Hydroneer

I have tried for almost 50 hours to make this game fun, it has proven to be an annoyance and a hassle every single time i get on to play, i can never progress significantly due to having to clear mass amounts of dirt by hand just to be able to setup drills and harvesters that break every couple minutes, in all my time playing i have not found a single cloutium, an essential resource to progress, oh and visual effects such as the ore vein locator are impossible to turn off and significantly tank your framerate when you look at them, my experience has been overall negative and i would not recommend you get this game, especially if your interest was peaked youtubers like lets game it out, the game is not like he makes it appear

Nice idea, still rough around the edges. Rating 6/10 Negatives Missing inventory system for the player, and some QoL things could be improved. Positives: No rush to do anything. Really easy to play with zero stress.

Man can't believe this thing is less than 6$ right now. Very grindy at first because you have to handle everything manually. But then you start to look at those shiny machines that will automate the chores for you. I bet it must be satisfying once you reach end game and you swim in smelted bars and polished gems. :P For the current price, it's literally stealing the devs. Go for it, you can't go wrong at this price.

Tl;dr: Good enough that I bought it after playing a pirated copy, but it is held back by some truly bizarre design decisions that feel even more frustrating with how obviously the devs possess both skill and motivation. First, the positives. The game runs brilliantly. I have not yet really pushed things, but my rather modest mining setup runs without a single hiccup on my ancient 4670K. The NPCs and their fetch quests make the game world feel more friendly and alive, which is a pleasant departure from the hostile worlds of Factorio and Satisfactory. I absolutely love the aesthetic. I also love how everything runs on water, and that the devs give you a magic water pumping pipe rather than requiring you to power the water pump. I like how the vehicles are so easy to get back upright after flipping them. I like how you can combine gems into larger ones. And of course, I love the built-in mod support. For example, aside from a set of basic starting tools, everything you will use has to be bought from shops with money you earn by crafting commodity items like daggers, axes, and jewelry. That itself is fine, but for some reason, the devs think that it is a good idea to have to manually carry your money from shop to shop to buy things which, since you do not have any kind of internal inventory, means either making multiple trips back and forth to carry the money to the shop, bring back each purchase one at a time, and then retrieving your money, or using the in-game pallets which have finite space and take your pace from "a bit slow" to "old man with his shoes tied together." This is partly solved once you get one of the trucks, but even that requires you to cheese things by dropping things from above the truck bed in order to get your various items of cargo to phase into each other. As others have mentioned, digging mines is a chore, and requires you to either use the shovel to relocate one basketball-sized piece of soil at a time or use things like explosives or the pickaxe which, while significantly faster, erase the material from existence, thus denying you the resources contained within the soil. Then, if you want the floor of your larbouriously dug mining pit to have flat terrain, you have to use a rake that loves to target the side of terrain rather than the top, creating a Minecraft-esque block rather than the smooth floor you were trying to get and, of course, fixing this requires digging out the block and trying again. Another example of the design decisions that make the game less fun to play are the machines themselves. Having mining machines be damaged by unfiltered water when you can run a literal truck off water you grabbed from a pond is kind of confusing even in-universe, and having to use five filters to prevent this is kind of obnoxius. What is very obnoxius is that the filters have rather short lifespans, and the death of a single one stops all water flow, meaning that all of your machines and conveyors instantly stop. While the filters and other machines do not explode or anything when they reach zero health/integrity, they do require you to use either a single-use wrench or a 5(?) use bag of wrenches to fix them, and these are both items that you have to buy and, like everything else, you have to carry and use them in your hand because the game has no inventory system. Even dropping things is annoying. When you drop something, rather than going where you are looking, it gets dropped from a point to the right, probably to recreate dropping something from where your right hand would be if you held your arm out in front of you. While that is kind of annoying by itself, so much so that the devs give you a little indicator to tell you where a dropped item will land, you also cannot drop things if the item you are holding is touching anything, meaning that tall items like the shovel cannot be dropped while standing on and facing an incline, requiring you to turn around or jump to put the thing down. The game has a lot of potential. Frankly, the attention to detail that can be found in little things like how dropping a hot ingot into water causes a puff of steam, hissing sound effects, and cools the ingot makes the game's many annoyances that much worse, because it tells me that the devs are not lazy and that instead the various issues I have with the game are actually the intended experience.

with 55 hours on hydroneer, i recommend the game,its peacefull and fun

it is a very fun sandox and adventure game, you should try it!

This is absolutely inexcusable. This game has been released for six years now, and the devs STILL haven't fixed a game breaking bug where all of your progress is randomly wiped when you load a save and everything you own is deleted. I would call this unplayable. Both of my saves have had this issue. I used to love this game, and it had serious potential, but I cannot in good faith recommend this to ANYONE at all. Even after a major patch designed to fix issues like this, it still persists. FIX THIS ISSUE FOULBALL HANGOVER.

I thought this game would start out with a lot of busywork and then slowly get over to the automation fun. And it does...*kinda*. However, a lot of things in this games are just an annoying hassle. If you drop things, you don't drop them in front of you, but slightly to the right. While a dropshadow indicates where it lands, it's still a massive annoyance, especially because "drop things" is the #1 way of interacting with the world. You cannot, for example, place something in a crucible or on an anvil, you pick it up and drop it. You can only ever carry one thing at a time, no inventory. This includes money. This means if you go into a shop you need to carry everything out to the cart, one thing at a time. If you dropped a bunch of ores, you pick them up one at a time. And then drop them in the container you want. Which, as I said before, is on the right of the screen, not the center. And yes, some shops are VERY DEEP inside a mountain so you are running back and forth a bunch of times instead of just having an inventory. Spent a few hours with this and it was enjoyable enough, but I'm done. There is something of a game here, but it tries its hardest to be as unapproachable as possible.

i really wanted to like this game. but it feels like so much of it is padded out with how ridiculously tedious doing anything is. the main innovation/hook of the game is: its a crafting automation game where there is no inventory. you pick up each item one by one and move them as physical objects, i can kinda see how thats a neat idea, but when 98% of the game is buying/selling and placing items it got old pretty fast for me. its especially annoying that there is no way to neatly stack or place items in the world when you are moving them around. you just have to literally drop a bunch of them on top of each other and hope they dont bounce or roll too far. which becomes a major pain when you need to buy and bring back more than a handful of something. for example: unlock a new tier of pipes and want to upgrade? congrats, first you have to drag 50 pipe pieces onto the checkout platform, which is way harder than it needs to be, because there is no way to neatly stack them, you just have to drop them on top of each other and hope the physics goes well. then after buying them, physically drag each and every one onto you truck bed., drive your truck to your mining spot, now painstakingly pull your whole operation apart one piece at a time and physically drag all of those parts into different piles and then physically drag all the new parts in to rebuild your entire setup.... the whole thing is even more annoying when you have tools. i feel like you should be able to hold a tool in one hand and move an object around in the other hand, instead of constantly dropping your tool over and over again. also, you can't wear a hat and drive your truck at the same time. so you have to drop your hat (which you'll want because it has a light on it and the game has a day/night cycle for no reason other than to make it annoying for you to see 50% of the time) on the ground every time you need to drive, at the end of the day, it just really didnt feel like the game was respecting my time. i definitely see that there is the spark of a cool idea in the "no inventory" idea. but in a game that is ALL about managing items, i think the tedium it creates just isnt interesting enough to justify it. and the automation and crafting systems beyond the inventory gimmick are just OKAY.

For a game centered around automation and building no inventory system. One item in your hand at a time is mind boggling in a building game. The game turns more so pick up and put down simulator than anything. Don't get me started on the drop system too. Items can overlap at certain times but have hard collision boxes as well. This game could really use some quality of life changes. -10/10 really wanted to like this game and see its potential but in this day and age I really don't want to play another game that just feels like work. Wouldn't recommend this to anyone to be honest.