Farlight Explorers

UPDATE: It's been more than a year since I wrote this review, and the "many things wrong with this game" still stands. The game has new features, but with old bugs still around, it just makes things worse. Save your money and maybe give it another year. -- I recommend you to watchlist/follow this game and track its progress. But I can't recommend a purchase at the moment. There's many things right with the game, and many things wrong. I hope I can clarify them in this review. Note that it is definitely early to judge, but not early enough to get a good intuition about the game's direction - which is what worries the most. -- Farlight Explorers is best described as a 3D Survival Factorio (with smaller production scale). Your goal is to guarantee your survival by building your life support systems - get Electricity to make Water, get Water and Electricity to make Oxygen and Food. Your goal is also to extract the most ore from the planet's veins, and build your base and spaceship in order to explore space - there's currently no more goals due to the early state of the game, but more are planned. My comments about aspects of the game: - GRAPHICS: The game looks amazing for a single-man team. The artist deserves praise - I really love his style. - SOUND: There's a single song which loops, and the sound is fine but needs mastering. When turrets fire, they'll definitely give you a heart attack. - INTERFACE: The interface is fine and easy to understand, but could do with a lot of work. There's an insane amount of typos, and building machines is not really symmetrical as one might expect (so it's very OCD unfriendly, beware :P) - BUGS: There's the usual bugs, but you can get around them by making saves or reloading an autosave. I didn't encounter any game-breaking or save-corrupting bug, though, which is good. Some bugs are really worrying, currently. Like using conveyor as you would in Factorio (or as the game makes you feel free to use) will slow your game below 10 FPS, and that's worrying giving that this should be one of the main parts of the game: building machines and transport systems. About the gameplay: - BUILDING uses the "snap" system a lot of 3D games use nowadays. Build a floor, then you can "snap" the next floor tile to the existant one. However, building right now can be really annoying and very time consuming due to the "snapping" bugging around. Building your SPACESHIP follows the same system, which makes it very customizable and cool (and VERY time consuming). - RESOURCE GATHERING AND MACHINES: The planets have Ore Veins which you can build automated Extractors in. Then make use of robot arms and conveyors to take the ore to Furnaces to make Ingots. Then to Hydraulic Presses to make Plates. And to another Hydraulic Press to make Gears. It looks really good and feels really satisfying when you're done building, but it is rather time-consuming and buggy. - SURVIVAL: The constant need for oxygen will make you want to spread Oxygen Dispensers all around your base - and you can do that. Having this survival requirement is pretty cool and very interesting in the beginning - if you don't build fast enough, you'll end up dead. - SPACESHIP: There's no reason to fly your own space ship at the moment - it currently works more like a teleport. You can't fly in space, and your ship jumps directly between planets. You CAN "plug" your Spaceship into a base and share electricity/water/oxygen with it, which is great...but is too much work, and you'd be better off building the necessary buildings on the ground instead. So maybe it will become more useful at a later time. - EXPLORATION: There's different types of planets, but most of them have a limited area. So won't be exploring whole planets, but small parts of them. However, with a big number of planets, this won't be an issue, but it's good pointing out. Some resources are only available on some planets, and that's really cool. It would be amazing in the future to transport resources between planets and different bases! CONCLUSION: There's a ton of potential in Farlight Explorers, there's no denying. The game went through a great transformation this year, which made it look really good. The developer is definitely interested in developing it. It looks nice, it plays nice, it feels nice. But that's not enough when talking about Early Access titles. There's two reasons I cannot recommend buying it. First, it's too early to believe it will be made into a full game. Second, because there's no clear direction or road map for the game. It could become an actual 3D Survival Factorio, or something much more limited and not as freeform as expected. This would mean you'd be investing in something expecting a certain game, and end up with something completely different. It's dangerous, and hard to trust in. There are suggestion lists and all that, but all organized and discussed by players. The dev does read and reply, but still there's no guarantee what will be done and what won't. So I do recommend for you to watch it. All that I said above can be invalidated at any moment. A clear roadmap and direction would make it MUCH easier to trust in the developer's vision and tag along with him, but the best advice is to watch it from a distance right now. All the best for the developer, though - I'd love to see this becoming successful. Thanks for reading!

Ok, big area of frustration. There are two games. The new version and old version. It took me about 4 hours of gameplay before realizing most construction materials don't unlock after a time.... they simply don't exist in the "new version". This game is so underdeveloped that it shouldn't even be purchasable as early access. I would NOT recommend it to anyone until it's a LOT closer to completion.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW I am generally not one for the whole survival, crafting, thing. I am much more interested in base building/management games. Luckily for me, outside of the irritation generated by having to deal with oxygen and food, which is a minor inconvenience, this game is much more a game of base building and management than it is of survival, and even crafting (though crafting is for certain a core element of the game). Once you get past the basics... electricity, oxygen, food... you are left with the goal of building a starship, which is a pretty significant goal. And to do so efficiently, you must leverage the power of automation. You manage the process of digging up the necessary materials, transporting them to a storage facility, and then removing them from that facility in order to turn them in to ingots, plates and gears to craft the next elements of your base, or star ship. The game gets you in to the flow quickly - though the tutorials need some tweaking. They break immersion and are incredibly irritating and seemingly unavoidable. Since they are delivered through, and stored as some form of email, simply notifying the user of new tutorial content would be highly preferable. Within two hours, you are, however deep in the process of trying to build a mighty automated infrastructure, and figuring out why your robot arms are tossing your newly crafted ingots 20 yards away from where you want it. The game is intelligently designed, and presumably combat and other threats will present themselves as you expand your search for the necessary elements for your next goal. There are no lack of bugs - however... placing a battery may teleport you at high speed a good 100 yards away from your base for not obvious reason. Indeed, random teleportation results are common and irritating, but overall not game breaking as everything seems to be as you left it when you finally make it back to base. The night-time element is just annoying. I get it's "value" to the game in terms of simulation and immersion, but it does nothing but encourage you to stand near your oxygen generator. A way of speeding up time at night might be a very nice feature for those who just don't plan to do much while the outside is dark. The controls are a little bit of an "acquired" taste. A reckless player may well delete their storage facility and every one of those hard-earned items. Deletion should not be possible on an item that contains other items. This is a simple fix and one I am shocked the developer didn't consider. Overall, though, the game is a reasonably well-designed and executed, though I would wait for a sale where it's closer to $10 than $20 in it's current state. The full retail price may well be worth it when the game goes to final release, but this early access version is hard to justify more than the $10-12 range. First impressions video for Farlight Explorers https://youtu.be/PqWi_rqT3V4

For those that are into hardcore survival with a space theme this game is not quite what you are looking for at the moment, think space engineers but less complicated. Still it does fill a unqiue niche in the genre and even in its current alpha state is extremely addictive. If you are a early access support of games this is definitely a jewel to have in your library. What it does right. - Being able to hop from planet to planet with realtive ease is a beautiful and sadly rare thing amongst games of this genre but Farlight pulls it off. - MINING! omg the countless hours you spend whiddling away for resources to build your next stick! Not here pal, mining is automatic, just plop down a extraction drill, throw in some power and let the goodtimes roll. It should be noted that you can still mine by hand faster than a extraction drilling platform initially. but put 10 or 15 of these puppies up and being able to focus on building is a huge plus in this game espcially when the monotony of placing pipes and wires and conveyor belts takes up a considerably chunk of time. - Production is pretty streamlined at the moment. X amount of water and power will get you pretty much everywhere so the only real micromanaging is making sure you have ample amount of supplies. - Bugs, the dev works hard at crushing game bugs as you can follow in the forums. Surprisingly enough for a EA game i have only once ever had a game crashing bug, Most have been minor annoyances that you can write off as early access. What the game still needs work on: - Content. At the moment the only real goal is to make a huge production ship capable of making everything and fly to planet to planet strip mining the planets dry which does not take long, maybe 5 hours if you are new to the game. Then thats it, end game. If i understand right there is only one guy making this and while hes peddling his production content out fast as his little legs can move, impressively so, being able to crank out more for a very creative game would help him generate a larger fan base. Maybe hire one or two people extra.

[h1]Pros[/h1] +Single-player focused +Helpful Tutorials +Multiple starting scenarios +Multiple end-game objectives +Interesting resource management [h1]Cons[/h1] -UI and texts needs polishing -Bad controls -Incomplete building blocks -Mediocre graphics Using only your sophisticated technology and skills, you must gather resources and survive being stuck alone in a far away galaxy. Farlight Explorers is a base building, resource management survival game, like a lot less complex 3D Factorio. And when compared to multiplayer space building sandbox games like Space Engineers, Orisis: New Dawn, Empyrion Galactic Survival, or Astroneer, Farlight Explorers instead focuses on singleplayer adventure and tinkering, a rare sight nowadays. There is a backstory but that's about it, you are left with your imagination to explore 20 different star systems, each with their own planets/asteroids of various biomes, scattered along the galaxy to explore. Gather resources in order to survive, while avoiding hazards like native alien life, storms, and meteor showers. Build your bases block by block, with increasing complexity as it goes bigger and bigger. [h1]Gameplay Analysis[/h1] Farlight Explorers gives the player a lot of freedom, starting with the four game modes: [u]Peaceful[/u] is like the sandbox mode, where you are free to build anything without materials and resources or worrying about survival. [u]Survival[/u] still allows you to build without materials but there's enemies and you now need the necessary resources like Oxygen and Water to survive. [u]Builder[/u] mode is the opposite, you don't need to worry about survival, you only need to gather materials to build things. and the [u]Classic[/u] mode where everything is enabled: materials, resources, and enemies ranging from alien life, meteor showers, and dust storms. What I liked about Farlight Explorers is that they already implemented an end-game at such an early stage of development, first you need to survive and build your base, making sure that all resources and needs are well balanced. Buildings have different requirements such as power, water, oxygen, oil, fuel, etc. and you need come up with a proper feeding system to properly in ensure 100% operation. Take out one building and it might cripple your whole operation. After that, the goal is to go to the center of the galaxy to build a singularity gate for other colonists to arrive, but not until you research space ships and build it first. You also need to research the cure for your species to survive the new galaxy. As colonies gets established in the galaxy, pirates and rebels will appear and you will need to wage war with them. There are three starting scenarios to choose from, at different points of the game. [u]First Explorer[/u] starts you off with nothing, [u]First Colonist [/u] starts off with the singularity gate newly established, while [u]Born in the Galaxy[/u] puts you late in the game, founding your own colony among others already established. The only issues or nuisances I've found is that there are literally no doors or airlocks, so it's impossible to completely close off all your buildings unless you wall everything. This is a huge turn off especially for role players like me. I also found it hard to place and rotate blocks, especially small ones such as electrical wiring or water pipes. [h1]Technical Analysis[/h1] The graphics are mediocre, all the models and textures are plain looking, lacking the finer details that make games beautiful. The UI is lacking, even your HUD indicators are just plain text. The galaxy map is very pixelated, and the menus seem rushed. The texts also needs some proofreading, but it's no big issue. The soundtrack is relaxing, just what you would expect from a single-player space survival game. Play the game long enough, the music becomes memorable and it gives the game personality. [h1]Value[/h1] At the moment it's just worth about half its price for what it currently offers so only get it on a sale, however if you are a fan of these type of games I'd recommend buying it 100% to support the developers and help in the development process. [h1]Conclusion[/h1] Farlight Explorers is currently barebones at the moment, offering only the core gameplay elements with none of the complexities that you would expect from the genre but with deep end-game content. Most of the issues I have in this game comes from the technical side and will hopefully be fixed. Still I'd recommend it because it offers something new. It looks just another sandbox space game but it's really a single-player focused base building resource management game with the potential to be like the 3D version Factorio, given more development time and effort. "This product was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free" [quote][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/23741321/]Follow our curator page,[b] Alexander's Club Curations[/b] if you like and want to see more reviews like this one.[/url][/quote]

Wait a minute... Abandoned game, buggy mess, half feature correctly implemented if at all, and they... anounce a new game.... Stay away.

The developer has chosen to abandon this game... Don't waste your money!

Pretty good design vision, sadly quite unfinished and now being abandoned to work on a new game. Current state is definitively not worth its current price, so unless it's on 90% sale and you are fine with buying an unfinished product that is very unlikely to be completed, don't buy it.

Ok, I am an old gamer. I have been playing games for a long time ( 30+ years). Most recently I have adopted alot of early access games. Farlight being the most recent. Although the overall rating on this is mixed you will note that most of the recent reviews are positive. Most of the negative reviews are about content, bugs and crashing. "It's early access!!!" Now on to my experience, if you are familiar with Factorio and like the concept you will most likely enjoy this game as well. I will give a "+" for the graphics over Factorio's 2D sprites. The environmental models need some work but over all satisfactory for the current state of the game. Mechanics take some getting used to, and the help screens could be written better. There is a nice guide available that is a must read to get you started. I bought the game on sale (recommended), at full price I am not sure I would say you get your moneys worth. If you adopt the attitude that you are going to encounter bugs, and crashes - it's pretty good. Has a decent concept with tons of potential. The game gets updates regularly and the developer seems keen on getting feedback and improving the title. I give this a thumbs up, and look forward to seeing more. Remember it's early access so you will, and I did run into bugs and crashes. I offer my support to this title because I think it has some promise and will keep an eye on it as it develops.

Dev abandonned the game for another one (Farlight commanders). This is what Satisfactory looked like in Alpha 0.0001, but he didn't even try to compete with it, and just goes "Srew it, i'm gonna milk another game type instead". Do not buy, as it will not have more updates.