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.

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.

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.

One of my biggest discoveries this year. Same dev as Neo Scavenger, so expect an incredible atmosphere, god-tier writing, and an unforgiving yet incredibly satisfying gameplay loop. You start as a shipbreaker trying to escape an inhumane, dead-end job that barely pays enough to survive. You take out a massive loan and buy what is basically a flying coffin that's falling apart before your eyes, all so you can finally start making your own choices in the harsh, unforgiving reality of the OKLG. I still remember the first time I sold a big haul. After one crazy expedition that I somehow survived in one piece, I made more money than I had earned after years of grinding, sacrificing, and saving every dollar while working as another disposable megacorp employee. There's something incredibly compelling—almost relatable—about that feeling. It's a space sim where you go from absolutely nothing to... maybe not a millionaire, but someone who took control of their own life and built the future they wanted. All of this takes place in a dystopian world where humanity has colonized the Solar System while simultaneously losing contact with Earth (Kessler Syndrome). This is the good part—actually, the great part. But then there's the second part. I would summarize it in one sentence: Lots of small, medium, big, or just game-breaking problems have been reported over the years, and they're still in the game. The devs know about them very well. So what do they do? Yep. They decide to ship 1.0 next month. As a software engineer myself, it's just painful to watch. Here's a short list of those problems: - CTDs. - Insane loading times (partially fixable with Nexus mods). - Broken quests (people on Steam and Discord literally recommend not engaging with them). - A UI that feels like it was designed to make you suffer. - The game clearly wasn't designed around controlling more than one character, yet it pushes you hard to hire a crew. The AI is from hell, the UI somehow gets even worse, and this introduces all sorts of problems the devs simply didn't think through. The absolute king is below: - And the worst part: horrible performance. At some point (mid to late game), it becomes literally unplayable. I'm not talking about the usual stuttering that's already everywhere. I'm talking about one frame every three seconds. Yes—0.33 FPS. Performance is such a well-known issue that it even has its own thread on official Discord server. You can reproduce it very easily: just queue around 20 commands (for example, dismantling ship hull walls) while having 4 or more NPCs. The lag persists even after cancelling those commands. Good luck saving the game or reloading it while running at one frame every three seconds. Kekw's on you. Now look at this list of problems and ask yourself: "Why. instead of fixing above. the devs are shipping new features that introduce even more bugs, and then set 1.0 release date for next month?" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you still want to play it, here's one pro tip: Don't hire NPCs. The game was clearly designed around playing a single character. You'll have a lot more fun that way, while minimizing negative-fun you are getting. Trust.

Games like Ostranauts make me hate Early Access. I was really excited about this game when it came out. A hobo simulator from the creator of NEO Scavenger, only now in space? Being able to create, modify and dismantle ships in an open world sandbox where other space hobos went about their day, blazing your path through the galaxy, all in a systems-intensive, survival sim where taking care of your ship is as important as taking care of yourself?! Sign me the hell up! Okay, sure, it's in a bit of a rough shape right now, but it just came out on Early Access, I'm sure with time things will improve. And one year passed by. Two. Three. Six years Ostranauts has permanently been installed in my computer, always taking a peek after a major update, and always bouncing off hard due to very frustrating, elemental jank that would force enormous rollbacks to my save. Confusing UI; brain-dead AI getting into looping, nonsensical conversations; unintuitive objectives relying on poorly explained unique interactions. Over the span of months the developers would keep futzing around, fleshing out one ancillary feature while introducing 5 more bugs and while the rest of the core loop would remain a raging dumpster fire: AI ships colliding because they couldn't figure out the way to dock, NPCs acting completely randomly, entire stations decompressing, broken pathing... game breaking ♥♥♥♥ would keep getting pushed to the main version, and slowly but surely, reality started to set in: the game wasn't going to grow, we'd be lucky if the developers ended up making it playable. Ostranauts has barely developed through Early Access. It entered as barely an alpha, and it's leaving barely a beta. The only thing Blue Bottle Games has managed to do in this time is add fluff like missions full of scripting errors and vague, blink-and-you'll-miss objectives that you will never again be able to track once that dialog box closes, and even if we ignore the still very real colossal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that can absolutely brick your game unless you roll back 30 minutes worth of progression, the core game loop is just not fun, because it's barely developed from the almost placeholder gameplay from 2020. Every single feature feels as ugly, unintuitive and ungainly as the gameplay itself. The game still feels like there's a ton of progression that either was never intended to be there, or that the developers gave up on. The difference between "space hobo" and "actually pretty well off" is minimal, as itemization usually boils down to "you have nothing" or "you have the best tool in the game because there's only one". Maybe you'll get a second, middle option if you're lucky. You can still collect all kinds of trash and put them in containers, boxes and bins, but since there's no crafting, you don't really have a reason to do so and it becomes incredibly tedious to browse through which bin has the bag that has the jacket that has your food. What worked in NEO scavenger to make you feel resourceful and crafty becomes bloated and purposeless in Ostranauts. The mechanical tinkering and systems management which was once one of the most exciting prospects when the game came out is for the most part reduced to a few increasingly flashy flavors of "on or off". Expanding your ship feels unsatisfying and clunky. Taking care of your character is a thankless, overwrought chore, with a billion little interactions that will keep slightly tweaking up or down a million sub-needs like "intimacy" or "self worth", none of which ever really amount to anything. You will never make meaningful connections with NPCs because interactions amount to little more than Sims-like random topic exchanges; and with quests being sterile, incredibly basic "this guy asks you to find this other guy and talk to him" affairs that require chasing down NPCs that will keep spazzing all over the place while trying to talk to them, Ostranauts fails to be a survival game, a sandbox game, an RPG, a builder, or a narrative adventure. It fails at everything. It is astonishingly bad, moreso when considering that its predecessor, NEO Scavenger, did actually a really good job when it came to progression, survival, and questing. For years I've kept hoping Ostranauts would actually develop in the direction it aimed for when it released, and yet it's going to "release" in what could barely be qualified as acceptable by the standards it itself set six years ago. It is a hollowed husk of potential ruined by a developer that has just been faffing around solving problems of their own creation instead of actually developing the game. It is a colossal disappointment, and a game that I'm truly sad to advise against. Do not buy this game. Even if worked like it should (which it doesn't), and even if it was fun (which it isn't), it's just an incredibly shallow, unsatisfying, frustrating mess of a game. 3/10.

At present, in its current form, all of the game's flaws worth noting are a result of frankly terrible design choices that should not have seen the light of day. Inventory management is a complete nightmare first and foremost, with the very concept of organization being a mortal enemy of the devs. Imagine if you had a book case. But Despite being as all as you, that case only has three shelves. And only one book can be put on each shelf. This is literally how the inventory system in the game works. Which is funny, because a 1 meter tall shelf has LESS of these "slots" than a pair of overalls. That's right, your jumpsuits has four slots. MORE FREE SPACE than a literal industrial storage rack. The overhead bin on an airplane that you can fit and entire suitcase and some extra luggage inside of? Six slots. Wear a pair of cargo pants, you'll get like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TWELVE instead. ALL logic in the game follows this ridiculous philosophy. The "trade off" for wearing normal clothes with pockets like a sane person instead of only moving one single toothpick at a time? You can't wear a space suit. At all. Not even "put it on over the clothes." No, you can't just buy a bigger pair of pants to wear over the space suit, and god forbid you just add pouches or a fanny pack to the suit you filthy heretic. Your suit can only have two slots. The bare minimum you'll need for your tools is three. Do you want a coffee machine? Too bad. You're barely tolerated being allowed to interact with them, let alone just buying one. Why? Because they just decided you don't deserve that privilege. Do you want to salvage ships like the game advertises? ♥♥♥♥ you. You have to deal with random supernatural magical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ because the devs wanted to shoehorn in their own homebrew SCPs. There's supposedly an entire system for investigating and solving the death and potential murders of unlucky bastards who die on ships you're salvaging. I wouldn't know, because I've been completely locked out of it by literally every single corpse invoking this supernatural dickery. You didn't ask? Too bad, now ships will randomly have giant tumors on them that may or may not try to kill you like cancerous amoebas. The AI lacks any more sophisticated logic than taking the shortest route from point A to B. Regardless of any objects that they might fatally collide into when going as fast as possible at all times and costs. It's so bad that the docking system is forced to teleport objects and ships into position when they get close enough. This more often than not has unintended side effects, just as teleporting a third party ship in-between you and another ship you're trying to dock with. Or ALREADY docked with. Have fun with the ensuing G-mod style cacophony . And on and on and on it goes. The best way to describe the game is as the middle ground between Rimworld and Barotrauma, but with none of the clever techniques that really make those games work. It's a good game, and you'll enjoy yourself if you're extremely patient. You just have to be able to tolerate the fact that the game does not respect you or your time in spite of the money you've given up for it.

Unplayable game. Every mechanic is obnoxiously obtuse, I spend over half a hour trying to install a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ battery charger with it in my inventory and the game keeps saying missing item.

Ostranauts is a little rough around the edges - still in EA - but for those who want the closest thing out there to really being beltalowda - stripping, building, flying and flipping ships, building up a loyal crew, trading goods, or exploring the belt - all while avoiding the inyalowda influence best you can, it's just the thing. You'll need patience to learn the game systems, and both an eye and desire for detail. You will die the first few (several?) times you play. Over time you'll pick up the rhythm of character generation (repeat as you like initially). You'll learn not to mass designate jobs in overly large vertical swaths because the column-first task ordering is making your character (and eventually crew) keep walking around walls you aren't trying to remove and waste a lot time. You'll realize that you should just (almost) always wear an EVA suit and have a crate filled with backpacks in your right hand, keeping the other one free. You'll learn to love the laser torch, but NEVER for combat (except occasional BBQ). Make friends and influence people: it's nice to be able to ask your friend behind the port authority desk to give you a break on docking fees when you're low on credits. Never run your ship anywhere until you've at least spit-shined all the electrical conduits. Nobody likes spark-induced fires. Oh and don't walk outside without your helmet. Bugs are definitely still in there in places, especially NPC AI, but they're getting regularly addressed by the developers. The core loops of the game are in place and hellaciously fun to play. It's incredibly satisfying to buy a derelict, salvage some other 2 or 3 wrecks, and turn what you started with into a whole damn fusion torch-drive beauty you can sell for $$$$$$$. Do that enough, and maybe you're eyeing doing an interplanetary trade run to Venus...? When you get there, note the eccentricity of the orbital station's orbit! You'll definitely want to think about whether it makes more sense to approach at apogee or perigee... KSP experience will pay dividends there. Seems like half the playerbase wants the game to be easier and more arcadey, and the other half wants more hardcore sim like requiring perfect directional pre-approach to initiate docking. For my part, it's right in the sweet spot. Recent addition of secondary airlocks has been the killer app for me - I can tether my current wreck under repair to my main flying warehouse and go plunder the boneyard without having to worry about leaving one of them carefully orbiting somewhere. :chefs_kiss: Oyedeng beratna!

I loved Neo Scavenger, but this is just too much. Character creation is awesome. I love the Traveller style way you build your character. But then you start playing the game. The walking around parts are fine, but the stuff dealing with controlling the ship is wildly frustrating.

This game is amazing, but it really needs more development time before it is released from early access. I haven't played for that long, but the game feels sort of empty and I felt as though there was a lot to improve. Sad to see that the game that this is the game's state when it's almost complete.