TUG

I'm one of the original backers from kickstarter. I've seen the entire process up to this point. Its been 3 years and this game is no more closer to completion than it was at the end of year one. Now the company is moving to change the engine and make the game free to play so more modders can have access to the game. Now they stated from the beggining the game was going to be modder friendly, but making the game free out in year 3 is simply because they cant just get up and finish the game themsleves. I love the idea of this game (thats why i backed it) however the company is clearly not capable of completeling the game.

I bought into TUG during its Kickstarter campaign back in May 2013. It honestly sounded awesome at the time. The campaign pitched a "multiplayer open-world sandbox-RPG using new technology and social sciences to directly involve players in the game’s design." I thought wow that sounds like it could be something special! Fast forward more than 3 years later, and very little progress has been made. In January 2016 the developers sent out a message to backers explaining how they were scrapping the DX11 engine they had been working on and were now working towards moving over to OpenGL, further explaining that there would be no more game updates for at least around 12 months. That means we’ll be (hopefully) seeing the next engine update sometime around early 2017, in an early alpha stage, four years after the Kickstarter ended. In the same January ’16 update the developers also pitched the idea of making TUG a Free to Play 'game', with monetisation of user mods. TUG would no longer be a complete game in itself, but rather a base platform that others could make content mods for, and sell to other users. That to me sounds completely terrible, and it is definitely not something I would have had anything to do with if I had known that's where things were possibly headed. Now to be fair the decisions of going Free to Play with monetised mods has still yet to be made, but throwing out the suggestion like that and announcing no decision will be made for a full year was quite honestly a terrible way to handle things. In the 8 months since that announcement, the community has all but disappeared (at least the current players on Steam), reviews have gone to hell, and community confusion has most definitely set in. Not a great situation for any game to be in. I’ll be keeping an eye on the games progress and will update this review accordingly, but at this stage I’ve just about lost hope that TUG will be developed through to completion and to a state that matches what was originally promised to early backers. I have a feeling that updates and communication will continue to slow down, to a point where development is quietly cancelled. Time will tell though and I would love to be proven wrong.

*WARNING* Do not buy this game! This is not a "bad review", this is a warning that this game is unfinished, will never be finished or updated ever again and is a waste of money. *WARNING* Do not buy this game! I urge Steam/Valve to flag this game. This is no joke, search for TUG the unfinished game and you will find a reddit post from July with a ton of details, links and facts about what exactly is going on. This is not slander. This is not attacking a potentially faulty company. This is a warning that this game is officially over. I have been patient enough with this game and the company. Time to speak out and leave a review. The developers first backed out of steam and then stopped updating their game altogether and website. They even had an announcement of the end of their development. There is speculation of the company having changed their entire team and moved onto different projects sweeping this one under the rug. It started off right. An open world adventure and building game based around a alien landscape with primitive technology. A lot of the features were fun to tinker with such as the crafting system which required you place the items on the ground or on a table in order to craft them into tools. The ambiance of the game was different and was looking forward to what the future of building would hold but do not get your hopes up. I would be curious to see if a valid lawsuit could be filed against their blatant sales of a endlessly unfinished game. Maybe this was their intention from the stay as a "big con" and the title was the give-away all along. The Unfinished Game is what it was called and is what it will remain. I have never given up hope for Cube World after all this time but I have no hopes for TUG.

I would like to state right off the bat, that I do not hate this game at all. I was actually going to purchase a copy of the game for my wife today to play it together, found out it had been taken off the store, and read the AMA and related info. This is a complicated game to review, but I felt I would share my thoughts so far. This game has has a lot of heart and love put into it so far, it's very obvious when playing it. It has a very immersive feel as well, via placing objects on the ground, instead of storing hordes of trash in numerous boxes. The feeling of digging out a mine, and having to dump the rock and dirt out the hole, is simple, but adds to that immersion. I also love the sound and effects at night time; That eerie wind and ambience is just mind blowing. Every update to this game, I update and play, as they had been adding tons of unique content. However, I have to put emphasis on "had." They did work on new biome generation and terrain generation as of last year, which was a big task to do, but there wasn't much else added in. They had a good reputation for releasing small, but potent updates to the game frequently, and highlighting them on their youtube channel, which I would reccomend following if you're at all interested in the game. The youtube channel itself describes what I'm talking about. A lof of the updates come slower than the last, and several of the "in the works" projects being worked on never saw the light of day. The last major update involved adding a crafting journal, which was great, but those changes were far too small in the scope of what was supposed to be there. It was disappointing to constantly wait to see changes to this game, only to try it out again in a few months, and being disappointed, or bored after a couple hours. It just feels too "barren" for a game that has been in EA this long. I felt like the game had an amazing direction, of molding your "seed" and it's appearance, which reminded me of Fable in a way. This awesome feeling of exploring a survival world, with less focus on survival, and more on exploring and progression in a sense and the players making their own "game" in a sense, by offering a diverse solid universe. It seems, and I may be wrong, that they focus more and more on the "pvp" community and pvp in general, rather than coop survival, which seemed like the original spirit of the game. This news comes on the heels of their announcment to make the game F2P, and nothing good rarely comes from a F2P model. While I have no doubt that they will do their best to make it a fair F2P model, if that is the route they choose, it doesn't seem like an idea that makes a whole ton of sense to me. That being said, the devs are a great team of people, and I have a huge amount of respect for their vision for this game, and have given it nothing but praise up until this point. They are very active in discussions about it, and interacting with the community.I still have the best hopes for this game, and look forward to the final product. I still am in love with that original trailer, and what I imagined it could be. Even in it's current form, it is a good game, to be perfectly fair. In some senses, I don't feel the devs give themselves enough credit, and are too worried about failing. We just need to see content that changes the game, and adds to it drastically. More pets, more mounts, more weapons and armors, more enemies, boss monsters, and places to explore and learn more about the interesting story they've put behind this game. It should also go without mention to how amazing the art is for TUG. The end note I guess is, that it's great they want to work in a new engine for the game, in a way. But it's a risky move, as we've seen what can happen with games like DayZ, wanting to 'redo' the entire game to make it better. I will still check out the updates from time to time, but it's sad to see that they almost seem to be damaging the game by taking it off the market, instead of trying to promote it more. I know these devs are a small team, and very talented, with a work load far above their numbers, but this just seems like a baffling move. I only wanted to write this because I had a lot of hope for this game. I wasn't a KS backer, but I did buy into EA very shortly after it came out on Steam. TL;DR Wait until the finished product comes out, and see what they have. (Not that you have a choice now, at least for a year.) If things change for the better, and there's actually content that keeps me invested, my review would change to a positive in a second.

I trusted the Yogscast in the decision of buying this game, and now, 3 years later, I didn't get ♥♥♥♥ out of it. This game had potential. It wasn't just Minecraft, it was "Here, you have to build your ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tools on a rock and figure what makes what instead of being presented with a 3x3 grid where everything was so easy to make. This flopped just as bad as Yogventures, and I'm still waiting for them to change this. Welp, at least this game isn't buyable anymore unlike the piece of ♥♥♥♥ called Starforge Just to say, I LOVED the taming mechanics of this game, but thinking about presenting users with microtransactions afer we paid 15$ for it? Are you serious?

I fell in love with this game in 2013 on kickstarter and backed it. Never got any of the content I was promised. The reason we never got the game and it never played out was this. https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=03468823-26313147 Any game dev should pick up on the original kickstarter idea and run with it. This could have been the valheim of 2013. Sad.

Update 4/21/16 I still cannot give this game a positive review for the following reasons - It is utterly broken in its current state. - The game is currently not available to purchase. - The game is getting a complete overhaul while it is down from steam. - Up in the air whether the game will become free to play or not after overhaul. So why update my review you may ask?. Its not because my view of the game in its current state has changed. It's because my view of the development of the game has. If you are into crafting/survival/creative/adventure game I feel this is worth following and here is why. The developers are creating the games engine with a set of easily accessible tools the will enable gamers to easily become modders. They are not just trying to make a game they are trying to build a community of modders that can easily create their own material. I very much respect this view and am excited to see what they come up with. So why should I believe what the developers say?, after all we live in a time EA fever and so many fail to deliver on their grand claims. Well the only reason I have any faith in this company is the willingness of the devs to "throw themselves to the wolfs" so to speak. Any developer that can't or isn't able to deliver usually slowly stops the updating then kind of fades away to rarely be herd from until the game is released with a slimey Plop!. These guys seem to be continuously prodding the community for involvement even when the reactions are hostile!. They have not faded out into the background but seem to be very open about what their goals are as far as development of the game. To me they are holding firm on their vision. Will it work out? IDK! It really depends on how good of a game TUG is when it is released. If it still sucks then no one will want to play it. If no one is playing it then nobody will want to mod for it no matter how good the tools are. If they really put in the effort to create a solid well thought out game then it has a chance. These in my mind are good reasons to keep an eye on this game. Totally Unfinished Garbage. Even the devs recommend not playing this game. That is why they don’t sell it anymore. It’s so bad they are considering just giving it away. Even if it does go F2P it would not be worth the download in its current state. NK still hasn’t even come up with a business model for this game even after putting it up for sale on steam. According to the developers they “still have years + time" before they come up with a decision on how to distribute this game. Now we are all aware of the risks of making the choice to support early access but wishy washy nonsense is what truly drives EA supporters’ nuts. hopefully Nerd Kingdom and the rest of the world can learn from this train wreck and move on. However if NK make the game better and come up with a real business plan in their "Years+ time" I will definitely change my review.

I backed this game when it came out on Kickstarter thinking it had a neat premise. Then when I went to PAX South in 2014 and to my surprise I saw a TUG booth set up. When I met with the booth staff I asked, "What happened to the game? I haven't heard any updates and I thought the game had totally died out." The staff was confused at first asking why I would think that until they admitted that the project had failed and they had to find new financial backing. This is a year after the original kickstarter with barely any communication given. It is now 2016. Almost a full 3 years have passed since I originally was interested in this game it is no where near what the developers had promised when many other Kickstarter games I've backed are doing quite well (Stonehearth, Panetary Anihilation, Among the Sleep, The Long Dark). If you really think your money will be well used by the development team then by all means buy this title. But at this time I cannot reccomend this game to anyone.

My favorite part of this game is where the developers stop developing the game and steal our money. We worked for that money, you didn't. Everyone who took a chance to support you should get a refund.