of bugs, guess because it is early access, although the devs seem active in fixing them. They also seem to care about what the community thinks about the future of how the game goes. I would much prefer it goes dark, and be more of a psychological horror game rather than a Mine Craft clone. Lots of potiental from the indie team, excited to see what they could do once they recieve funding. Let's support them so that we can help them build this game even more, I think they will be in early access for the next year. Can't wait for the final version.

I love the concept and the dedication that these developers have put forth recently. Almost any other dev group would have scrapped/abandoned the entire game, leaving it unfinished. I really think that if they had more exposure to the gaming community, things would have progressed a lot further! These devs have kept working on this game despite all of the negative reviews. I approve of these devoted devs and I think that the steam community should give them a chance. I think that this game could eventually be as good as Subnautica, P.A.M.E.L.A, and space engineers. This game has major promise and the devs are committed to making this an awesome game. These devs can use all of the support possible..... (and mabye some english spelling and grammar checkers and editors)

It's not ready AND it's designed for a VR headset.

Avoid at all costs. Please look up the developers and the game before even considering a purchase. I bought the game back in 2016 expecting it to be treated like other early access games; incomplete to start with but slow, eventual progress towards a polished game. The game concept is the only redeeming quality, but its worthless without an actual game to back it up. True to their name, the devs have engaged in nefarious practices such as false advertisement, including padding of the feature list. See the right side of the store page? Several of those features don't even have a purpose in a game like this, much less are actually useable - the game has no multiplayer whatsoever, yet is tagged for PvP and Co-Op. They've clearly labelled the game to get on as many lists as possible. They've also randomly increased the price of the game to more than AAA-levels ($75+) periodically. The game has not received any update in the public branch in over 3 years, and their internal dev branch (at least the one on steam) hasn't received an update in over 4 years. Yet, they continue to add tags to the game, change the title of it, make edits to the store page - all in an effort to spur people into dropping money on something they think is being treated with any care at all. They seem really good at setting up roadmaps and promises of future updates / features in various places and then immediately abandoning them. Read the early access text closely - they intended a full release in 2016, nearly 4 years ago now. Further, they set up a 'public trello' roadmap, which hasn't been touched since mid 2017. Now, they have opened up a Discord where they farm out work on the game to community members with 'shares in the company' as the carrot on the stick - and even then, there is no visible contribution or progress beyond a few token submissions, with responses from the devs sometimes taking months. I only paid $6 for the game and I still feel ripped off. I'm a fan of early access, and I've had some poor experiences with it, and usually it is worth the risk to help a new developer. However, this game is by far the worst experience I've had with an early access title - at least the second and third worst admitted they were dead and went F2P (and open source) after 3 years of stagnation instead of trying to edge more money out of customers and never respond with even a single update to the game. If they're out of funding, they should start a kickstarter or something.

This game has been dead since almost the day i bought it...don't bother buying this please save your money. Steam shouldn't even be selling it.

Note: I'll potentially change this review if can actually get the game to work, but for now I feel like I probably wasted my money. I'm playing this game on the Oculus Rift. Firstly, the game won't even run from within SteamVR, but fortunately I found a forum post in which the devs suggested running the game exe directly and that worked. Second, and this is the game-breaking part: no inputs work! The mouse and xbox controller work to move the game cursor around, but that's it. Headtracking is fine, but from the very first instance of needing to select something in the game (menus prior to playing seem to work fine), xbox buttons, mouse buttons, and keyboard keys do nothing. So I'm dead in the water right from the get-go. I found a post in the forum in which several people indicated having the same problem, but the dev responses weren't helpful and I don't know if those other players resolved their issues. The forum posts from devs seem to go back to early December and then nothing. I'm not sure if devs abandoned the game, but as of right now, there was only one recent forum post from a player and even that was a week ago. TL;DR: looks like this might be another dead early access game and I'm out 10 bucks on what looks like something promising. Again, if I hear from a dev to get my current issue resolved so I can actually play the game, I'll at least update this review to reflect that. EDIT: I just found that my post in the game forum regarding the problems I was having with the game (as well as asking where everyone had gone, since the forum appears to be dead) has been deleted! I'd say that's a pretty strong indication to stay far away from this game. My money was stolen but yours doesn't have to be. The game is unplayable right now (despite many other VR games working fine with my OR rig) and rather than supplying a support response to my post in the forum, they deleted it! What is going on with this game??

Don't buy it now I'll check again one year later

I'm going to say that while this might seem a neat game, the visuals are very different than pictured, much worse, and the beginning tutorial, what there is of it, is horrible. For example, at least for me the mining arm is unselectable and completely immobile. Maybe various features are broken, but how to mine and collect ore is something that seems to need a while to pick up - I've broken mining arms, run out of fuel, run out of battery, and restarted a number of times. Maybe it all becomes better with some upgrades, but I can't even figure out how to sell the small amounts of ore I do collect.

I cannot recommend this game at this time. First off, kinda lacking in direction from the start. It lacks an area to ease into learning everything. For the life of me I dont know how to get my drill to work again for example. Bland gameplay, at this time, makes me feel as though I am a prisoner within the game being punished for playing the game. Maybe in a few updates and more content I might revisit and update my opinion of the game. Finally, the game lacks any real thing to do other mine rocks. But, what they do have right is the physics and feel of working in space, which I like. It doesnt feel to "arcade"-y. I hope to see better things from this game, but seeing as it is now 2017 and the state of the game I have serious doubts for this game.