While this stuff can be recovered by revisiting the site of death, it can be incredibly difficult to navigate back to the corpse, especially in the early days when there are few resources in reserve to outfit a replacement explorer. Suffocation, fall damage, flying debris and hostile plants are generally easy to survive by carefully planning excursions, but when something goes sideways, the player loses everything that’s on the character. I’d have sold my soul for a simple rope ladder to dangle from ledges at times.Īlong similar lines, there aren’t many ways to die in the game, but when it happens, it totally sucks. I also found heading down into caves to be unnecessarily tricky, with huge drops appearing out of nowhere, or my burrowing often interrupted by huge underground caverns. For example, it can take forever to find certain necessary resources - a problem exacerbated by procedural creation of planets when starting a new game.
However, after a honeymoon period of relaxing exploration and experimentation, flaws start to become noticeable. Heading off down mineshafts, bringing resources back to home base or even just collaborating to discover how things actually work is a much better experience in co-op - as is hearing them tumble to their death down a mineshaft or switching off their oxygen supply when they’re miles from safety. The geometry can warp and deform in some pretty unexpected ways, thwarting efforts to carve out new areas to explore or set up shop in.Īs a co-op enabled title, Astroneer is a significantly better experience when exploring with a pal, working towards a common goal like busy little Astrobees. Sucking up dirt through their vacuum and then planting it back down or simply smoothing out surfaces to make them useful for building is a breeze, though occasionally creating functional ramps or tunnels can be more awkward than expected. What’s more, Astroneers are able to terraform the world at will. Without spoiling too much about the mechanics of establishing a home base – the sense of discovery is one of the game’s strongest assets, after all – it’s soon possible to branch out for miles in any direction with a steady supply of oxygen and ways to travel without keeling over miles from home. While there’s no real danger from wildlife apart from the multitudes of killer plants on each planet, oxygen and fall damage are real concerns, especially when first starting out. The whole shebang will need adequate power, so players may wish to take advantage of solar or wind power, and… well, it starts getting fairly involved, including routing cables and stuffing them into power sockets, which is surprisingly enjoyable given how much of a pain doing it in real life can be.Įventually, all of the supplies nearby will be exhausted, so heading off into the unknown in search of more is a requirement. Later, once a home base gets established, it’s possible to start smelting materials or employing other methods of refinement to get new types of supplies. Generally this is done by sucking up raw materials through a space vacuum the Astroneers carry around. Essentially, the player controls an astronaut and is heads off into the cosmos to search for planets filled with stuff for mankind to claim dominion over - our little spacedude is handy at fabricating new equipment as long as he can find the various resources required to craft it. Some people call it the final frontier, and that’s true for the bunch of astronauts I’ve spent time with while playing the fresh-out-of-Early-Access interplanetary exploration game Astroneer.Īstroneer is a third-person open-world exploration and crafting game, but one that doesn’t offer much in the way of story.
WTF All this space age tech, and no simple method to descend into caverns. HIGH Establishing the first fully-featured base feels awesome.
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