helionaut

I want to love this delightful little game, I really do. It has a lot going for it, including a surprisingly engaging gameplay loop. However, there's just enough wrong that it leaves a sour taste in my mouth - obvious issues that could have been fixed with just a little bit more time in the oven. - Multiple prompts with a gamepad are incorrect. - No D-pad navigation for menus. - Picking up a tool automatically puts it in a new slot, but picking up an item doesn't, despite items having a dedicated slot, and instead it drops the tool. - Walking position seems to be tracked using two axes rather than a more advanced method such as quaternions, which means that movement, camera control, and aiming all become *very* broken and weird near the poles - and since the planets are so small, you spend a lot of time near their poles. - No tutorials is one thing, but it's very easy to get stuck in a rut with no resources at the beginning of the game. Personally, I chose to restart from scratch once I had baseline mechanics figured out. - It's completely unclear what is needed to be able to do the harder sections of the game, to the point that I didn't even realize I had what I needed to beat the game until I looked it up. - Several things do not seem to persist correctly. I had to redo several of the challenging sections from scratch because I flew slightly too far away. - The universe is pretty small, and I quickly got to the point where I was regularly coming across planets I'd already looted. Coupled with few landmarks and weak scanner range, navigating was a bit of a chore. Being able to place your own markers would help a lot. - Planet variety is really weak in terms of gameplay. Sure, they look different enough, but the vast majority just have a handful of robots and a handful of ores, and the planets with shields do very little to break it up. It would be fun if more planets didn't have any robots at all, or if there were occasional planets without any ores but with a lot of the "organic" resource. - It's nearly impossible to avoid getting hit by the robots, but they themselves are very tricky to hit. This means the best way to fight them is to tank the hit while you kill them, which is lame and boring. - The oxygen tank is *really* small, even when upgraded. To avoid wasting resources you need to constantly stop on planets to refill it, and it becomes a major issue on the final planet as you don't have time to craft more, but (as mentioned before) leaving and coming back is not an option. - If you are full on reserve oxygen when you save and quit, there is a bug where it all disappears when you load back in. This can catch you off guard and totally ruin a session, and it worsens the following issue. - "Organic" materials are far and away the most valuable ones, and you will have a surplus of all the others just by trying to stay stocked up on it, which makes planet types and exploration strategy meaningless. It seems like you even have a decent chance of soft-locking yourself if you use up too much, because (as mentioned before) the universe is actually fairly small. Overall, these issues might be minor enough to you that you'll enjoy the game regardless, but I can't help but think that most of these are pretty low-hanging fruit that could have been ironed out with play-testing or patches. It seems to me that the developer is less interested in making a good product and more interested in padding their portfolio.