Gaia

[h1]Overview[/h1] [b]Gaia[/b] is an open-world survival sandbox set in a distant future, during the age of planetary colonization. Players impersonate the only survivor of a space accident, crash landed with an escape pod on an untamed, wild planet. With only a few emergency tools and supplies available at first, you will need to build everything from scratch, trying to survive harsh planetary conditions, local fauna and natural disasters that only become more aggressive and difficult as time advances. 🟩 [b]Pros[/b] [list] [*]Good amount of structures, items and equipment types to research and craft, for both your base and character. [*]Some interesting gameplay concepts, such as natural disasters, narrators and orbital trading. [/list] 🟥 [b]Cons[/b] [list] [*]Extremely outdated graphics in multiple fields, most notably textures, effects and animations. [*]Serious design flaws regarding several gameplay aspects. [*]Optimization problems with loading times and RAM consumption. See technical section. [*]Evident lack of polishing and refinement in every side of the experience. [*]Absence of secondary activities to break the main gameplay loop: no quests, locations or NPCs. [*]Combat system is extremely clunky and approximate, aiming ranged weapons feels floaty and inaccurate. [/list] [h3]Rating: Bad[/h3] [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1989090445]Click here for the complete Rating Chart[/url] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054337840 Gaia doesn't have many points in its favor to speak of, but one of them for sure is variety: there are plenty of structure types, vehicles, crafting stations and equipments to progressively research and unlock, so there is a decent sense of progression in this regard. The pacing at which new technologies are unlocked feels right and is one of the few well balanced things in the game. Some gameplay concepts like random natural disasters and base raids keep players alert, while trading is done in a unique way, which is interesting. Three different story narrators make the game play out somewhat differently and is a nice concept too. Now onto the sadly more numerous bad sides. Visuals are not everything in a game, for sure, but it's also 2020 and there is a certain standard to hold up to. In the case of GAIA, we can see fairly well done shaders and lighting systems being put together with really low quality, ghastly models and texture that would have been bad even 10 years ago - this on maximum settings. Same for animations. The visual quality is just not there for most things, and is a real eyesore. Game design flaws are many: inadequate building system that doesn't work with even a slight terrain deformation requiring a 100% plain surface for floors, way too small stack sizes for most resources, to the inability to move placed structures, while destroying most of them refunds nothing. And several more. All across the board the lack of polish and refinement is evident from animations to user interface, the game plays and feels like an early alpha. Without secondary locations, quests, NPCs or random activities, the world feels empty and barren to explore. [b]Overall Gaia is a sandbox with some good ideas and concepts, but for the most part fails to execute them properly and is overwhelmed by design oversights, lack of polishing and flawed gameplay mechanics. The game doesn't have an exact end, so there really isn't a playtime to determine: I played around 9-10 hours and got a fairly advanced base with multiple vehicles and good defences, but there is no real "end" to it, since it's a sandbox. Priced at 30€ and offering overall mediocre content quality with several major flaws, I recommend avoiding this game.[/b] [quote]Liked this review, and want to see more of the same quality? Check out [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/39323490]Tamaster's Review Archive[/url] to see all my Reviews in a single, convenient location.[/quote] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054593190 [h1]In-Depth Breakdown[/h1] 🎮 [b]Gameplay Analysis[/b] Gameplay is divided into Session Preparation, Exploration, Management, Trading and Combat. [b]Session Preparation[/b] Is done when starting a new game. You have the option to select your Narrator, which will influence the frequency of positive and negative events, and as well the voicelines. Then a planetary model will allow landing in different areas with your starting pod, ranging from the easier grasslands to the unforgiving arctic regions. All areas have the same resources but some different fauna, and diverse spawning rates for them. [b]Exploration[/b] Is done on foot at first and then later, once unlocked, with some vehicles including a rover, a mechanized suit, and later on a flying vessel. The world doesn't have much to find apart from basic resources such as plants, and mineral deposits, easily recognizable by large rock formations in an otherwise plain land. Locating resources and plants, or rare creatures is very important, but for some reason there isn't a global map so remembering where each of them is won't be easy. Your base will always be marked so there's not getting lost, at least. [b]Management[/b] Is twofold and about your character and your base. You will need not only to eat, sleep and drink to survive, but also satisfy other needs such as leisure, bodily needs, mental sanity and hygiene. You can ignore the most secondary ones as hygiene however, as your mental sanity won't go lower than a certain threshold with just one or two factors at 0%, you won't die for that but get debuffed instead. The base needs energy defenses and facilities to work. There is a large amount of crafting stations, organized with dropdown and radial menus to operate them and build what is needed. This interface system feels annoying and unnecessarily convoluted, and is a pain to operate on a regular basis. Inventory, with a weird hexagon based interface, results annoying. Timed enemy raids make the base need constant repairs, ammo refills and energy - since resources never respawn, this means longer and longer voyages to gather them. Unite this with small stack sizes, and you have a disaster. [b]Trading[/b] Is done via trading pods: once you place your bartering order with an orbiting merchant, a pod will come down and be the means for your exchange. You may try to steal things and rob the merchant, but then face orbital bombardments or space headhunters as consequence. This mechanic is really unique and admittedly a good one. Why the merchants don't just save you from your situation, is beyond my comprehension and a huge plot hole. [b]Combat[/b] Is ranged only and actually poorly executed. it mostly consists in kiting around creatures in circle, or strafe to avoid ranged attacks, while shooting enemies possibly with the help of your turret, which themselves have poor accuracy most of the time or just don't fire when they could. Aiming is in third or first person but without ADS, and feels very floaty and inaccurate to handle. There is no hit feedback or weight, recoil whatsoever, nor satisfying death effects. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054338407 🔩 [b]Technical[/b] [u]PC Specs: RTX2080Ti, Ryzen 3900X, 32GB RAM DDR4[/u] Significant optimization problems: the game managed to constantly consume an outrageous 16 to 18 GBs of RAM while running. CPU and GPU loads are above average as well. Loading times are minutes long even on an NVME SSD, with the game getting stuck not responding for a while sometimes while loading. Character control system and user interface feel clunky and unresponsive. [h1]Final Thoughts[/h1] Gaia is yet another open world survival sandbox that tries to be innovative, unique but fails on many fronts and confirms itself to be an unremarkable, low quality experience not worth your time. [i]This game was reviewed using a free key[/i]

[b]AVOID.[/b] The balance of this game is beyond borked. First playthrough the 3rd raid dropped 8 lazer wielding Raiders that 2 shot me, but require 20 shots to kill. The "Raiders decided to leave" but they didn't and 1 became invincible and destroyed ALL structures. Deleting 2 hours of progress and all the resources are just GONE. No more Copper and green ore aswell as food and water... can not build anything anymore. Hard locked. Second playthrough a Solar Flare caused a "fire tornado" which dropped near my base and the fire consumed 90 minutes of progress... again ALL structures are gone. All items not in character's inventory GONE, and the resources needed to build replacements already mined and stored in the storage contain that was deleted. This game is ill conceived. There are dozens upon dozens of other major issues. But I think a survival game with random events that leave the player with nothing takes the cake. Nothing to build back from, [b]AND within 2 hours of starting a new game[/b], is fundamentally a busted game from the word go. How could anyone release this from Early Access and call it done?! Over-Overpriced, underbaked and unbalanced. It's FUBAR.

Boring. Glancing through the reviews I thought I'd try this game as it had a decent discount. I was prepared for some bad balancing and crappy art. I was not prepared for the majority of the game being running around boring terrain hoping to find a lot of a specific resource that I would need to build all basic things with no indication of where I could find it.

there have been NO updates since release. Game is promising,if only the dev cared enough to work on it more.

I haven't made it very far because this game has some crazy things going on with it, I tried to start 6 or 7 games before I was finally able to get started. Also the sheer amount of stupid buildings you have to build, is ridiculous. You barely get started and your hygiene is falling through the floor, tried to build my way too the sink and never found it. Also if there are space traders that come to your world, how are you stranded? So far I am rather disappointed I had to spend money on this.

Nombreux bugs, jeu bloqué lors des tempêtes de feu,impossible de sauvegarder, sauvegarde transformée en chargement sans fin , jeep brusquement sous l'eau avec pression mortelle. Après avoir recommencé ce jeu plusieurs fois, les bugs de la dernière m-a-j me contraignent à renoncer . Sur quatre sauvegardes aucune ne fonctionne.

I could live with having to buy an old monitor to match the few available resolutions. I could also live with the buggy tutorial, that I had to restart several times as it got stuck - and each time you have to quit the entire game for that. ...the stoneage graphics... misbehaving menus ... but you endure all that, just to have a boring game with bugs like flaoting stones? Even if I live another 50 years, I will not spend another minute here.

This game feels like early access still. It is a basic Sandbox planet explorer game with abominable storage and inventory problems, minimal inventory stacking, and still jerky graphics with enough fogginess to everything that playing feels like running around with minor nearsightedness at all times. A lot of potential, a *really* a lot of potential, but it is not ready to be a final product. Even getting it on sale I am going to be getting my refund until it realizes potential, just in case the dev has *really* decided it is fine as is and isn't going to keep fixing it up.

Its got great potential, but too many developers put up a bare bones functionality and don't even test it. So if you are playing ironman mode (aka hardcore) and you die, you will have to exit the program to start a new game. Sometimes if you go to sleep on the 3rd floor of a building... you might end up naked and have no items in your inventory. Basic bugs like the rifle sometimes just doesn't work. I do like the fact that sometimes the loading forgets the hill under the metal and you can build your base under the metal and just build upwards to get more. Loading the saved game often does not work right. I just suggest if you are intending to use the public to playtest the produce that maybe you should place a report a bug button in the game so when we encounter a situation... we can pop a note to the developers and it takes a snapshot of our program memory to be uploaded in the back ground. Still more no than yes for recommendation, but stay tuned, I may edit again (especially after the next update).

I haven`t clocked much in the way of play time hours, but I just can not get into this game. It needs serious optimisations doing to bring its performance to acceptable. I`m not refunding as I really hope this game is well supported and gets improved. But as of now I really do not want to play and I can not recommend.