Astroneer

I think Astroneer was the oldest game still on my wishlist, at almost 9 years old. I even had an early blog post talking about it, back when I was still making weekly posts about whatever. Well, I finally got around to it. Sort of.

I'm going to keep this "review" short. I didn't effectively play the game. I've had a very poor run, quite disliking every "open world survival craft" game I've tried with the exception of Terraria, and I can assume that's because that was more combat and less crafting oriented. So I already went in, not expecting anything.
The problem is that when you're already thinking that you might not be in it for the long haul, the worst thing they can do is make getting into it be a chore. And that's exactly what they did. The main manu was already difficult to figure out, opting for half-cryptic icons instead of text, but starting a new, default game, was easy enough. Now, I would think that I don't care much for tutorials, but Astroneer is sorely lacking one. They had some basic introductory missions telling you what to do, but not how to do it. I need a resource or an item. Where do I get it? No idea. The inventory system was trying to be immersive with things slotting into your backpack, but gosh was it difficult to understand what was where, and the amount of actions needed to pick up a single thing was far too many. Worst of all was the camera, which did not follow your mouse, but had to be explicitly positioned. For a game in this genre, where I need to build and connect things, this too was too many actions just to be able to see the areas I wanted to interact with.

After about an hour, I was thoroughly angry with how difficult it was to get anything done, so I just quit. I don't really know what most of the crafting, gathering, and exploration was going to be like, but I can't imagine it would've outweighed the terrible experience I was going to have getting through it. Many negative reviews apparently touch on this, but I'm amazed that it's not a problem for more people. So, yeah, a rough starting experience is why I don't want to play it. It's still one of the highest rated survival crafting games though, so if you like the genre, give it a try. If the UI and controls haven't put you off after an hour, it'll probably suit you just fine.