Stranded: Alien Dawn

It's Rimworld for kids. Seriously, what the game does well, is mostly just a prettier carbon copy of Rimworld. They couldn't have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ it up if they'd tried. Here's what they did well: The graphics are stellar for a 10Gb file size. Rimworld copy. Building verticality. The defense is genuinely fun. The AI is more-or-less very robust. The menus are clean and intuitive. Controller support is also clean and intuitive. Mod support doesn't disable achievements. There are some tradeoffs for the higher fidelity and larger development team, though. I'll just list them here as I find them, because I can still see myself playing this for 100 hours or so. Here's where I feel needs improvement: Sometimes, colonists refuse to eat and may just starve to death. This is a known bug. There are NO risky choices in the game (religion, cannibalism, organ harvesting, etc). It's implied through the tutorial that colony wealth affects raid sizes, but this is entirely false. Raids just scale with time. It's a very clean and sterile game; very unusual for a rags-to-riches colony survival game. The jump in technology from bricks to carbon nanofibre is an extreme contrast, ther should've been at least some tech that bridged these, like Plexiglass or something like that. Ultimately, it's a good buy. It's just not as long-lasting as good ol' Rimmers.

Paradox`ы убили игру. Купили и просто забросили. Разрабам - 10 из 5, текущим издателям - 0 из 5. Если вы еще не купили игру - проходите мимо.

I don’t think this game is abandoned — it’s finished! Maybe in the future this hidden gem will shine, but right now it’s not the next RimWorld. I mean, it has a community and some great mods, but it’s not on the Minecraft level of popularity. I think anyone who likes survival and management games will love this game. This game is like another flavor of the same recipe — and I don’t mean that everything is just like RimWorld but in 3D; it has its own charm! Saying that this game is just a RimWorld clone is like saying every game with crafting is a Minecraft clone. I don’t think the game is abandoned; I think it’s finished. Maybe it will shine in the future, but as with everything in capitalism, what dictates what happens next is money. This game wasn’t made by one passionate guy — it was made by a small passionate studio. Still, it’s a studio; everyone needs money to pay their bills. If you like this genre — colony-sim, survival, sandbox — you’ll like this game. Give it a chance!

paradox bought it to let it rot on the vine, dont buy it. the game had a good start but its not coming back. dead in the water

I enjoyed my time playing Stranded: Alien Dawn. It gets labeled as '3D Rimworld', and the comparison is made for a reason - the UI and gameplay is too close to be a coincidence. There are subtle differences between the games that lean into different strengths. Rimworld is more geared towards generating stories with your colony in a more freeform manner. Stranded can have some of that too, but it's not the primary focus - Stranded is more focused on completing scenario goals while defending your colony. Some of the differences/changes in question: - Instead of having raiding parties occasionally attack your colony like in Rimworld, in Stranded you will have groups of insects of different species ramp up to attack your colony (or robots in the DLC). It plays out more like a tower defense, and can encourage some fun defense design decisions. I like this change, although it provides for less potential story narrative than Rimworld. - Since you crash land on an alien planet, a lot of flora and fauna need to be observed and researched to figure out what things are and how they can be used. I also really like this change (and makes it feel like more of a realistic crash landing experience), although it does nothing for replayability once you've played through a couple different environments. - Caravans and world travel is replaced with a much simpler system of having a hot air balloon where you send off a team member on individual excursions. This is another change where it makes things easier and simpler, but removes that potential for organic storytelling. - A lot of the potential weird stuff (war crimes, drug addiction, cannibalism) is gone, which makes things easier and simpler in Stranded, but again removes some of that storytelling potential. - The building system is more complex, however it's disappointing that it gives you the ability to build multiple floors and have sprawling malls and complexes, but then makes it impossible to have interior stairs (for whatever reason, you cannot place a ceiling above stairs, which means no roofs). I feel like there was some incurable interior stairs bug where the developers gave up and gave every colonist a pocket ladder they whip out to climb up a story whenever they want. - The standard walk and carry speed in this game is much slower compared to Rimworld. This means that maximizing the efficiency of your colonists is much more at the forefront in Stranded. It also means that you need your crafting stations very close to the material stockpiles they use, and that doing anything far away from camp is almost never worth it (observing a critical plant you need for a specific food type, cloth, leather, etc. is the only exception). You can get delivery drones later to greatly relax the logistics needs, but it is frustrating that a game so critically reliant on production chains does not give you the tools to adequately manage multiple chains using a single resource. For instance, if you want to set up a huge grain farm in a far patch of fertile soil, and produce both moonshine on site and food in the main camp from the grain - you will inevitably end up with people carrying grain from far away to deliver to the cooking station for each individual meal and waste a ton of time, or take grain from the kitchen to walk far away to put into a distiller. You can assign different work areas, but now you're forced to designate workers to different areas, and then lose out on those colonists covering other chores in other work areas, or constantly reassigning them. Tools to designate priority and quantity of storage of certain materials (you get a "fill this storage unit first", but that's it), lock specific storage units that crafting stations can use, etc. would go a long way here. So those are the big notes. From the above it sounds like I didn't enjoy playing the game, but I really did enjoy it! I got about 90 hours out of it to play through each of the scenarios, and there were definitely some fun times and organic storytelling that occurred (my favorite was a bug raid interrupting a wedding, then after killing all the bugs, the colonists went right back to the wedding with guts all over their clothes, and then right after getting married, a notification of "Groom lectured bride on critical thinking" appeared above their heads). But after playing through each scenario, there wasn't really a whole of replayability to come back to. Still worth playing through, and for much cheaper than Rimworld. TL,DR - A fun 3D take on Rimworld, that lacks the replayability, but makes up for it with more streamlined and scenario focused gameplay, and a much cheaper price tag.

Basically Rimworld with advanced graphics and few added mechanics. Would recommend if you enjoyed Rimworld and similar game genres

Caveat #1 - Buy on sale. DO. NOT. Pay full price for this. Paradox bought the studio and "killed" the development. The game is fine as is. It has several of the OG dev's putting out mods that patch up the game, but, that's about it. Caveat #2 - Paradox bought the studio and killed the game. A sheety practice that Paradox has been known to do to "promising" games, but Paradox's management of said IP's is atrocious. The review - A fun survival, builder game set in space. It's deep enough to get your/mine's money worth at the "Dollar per Hour Played" ratio, at least that's how I view games. Some decent mods out there for sure, but don't expect them to breath a 2nd life into this otherwise abandoned title.

Very good game, unfortunately without good endgame. Early and mid game and early endgame is veeeery good, you always have the feeling that you're progressing, doing something new, upgrading your base. But when the real end game comes - it's just a matter of surviving the waves till you meet the scenario winning conditions, as there is no progression. Still, if you can get it for less than 25$ it's worth it.