Stranded: Alien Dawn

really interesting concept but it seemingly was abandoned so it's left in what feels like an unfinished state to me. Now that they are owned by paradox, expect that if the game ever comes back, they'll add 20 dlcs that re-"fix" the game over and over again because someone on the forums stubbed their toe one morning.

Decent colony sim that turns into a tower defence game; the game feels unfinished due to the need to micromanage your pawns - i.e. you have to change their clothes to suit the season, rather than them having the AI to wear what's appropriate. The flaws are probably overcome with mods however the devs have abandoned the game in its mostly but not fully completed state.

I'm pretty split on this. It's neat, KIND OF like Rimworld with Zlevels which allows you to take advantage of verticality which makes defense a bit easier to conceive. Unlike Rimworld you don't need killboxes to survive. There is a lot of inspiration from Rimworld here, unfortunately the game speed on 3x is brutally slow, crafting speed for anything is also painfully slow. Crafting armor and weapons is funny because by the time you finish producing enough for everyone, their equipment will probably have degraded to the point of needing to be replaced. A cool weapon could turn to dust before it ever even gets used in a colony with turrets and one mech. Ultimately, 20 hours in and I'm bored as hell and don't see anything getting better. Characters are preset, there's only 3 biomes, and traveling within your map is extremely slow. The launch trailer is the whole game. You build up and defend, and that's about where it ends.

Racheté par Paradox, depuis, plus aucune MaJ, plus rien. Merci Paradox de tuer les jeux, c'est pas la 1e fois...

RIP Paradox bought the game, tossed it in a pile of junk in the corner and hasn't said a word since. Get it for $10 if you think you'll like it and the workshop mods will be worth your time. This is all but abandoned now and it's potential wasted.

This is another game I'm quite torn on recommending. It has some good, enjoyable elements. It also has a bunch of half-baked or broken mechanics which almost entirely trash the enjoyability of the game. I only played the crash landing scenario, which seems like the default, OG experience. I really like the visuals and the world building - it's an attractive bit of alien landscape with some great wildlife. I like the concept of studying the bits and bobs around where you land to unlock technology to exploit what is available. The potential survivors are not just randomly selected bunches of stats, skills, traits, but are a curated group with some thought put into them by the developer, with nice touches like detailed portrait art etc, which I found did make me feel more and care more about these characters as individuals than say, the dupes in Oxygen Not Included. You can only really have a fairly small roster of survivors anyway which fits well into the atmosphere of the scenario. Where things fell down for me was in the mechanics. Coming from Rimworld and, particularly, Oxygen Not Included, which I loved, the mechanics seem recognisable, but are all missing crucial functionality, if not just being outright buggy. It's simply not possible to get the level of control to make your camp run smoothly with the tools as provided, and that only levaes fiddly micromanagement to try to bend the systems into kinda doing what you want them to do. It's not challenging in a good way, but in a continually frustrating way. Some examples: * There is no explicit 'eating time' activity in the daily schedule to control when the survivors go for their meals - they just go whenever they are hungry (kind of - they'll also inexplicably at times stick with an activity way past being ravenously hungry), and they'll eat a lot and often unfortunately. If you're not paying attention they'll get up, head off to scavenge on something a ways from camp, spend hours walking there and then decide they're hungry and walk back again without achieving anything because they didn't eat breakfast before they set off. Just annoying, and micromanagement is required to head this kind of thing off if you want to have stuff done any distance form camp. They did put in a survival kit tool you can equip your survivors with to, in theory, eat and sleep independently while they're out and about, but it is so frustrating to use. It takes emergency rations only, and that's fine, except I set all my survivors to not automatically eat emergency rations (they're for emergencies duh!), and so I'd have to explicitly change the eating restrictions if I wanted my travelling survivor to not starve themselves, and then remember to change it back when they got back to camp or they'd happily start eating through the stock of emergency rations that I didn't want to spend time making more of if they had other things to eat, which they did. Micromanagement. Annoying. Just making a priority for the different food types would have made things so much better rather than a yes/no permission system. * activities have only the crudest/simplest priority system with an activity table for each survivor, and a production priority order on each device. Within the categories they provide there is no prioritization so you can't finesse which sub-activities (and where) you want to prioritize. So, for example, crafting at a worktable can be used to produce all sorts of things, from weapons to healing consumables to essential components. You can get survivors to prioritize crafting in general, but not adjust priorities of what to produce beyond the production order on the tables. It just doesn't work for some really common, not unreasonable, scenarios. I want crafting focused survivors to prioritize making CPU cores to a certain stock limit so I can build defense turrets when I need to. I also want survivors who don't have anything else to do to turn poop into fuel. But since both are classified as 'crafting' they will both be prioritized the same - the survivor will make CPU cores until there are enough, and then see a poop-to-fuel order and do that indefinitely without checking if there are animals to feed or scavenging to be done. It's just basic, annoying, unnecessary, broken mechanics that could and should have been fixed by some early feedback on how their implementation was working or not. * speaking of feeding animals, the activity to fill feeding troughs is just buggy in my opinion. If you set a trough to have a particular food the survivors will attempt to deliver it (drones won't do this even though it is clearly just a delivery job), but once the survivor picks up the stack of food to exactly fill the slot in the food trough they'll set out on the journey to the trough to deliver it. In the meanwhile if any animals take a small nibble from the trough while the survivor is on the way then what happens is that the survivor gets to the trough, puts their load in and then apparently goes "oh no I was supposed to fill this, but there are only 97 out of 100 bits of hay in this trough now, I must go right now to get those 3 bits of hay or else my task is not complete and I can't even consider doing anything else", and so does another trip back and forth to deliver 3 pieces of hay, and if the animal has nibbled some more, the survivor will insist on making another trip for 2 more pieces of hay. It is absolutely infuriating to watch as the most precious resource you have is the time that your survivors are doing something productive. There are many ways to fix this - eg set a simple threshold on the feed troughs so if it's 75% full the survivors will consider their job done - the issue comes down to the fact that I just don't understand how basic testing and/or getting feedback wouldn't have made clear there was a problem with keeping animals fed. The only workaround I could find was, again, annoying unnecessary micromanagement. Anyway, all this is to say there were quite a few occasions where I found the mechanics needlessly frustrating, and this unfortunately made me very frustrated with what would otherwise be a decent game. To an extent what saved this review was that when I worked out what the ending for the crash-landing scenario was going to be and worked through that I found the resolution actually fairly satisfying.

This is a prettier version of RimWorld with loads of potential except that it was abandoned in a forest as a baby. Pro: 1. This game runs very smoothly. At maximum graphical settings it NEVER drops below 90 fps. I also have about 100 mods installed packed with content and even in late game with lots of going on it ran smoothly. (wonders that can happen when you utilize cpu cores, unlike *ahem* RW) 2. The world feels alien. Strange fauna and flora. 3. Mods dont have loading order mumbo jumbo. You enable the mod and it works. Modding hell has never been this coooool. I cannot stress enough how nice it was not to bleed from my eyes while trying to run lots of mods. 4. I liked the fact that you first have to figure out what something is before you can use it (with some mods this becomes even more important) 5. The expeditions are pretty cool, although a bit simplistic. 6. There are loads of different fauna and flora. 7. The game does a really good job of letting you get that feeling "I'm gonna build a nice base and defend it!" Cons: 1. Baby - Forest - Abandonement issues - etc. 2. The wildlife isnt really wild. Only the insects are truly hostile. 3. There is only a handful of hostile enemies (insects). This really made it feel strange for an alien world. I would have expected different species, hell even carnivorous plants would have been cool. 4. The survivor's AI sucks. There is no sweet talk here. It just sucks. Even after modding it, which made it a whole lot better, it still sucks. You will have someone run towards something hours away just 1h before they are supposed to go to bed which means that when they realise that it is sleepy time they are in the middle of the forest. There are so many times when you look at the survivor doing something stupid and just yell "WHY?! WHY?! WHY ARE YOU IGNORING THE THING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU?!?!?". Every time I stopped playing this game it was because of self-inflicted bodily harm after witnessing the most frustrating actions of the survivors. 5. The combat needs the CE mod from RW. It is not bad but way too simple for a game that has so much focus on base defense. It is disappointing to see such a gem practically abandoned by the devs. If they had not left this baby in the forest it could have become a contender of RW. It is sad to see that the current norm is to let the modders fix and extend your game.

This is... this is Rimworld. I don't mean "this reminds me of Rimworld" or "this is a similar sort of experience to Rimworld", it's the same game with nicer graphics and some features left off. It feels weird to give a thumbs down to a game I've put over 100 hours into, but my honest review is "Go play Rimworld instead." If you love that game, you sadly won't find anything new here. If you've never played it, you're better off experiencing the original. I guess if Rimworld's low-fi graphics were bugging you, or maybe you thought its gameplay was a bit too detailed, this game is probably for you. For my money, I find myself missing a number of Rimworld's features and in-depth management, and my NES-era brain stopped being impressed by shiny graphics upgrades a long time ago.