Ostranauts

I want to preface this review by saying that I adore this game. I've played it for many hours - hell, I've made what is arguably one of the first major expansion mods for the game. With that, I have to say that I cannot recommend this game as it stands. I have no doubt it'll be good in, say, three years, but as it stands? No. The game is straight-up broken, as it stands. The developers have prioritised completing their promised roadmap over anything else and it shows. Despite all the hype around the complex NPC system, said NPCs can't even, like, stay alive. I was docked at the major station you always start at for an extended period of time for periods and whatnot, and a significant amount of NPCs there just died. It should also be noted that said NPCs don't actually do anything interesting. You won't see people getting into arguements and whatnot, the most complex activity they can perform is the maintenance techs in stations repairing damaged modules. All these promises of a living, breathing world, and the NPCs can't even stay alive in environments where all their needs are provided for. This jank extends to all levels of gameplay - for example, a major (dare I say, even central) point of the game is building yourself a ship with parts you pull from wrecks. Not only are the ship designs used here are rather poor (for a variety of reasons I can't get into here) but the 'damage pass' meant to simulate scavengers picking over the wreck is very poorly implemented. The result is that, while supposedly-incredibly-rare things like reactor parts are relatively easy to find, common electronics like O2 pressure sensors are incredibly rare. Despite the whole salvage economy thing, none of these common parts are readily available for purchase either. In the time it took me to find enough parts to build a mighty freighter capable of interplentary travel, with a reactor and various atmo-scrubbers and whatnot, I still hadn't found enough sensors for the various life support systems I had. To this day, despite pulling dozens of reactors off of wrecks, I do not have the contaminants sensor I need to plug into my contaminants scrubber. This makes ship-building incredibly frustrating. The entire 'social needs' system falls flat because there's no way to meaningfully fulfill any of them. All these social needs, and the gameplay boils down to doing nothing but clicking the same 'doomscroll on social media lol' button over and over again, then pressing the 'cocoon' option to recover the privacy you lost doomscrolling on social media. And for some reason, doomscrolling on your PDA is significantly better than any other way of filling these needs. That's the funniest part - the game doesn't facilitate, say, going down to Mescaform to get a drink with your crew, but even if you managed to chat someone up down there, that's still the sucker's way of filling those needs because the 'social interaction' system, being closer to 'social combat' than conversation, sucks at filling those needs. In this game, social activitiy is a bad way of filling social needs. Character creation is also very, very bad. A lot of the traits are basically meaningless ('Lustful' for example just means your intimacy need goes up slightly faster) but there are a few that are cripplingly bad. For example, 'Zero-G Hypervolemic' affects a huge variety of things. A funny detail here is that the player character starts with all the 'cripplingly bad' traits by default. A lot of the game's difficulty comes from beginners not knowing that they can go to their trait selection, remove the crippling stuff and replace them with meaningless 'downsides' like Lustful that nonehtless give you the trait 'years' (Each positive trait you take makes you older, and each negative trait makes you younger in this game.) you need to start in the same age and condition as before, but now you're expontentionally more capable. 'Make sure to not take the traits that cripple you forever' isn't much of character creation. I'd have much preferred a system like Project Zomboid, where you have to balance positive traits with negative ones. Taking the 'smoker' trait to make up for my great athlethic capabilities felt much more of a meaningful decision than just removing the 'Do not forget to remove these' traits at the start and not doing much else. Speaking of mecahnics, this one is a bit minor but none of the stations actually orbit their parent body. This is especially noticable at Venus Orbital where you can match the station's orbit and speed, and it will just accelerate away. All this talk about simulated ship systems and docking generally just involves accelerating at your target at full speed because orbitals aren't actually orbiting. The maps you play across are also very weird as well. Even the more 'modest' locations you find are supposedly inhabited by hundreds of people but they look like they could maybe support five. The biggest 'aerostat' colony in the game, around Venus, has a grand 'mall' that's like, five company stalls and that's it. The grand starport (which is a seperate facility, you have to take transit down to the colony proper) can support maybe two ships. At an age where games like Star Citizen can offer believably-scaled facilities, it feels odd for supposed megaports to have like two docks. Hell, Ostranauts is a 2D game with very little overhead in huge maps, I know because I've made one myself. So it's really weird to see the illustration about the Venus aerostat colony with a huge crowd of people among skyscrapers, with a maglev line going overhead... then walking around the actual in-game map where it's a few rooms and that's it. It doesn't have to be 1:1 of course, but really? You couldn't make any attempt to pass off the supposed scale here? I also want to speak about the modding scene a bit here. The game technically has Workshop support but anything beyond simple .json remixes require third-party loaders, and the developers, being extreme fence-sitters, have not forbidden mods with custom assemblies but has forbidden mods from loading their own assemblies. The end result is that mods with custom assemblies still exist, but now the whole process is just worse for no reason. Users have to manually install things like BepInEx in jank ways. Updates are a pain, the whole process is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, so on and so forth. A lot of the game is also explicitly written in a way to discourage modding. For example, adding new stations, planets, etc. is technically trivial, you just plug in a few values like what it should orbit, how far it should be, etc. but in practice, it's impossible, because the game, despite supporting the custom star system format, explicitly only loads one star system with the name 'NewGame' and ignores the rest. Not only that, but the game *can* handle mods providing their own star system. It just chooses to explicitly ignore them and, in the case of systems with the same 'NewGame' name, chooses to completely override instead of merging. This means that a mod looking to add a new location either has to provide a full replacemement of the entire star systems (Super jank and breaks any other mods also looking to do the same) or you have to write a bunch of custom code to inject your new elements (Not only significantly more complicated than it should be, but runs into the 'no official custom assembly support' issue mentioned above) - This is just one example but a lot of the game's code is like this. At every step of modding, you run into either deliberate ignorance or just plain incompetence. Something is hardcoded in a very specific way, or something very laborous doesn't a common helper you can just plug stuff into.

TLDR: Someday, someone is going to give me the deep, fiddley, system-heavy space game I'm looking for. It doesn't look like ostranauts is going to be it. :( Early Access Review This is a compelling sandbox, but in no way is it a finished game. They're saying its less than a month from 1.0 release and it feels like it just entered beta testing. If there were 1 or more years left on the dev's roadmap I would say this has excellent potential. It sits in a niche that no AAA developers are ever going to address and it kills me that there are so many near misses in that niche. I'm probably going to have to chalk this one up as a near miss as well. The writing is really superb, there just isn't very much of it. You get a neat little blurb every time you visit a new place. The intro quest is very well written and easy to follow. There are a handful of 'story' quests. And thats it. Once you leave the starter area (which is a significant task), there is really very little to do. The new space combat is fine but not terribly compelling. I was expecting something that requires multiple crew working in tandem to pull off like FTL. The AI is absolutely atrocious. NPCs are largely useless. The job queing system lacks custom priority settings and causes all kinds of nonsense to happen. All tools and spacesuits require batteries that the AI is completely incapable of managing. The dialogue system is a slog to interact with. Pathing in stations and on bigger ships causes serious performance issues. There isn't really any 'endgame' activity other than combat. You spend a significant chunk of time building a ship capable of interplanetary travel. You can then do some space trucking and make significantly more money than when you were restricted to the starter planet/asteroid/whatever. You can spend all that money on... a condo and thats about it.

Most of the positive reviews seem to follow the same pattern: "I love this game, however..." or "This is a great game, but..." And that's exactly the problem. It could be a great game, but right now too much of it is either broken or poorly designed. Unless you're an experienced player who already knows how to work around bugs and identify important yet poorly communicated information, the game can feel incredibly inaccessible. Take K-Leg, the starting station, as an example. You'll regularly find NPCs lying on the ground wearing pressure suits. The issue is that these suits don't have oxygen tanks; they only contain whatever air pressure is already inside them. So these NPCs have somehow decided that, while standing in a perfectly safe, breathable station, they should wear what is effectively a plastic bag over their heads. The same kinds of problems extend into more complex systems later in the game. Crewmates, for instance, will sometimes wander outside the ship into the vacuum of space to repair something without putting on a spacesuit first. Or if they are wearing a suit, they'll wear it until they drop dead. There are other baffling design decisions. You can stack floor tiles, but walls have to be placed one by one through dragging. Every few minutes, you find yourself returning to the ship just to remove your helmet, put it back on again, and carry on. None of this is fun. It's not particularly realistic either. They're simply quirks players learn to tolerate and work around as quickly as possible. Instead of enjoying the game, it often feels like you're battling against its cumbersome systems and questionable design choices. I would love to recommend this game, I'll likely continue playing it despite the problems, but for most people i'd say steer clear unless you're willing to deal with frustration.

It’s honestly really sad for me to leave a negative review for this game. As you can see, I’ve spent over 150 hours in this game, and that was all for just a SINGLE playthrough. I was able to visit all the major locations (OKLG, Venus, Ceres) featuring actual content (not placeholders) currently in the game, and I completed all the story missions. So... What went wrong? This game has been in Early Access for SIX years already. In many respects, it still feels like an unfinished demo version of a real game. You will constantly encounter bugs that break the gameplay, kill your characters, ruin the story, and so on. This game is INCREDIBLY broken; I have never played a game that was more broken. The AI ​​is simply terrible -it constantly kills itself on your ship and at stations. On Ceres, all the AI ​​ships that are supposed to fight keep shutting down and dying, freezing in "stasis" until you use the game console to fix it. And you know what? I was absolutely horrified when I saw that they plan to remove the "Early Access" tag on August 3, 2026 - even with the game in its current state. So... It seems to me that the developers pinned huge hopes on this game. You can see it in the extent to which they rewrote the engine and core features, and in their attempts to "simulate a galaxy" -they wanted to create a new Space Rangers, but they lacked the skilled developers needed to pull it off. And here we are. They just want to abandon the game. It was clearly six years of troubled development for a game they simply weren't capable of making good. Can you have fun with this game despite all that? Yeah, but you’ll constantly be fighting against the game itself.. Cheers... It’s just sad; this game could have been something much bigger.

[h1]1000 Hours: Just getting started.[/h1] TLDR; if you like slow, vibey, salvage and survival. And you can be patient for the first ten hours. You'll like this a lot. I have been playing this game for over 1000 hours. I love it. The entertainment value of 400 movies. I like to just veg out and salvage wrecks while I watch YouTube. I've done a few of the storylines. The main loop is satisfying enough for me. I've done several characters, learned how to survive well enough that I am not in immediate danger. But mostly I pay off my debt, get a nice ship and start visiting the rest of the solar system. [h2]Pros[/h2] [list] [*] Atmosphere - love the setting and lore, even if I don't remember all of it or need to. [*] Buy a ship or build your own, and build it however you want [*] This is slow space. No instant gratification. Adds to the feel [*] Lots of ways to play - mostly I focus on stripping every wreck for the $$$ parts [*] Devs are very responsive - several things I've reported or experienced have been fixed within a month [*] Vibes, everything feels lived in, real. [/list] [h2]Cons[/h2] [list] [*] Bugs: there are frequently minor bugs, but they [i]mostly[/i] don't crash or block gameplay anymore. [*] [strike]Lag: the game used to slow down a LOT[/strike] the updates from the last few months have mostly fixed this. [*] Quests: These need some work. It's unclear what to do to progress them sometimes without looking up the wiki or discord. [*] Employees: Hiring people is often more trouble than it is worth. They ignore your orders and try to walk outside without a helmet. [*] AI pathing can be psychotic. [*] Moodlets and social combat? Never clear what to do and why my chars' mood is so poor. Everyone is too horny. [/list] This is not an easy game. But after the first ten hours you should be able to survive long enough to not die accidentally. Take it easy when you are travelling. Speed up the game instead of speeding up your ship. If you feel inclined, reporting detailed bug reports helps and will usually be addressed. If you want quick combat and crazy action, this really is not for you.

I can't do this anymore. The game isn't finished, it's not even close. The devs added more content for 1.0, but I don't care. The base game is one of salvaging derelicts and building up your own ship, and this system BARELY WORKS. The logic involved in hauling anything you strip off a derelict is terrible. The logic for transporting items to construction is terrible. What's the solution? Well, the astute gamer probably already guessed, MODS! Mods fix everything right? Well, the developer also decided to make native workshop support as much of a backburner issue as his core gameplay loop. After struggling with BepIn, you know, one of the most commonly used mods, and finding it impossible to get working, this is where I'm at. I can't stand playing the intended gameplay loop anymore because of the terrible logic. I can't mod around it, despite there being MULTIPLE mods to address this GLARING oversight from the developer. I have been with this game since some of its earliest days. Every time there was a massive update, I came back to test it out, see how I liked it, and EVERY TIME I walked away going "Not ready yet, good update." So of course when 1.0 was announced, I was very excited. It had even been a longer than average gap in playing, so I had a lot to look forward to. So you can imagine my utter disappointment when I find that the logic for hauling and construction have barely changed; aghast that my character STILL doesn't understand how to use backpacks, dollies, or COMMON SENSE FOR GODS SAKE when moving ANYTHING on my ship. And if you're reading this review and thinking, "Surely it can't be that bad. Surely this user is just being hyperbolic." No. I'm really not. You can go and do other things, once you have money. But to get that money, you (generally) need to do the core gameloop. And by the time you really want to build up a ship, or really want to strip a derelict for all you can... you'll understand as you watch your man take a single floor tile, ignore his backpacks (which they fit in), ignore the dolly he's currently pulling, and walk ALL THE WAY to your ship to drop off ONE tile (they stack to FIVE). You'll understand. To the dev, because I loved Neo Scavenger and I DO still believe in your vision. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ fix this. This is rediculos, and if you don't know that, you should. If you want your community to solve your terrible logic for you, then make mod integration a bigger priority. But you need to pick one and fix this. I don't care about any other content you add to the game until this is resolved. Period.

"1.0" they said with the publisher breathing down their necks... ...a tale as old as time

They suddenly released the game without really finishing it... Nothing to say that hasn't been said already in other negative reviews. A great game overshadowed by a multitude of bugs and a sudden decision to release because the devs want to do something else. Don't buy this game until their post 1.0 updates to see if they actually fix any of the things that make playing this game just a half-assed experience, as engaging with quests bugs the game out, hiring crew is a nightmare due to their AI (still), combat bugs the game out... Need I go on?

Such a good simulation and concept, let down by the fact that devs forgot this is supposed to be a game and desperately needs some QoL and gamification, examples: [list] [*]Salvage timescale - Often you'll be salvaging/repairing and be manually speeding up to 16x, pausing as you finish so you don't waste time before repeating the cycle on the next piece of equipment. Order systems helps for hull and conduit but when working on equipment it should auto speed and slow as finished. [*]Character Creation - Very cool system, but if you don't pick EVA and Mechanical you're going to have a bad time engaging the main early game loop of salvaging, making character creation somewhat bland. [*]Docking - Should have an autodock module in the nav that can eventually be bought!, exists in the workshop and would be great as an early automation goal. Even earlier could have a dockign request button vs. the current hail ship, hail again, pick dock that goes on. [*]Ship Editor in-game - Customising the startership feels great early game but is a slog for torch drive rooms, watching my guy for 10min at max speed just drag floors and walls around. Really needs to be drydock where I can pay a docking fee or repair fee, make the ship with an editor from parts I have then have it simulate time passing as the ship gets built up by me or the dock. [*]More accessible gameplay loops - It's quite a slog to go from the initial salvage gameplay loop to other ones because the torch drive and tanks needs a beast of a ship making going to hubs for bounty hunting, mining impactical. Game also gets a bit stale since salvaging is almost all there is to do until you get the torch drive. [/list]