Recent reviews by Genkaz

Do I recommend this game? Yes. However this review will be mostly about the negatives. Please keep in mind that this review has spoilers, so it is best to read it by someone who already played the game, however they are not really major enough to ruin anything because the game does not really have an actual story that can really be ruined all that much.

The replay value in the game is virtually nonexistent because its survival mechanics by itself are not interesting or complicated enough to warrant focusing on them by itself independently of the story. If you want an extremely immersive emotionally rich game that will glue you to the monitor for several days, go for it, however this game is not a long term companion, also keep in mind that you might get bored before the actual end, even if the experience was very interesting.

The game should mainly be purchased for the atmosphere and the sense of wonder that it initially creates for a few days until it gets boring.

The ocean floor is fascinating and full of things to discover until they eventually become discovered.

The crafting is too simplistic and there is no way of adequately automating anything, making certain operations too repetitive.

The resource gathering actually feels rather nice, and hunting for things to eat feels reasonably nice as well, however a combination of the stasis rifle and the molten knife kind of breaks it by making it too easy.

The monsters of the world are not sufficiently threatening enough, and it was way too easy to avoid most of them, most hostile creatures of the world feel like a mild nuisance instead of being terrifying intelligent predators that they could have been.

There are no methods of effectively mapping out the entirety of the sea floor, making keeping track of things and discovering important locations rather problematic.

A hypothetical “advanced scanner room” could solve the issue that would need to be powered by like five nuclear reactors or something, it could also be a craftable map object that would allow to gradually draw out and label the ocean as it is progressively more explored.

The alien bases are not sufficiently interesting enough and feel rather bare. The keycard mechanic was rather dumb because I climbed all the way down to the deepest lava place only to realize that I didn’t have the blue keycard, which was a massive game breaker due to how time consuming and somewhat hazardous it is to get down there, the awe and the amazement of seeing the enormous leviathan above the lava was eventually ruined by having to go back and forwards in an attempt to figure out how to get the blue card until it eventually just got boring.

I could obviously cheat and spawn the card but it is pretty obvious that I already did everything important in the game already, I am not sufficiently interested enough to finish it because it no longer feels challenging. Hunting for food and making disinfected water became rather easy, and harpooning around in the prawn suit also removes all concern for oxygen, especially when you take 4 or 6 reserve power sources with you, and there are no sufficiently threatening monsters that are more than a mild nuisance as mentioned before.

The game has no methods of instant travel to my knowledge, and even though the map is not enormous, having to move around manually can get a bit boring. Reverse engineering the alien teleporters and implementing them around the user constructed bases could make it a lot more interesting.

The player base seems to be largely safe from virtually everything if its structural integrity is sufficient, there is no necessity to actively defend it from anything, nothing living ever attempts to sabotage it.

The story is not sufficiently interesting enough and feels largely trivial. The beginning part with the aurora containment was interesting because there was a sense of impending doom. I would say that the game would feel much more intense if it gave the player an actually limited quantity of time to solve certain tasks, because right now the threat of aurora detonating and the infectious disease do not feel urgent enough to be actually pressing or scary, the player is given too much time to solve both problems from the perspective of suspense.

Virtually all of the text logs and the data downloads found are pretty boring and do not inform the player of anything substantial or not obvious. Every single data found in relation to the aurora crash basically repeats “we crashed and everything sucks” over and over again in different words.

Scanning creatures and plant life is largely useless and is not sufficiently rewarding enough, there needs to be more function along with the trivia surrounding the scans, and if it isn’t useless and I just missed it then I am not interested in reading a bunch of wikipedia pages just to extract that information, it should be more apparent that scanning flora and fauna is useful in some way, the altera assistant could automatically read the important bits for example.

Silver is more rare than gold somehow.

The combination of the stasis rifle and the molten knife kind of breaks everything in general, the majority of monsters can be effectively neutralized and murdered by freezing them and then bashing them in the face with the knife.

The structure and the pacing of the world feels a little bit too on the nose. Deeper should not automatically mean more important, there are not enough random important locations at varying depths, having a number of extremely dangerous shallow/medium depth locations could have been good.

I could mention the bugs but it is not necessary given the hilariously high number of reviews already mentioning them.

The pseudo scientific announcements of the Altera AI were very funny and well placed, and I really enjoyed them.