Exocraft

TLDR: This game looks interesting for the first time and the idea is good. But unfortunately it is super buggy, imbalance, and PAY TO PROGRESS. Devs destroy the atmosphere even with their greediness as even colouring your ship costs paid currency PER PIECE. You cannot get anywhere without paying for the game or entrusting your grandchildren to continue progressing. Absolutely no sense of progress and accomplishment. I got it for free, but I would like to get my time back. ----- Details: Unfortunately the game gets really annoying and cumbersome really quickly as making progress is super slow and the game has serious balancing issues. E.g.: If you like spending hours in a game to recover your lost drone just to lose it again in an easy looking fight, so you can spend hours again recovering it, then it is your game. It is clear that the developers focused on how to get money and how to get people pay for their progression. Paid currency drop rate is very low compared to the prices. Even the in game currency (crystal) is ridiculous too, but not like you would get to the stage where you can store a significant amount of it... The prices are in the skies and even minor features cost the paid currency - E.g. a simple paint job. Due to this, you can see that people don't really care about how their ships look like, shape or colour-wise. This ruins the one remaining sane part of the game what would be its atmosphere. The UI is kind of a disaster too, displaying full screen popups sometimes, especially if you accidentally click on a player during a battle, so you lose control over the situation and pointlessly take damage. Popups and menus don't respond to the "Escape" key, you need to hit the X in the corner every time. Maybe the only exception is the map. The menus could be better organized and more intuitive. There are more sophisticated solutions out there for these UI challenges. Besides the game is super buggy and glitchy. Sometimes even the sound glitches and goes to full fart mode, so sooner or later you just turn off the sound losing even more of the essence of the atmosphere. Also this game deseperately needs some purpose besides running around, constantly repairing and recovering your things you lost in pointless battles and unexplainable situations due to bugs and balancing issues. 1/10 - Because of pointless flying fart simulator. Update - 2021-03-13: Now it is badly lagging as well. 0/10 - Totally useless.

There is Fun to be had, but the fact that every single item requires the premium currency which doesnt drop enough in the game is in my opinion a big no go. and even if you consider buying it... why would you? there is nothing that requires you to get stronger. I put a yes for the potential, since i liked what little content it has to offer.

Why even bother putting this on steam if you can't use your Steam account to verify it? The game wants you to use Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. to verify your account, but Steam isn't even an option.

I enjoyed the game for a bit. Even with it being a bit glitchy. Then my entire ship blew up randomly. I lost all my ship parts and hard earned drones in one quick swooping glitch. Weeks of hard grind gone and I was left with less than I started with.

I played for about few hours, even got went and got a starter pack code. My conclusion is that it's not worth playing. Main problems I've found so far: - The crystal economy is absolutely terrible, the main problem so far is that drones eat damage just from going out, even just salvaging shipwrecks with no enemies, causes them to take damage. Most of the time, the shipwrecks barely drop enough crystals to cause you to break even mining them. The Mines with Guardians are even worse. Going after a mine with two of the smallest guardians with different elements, and 3 3* drones of each type, I took 174 crystals of damage to drones, and the mine dropped approximately 80 in return and nothing else, no red gems, no parts, nothing. Huge waste of time and resources. - Another issue is getting way less for selling crystals than what I should be. In the sale window, I should be making 951 Crystals for a full load, yet I only receive 544? That's my cargo size, not how much I should be making from the sale. There is no explanation for this discrepancy so I only assume that it's a game breaking bug that has yet to be addressed - Lag, there's a ton of rubberbanding, inputs are often ignored, etc. I don't seem to be the only one having this issue, so I assume it's a general problem. - Permanent part breaks? From what I understand, ship components will eventually break down forever. Given how expensive it is to buy them and how rare of drops they are, you either have to take no damage or be ready to spend money to maintain your ship. - The gameplay is unexceptional, low profit/time ration means low incentive, the game consists of grinding and absolutely nothing else. The actual combat has next to no player involvement, no discrete healthbars on the enemies means you have no idea how much you're dealing and how much they're healing. You're investing everything you've earned to fight and yet you barely know if you're doing anything Overall this game is good only to waste some time. The most core issues are the difficult economy; which feels nearly like p2w, unrewarding gameplay, and lag. Until these issues are resolved, it's unlikely game will be worth the effort

Put almost 5 hours in to the game as of this review. Currently level 13, It appears I have unlocked everything as far as game play elements go. My thoughts so far> 1. This game appears to be very pay to get anywhere. By this I mean you must buy currency or progress very very very slowly. a. Currently I can equip 30 parts of anything I want. Which sounds good however we hit a wall and that is how do you get them.. well over my 5 hours of playing I have found 3 parts on the ground(totally random after mining stuff) and other than that you have to buy them. Which leads to 1.b b. There are 2 currencies one is to common and will only limit you for your first half hour or so the blue crystals, and the second which are rare red crystals(can be bought with $) you will need both to buy parts for your ship. c. All parts price increase with each part you buy from the market.(I wont talk about blue crystals as I can't think of a way to even spend them all if I wanted) currently a part for me ranges anywhere from 45 red crystals to 750. It takes about an hour or mining to gather 100ish. d. This means if your not putting $30ish in to the game every 10 ish levels (assuming levels and parts available continues to scale the same at higher levels) your not even going to fill you slots, much less be able customize your ship(aside from your first build and throwing whatever you find on the ground on somewhere its doesn't look to terrible) 2. Very little content. As far as gameplay goes there is very little to do a. Mine(get near a mineable entity and send any drone to it) b. Kill defenders (again send a drone but with elemental rock paper scissors element) c. Return to a base to drop off crystals you have mined. d. Upgrade ship.(limited by reasons above) f. Partake in a race(In which you race others in teams to complete 2.a through 2.c) 3. Pretty graphics a. Great enemy graphics(even if there are only 3) b. Love the landscape. c. Seen quite a few cool high level parts people have found. d. You can color every part of you ship separately (though you can't afford it at low level as it is far more important to buy parts with your money)

The reason I give it a thumbs down is only because of the forced email-verification. I played a game of this publisher before, so i have an acount but I cant log into that, because the internal browser is no longer supported by google. That in itself is worrying, as it probably means there is a risk that my login credentials could be leaked. I don't get why that step is necessary in the first place. You offer that game on steam and you provide an account from the moment one starts the game. So, what's the point of that? Regarding the Gem-issue that many mentioned (premium currency, that CAN be collected ingame), I mostly disagree. I played roughly an hour and had no problems collecting the gems I needed so far. I imagine there is no issue grinding your way even late game, it will just take time. Impatient people can just buy stuff. I also disagree with the claims that it's a cheap "mobile game" port of sorts. It does not feel like that at all. There is no gacha elements or time-based offers, as they usual are in free mobile apps, so i don't get where those people are coming from.

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the sign up system is VERY suspicious, why would they need to know your age, birthday, email password, gender, and more also microtransactions i like shipbuilding games but this one is just bad