StarRupture

I've played ~6 hours or so and it doesn't seem to be as deep as I'd hope, but I haven't upgraded a core yet which is what sets off the base defense event.

The world seems fairly blah and repetitive so far. Small number of enemies and not much variety either.

Gave this one a go.

Shamelessly rips off satisfactory, although that's obvious to anyone who looks at a screenshot.

It's tilted a bit more toward the combat part than satisfactory is, you need to hunt down various blueprints for items from other failed outposts. This isn't bad even if you suck at FPS like I do though, enemy AI is good and reaallly annoying, but you have a forcefield and strong, effective weapons. Fighting is actually something you'd do for fun rather than satisfactory where it is something you'd do only if you have no choice.

Building wise, it's more streamlined than satisfactory is ( huge amounts of different types of items are made in the same buildings ), and while it has nowhere near the same depth, there's actually quite a bit of it in there at the moment - I've put in about 15 hours, and there's still a lot of stuff to build/unlock.

It's pretty with a good engine - the huge sightlines are very nice, and the solar flares and such are fantastic visually ( when you are inside a habitat with some big windows rather than burning to death of course ).

The voice acting is surprisingly good.

EA wise, it is extremely polished with no bugs I've run into so far, and almost no jank.

Overall, worth the $15 in its current form I think, and could end up really good - all they need to do is add a bunch of content, the foundations and mechanics are all there already.

Tuco said:

Certainly looks pretty. With it being sooo similar to Satisfactory in art direction and apparent gameplay i wonder what they are doing that's new beyond swarm or solar events?

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There's a few things, though they aren't as developed as they could be.

- Survival game mechanics like food/water/toxicity. These are tuned as mostly a nuisance currently, rather than being a significant driver - mixed feelings here, not the biggest fan of survival stuff in general, but if you add it, it should at least matter.

- RPG mechanics - you level up various skills ( like running or survival ) through use, and higher skill levels also give you what are effectively gem slots where you can add what they call LEMs to the skill to give you various other bonuses/abilities.

-Tower defense mechanics - there are various turrets etc, and unaddressed alien incursions will result in them 'infesting' your bases, which disables all the machinery and surrounds it with a giant infection cloud that drains your shield etc when inside it. I haven't had the aliens attack a base that was a long way away, but I don't know if that is a rule or just coincidence.

- Modular weapons upgrades - apart from having way better guns than satisfactory, the guns are all modifiable with different mods you can buy with the 'war bonds' currency ( like blueprints, scavenged from other outposts/dead miners etc. ).

Yeah, I felt mostly the same.

-Food was just annoying and no real benefit and you couldn't even MAKE it until like lvl 8 with one of the corpos. They did do a stealth fix I think the first day that removed the toxicity from a lot of stuff like polyfruit. That helped managed it, but it was mostly just a nuisance.

-The leveling of skills was very slow and the LEMS that use this leveling ranged from pretty good to near worthless.

-Tower defense was weird. We knew it was coming at Core lvl 2, but then it just randomly starts happening after? That's okay as it gives you a reason to build defenses, but right now the rewards from killing mobs are basically meaningless and the combat is very bland. Stuff like 7DaysToDie and Foundry had fun game design where you activated the attack and the mobs were varied and you built special defenses and you actually got GOOD rewards from winning and from killing itself.

-Weapon upgrades are weird. Besides AoE/Penetration and bigger magazines not sure any of it mattered. This could change when they add more complicated enemies, but until then the combat is very dull, repetitive, and almost unecessary completely for this stage of the game. Think they just threw it in quickly to say "we have combat!"

The real problem is crafting. You craft not for items, but for crafting recipes. All this stuff you make? YOU don't use it. It's just requirements for some other bullshit you also don't use. You're not making grenades or hand gliders or anything useful. This is the biggest problem. You're basically just working the checklist going through it to then have it all and none of it TRULY benefits you outside of making ammunition. It's a big fundamental problem.

Beautiful game.

Sabbat said:

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Beautiful game.

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And you chose correctly with the scientist. Well done.

It's a great game for $15. You'll definitely get your value of it.

That said, it's probably worth waiting for a bit. Right now it's somewhere between a crafting/survival game and Satisfactory but doesn't really know if it wants to be either. There is a lot of potential here though and if anybody ever played Satisfactory back when it first released, this game is in a MUCH better "initial" state than that game was.

Kirun said:

It's a great game for $15. You'll definitely get your value of it.

That said, it's probably worth waiting for a bit. Right now it's somewhere between a crafting/survival game and Satisfactory but doesn't really know if it wants to be either. There is a lot of potential here though and if anybody ever played Satisfactory back when it first released, this game is in a MUCH better "initial" state than that game was.

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1000% agree. Which is why I'm locking in at $15 now. It's perfectly playable, even with the issues that it currently has. And I absolutely expect a price increase when they get to full release.

velk said:

- Survival game mechanics like food/water/toxicity. These are tuned as mostly a nuisance currently, rather than being a significant driver - mixed feelings here, not the biggest fan of survival stuff in general, but if you add it, it should at least matter.

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They're probably aiming for a more casual experience after how much of a ball buster Green Hell was.

Fuuuuuuuck.

I only just realized I'd been accidentally playing nightmare mode because I expected it to work like Satisfactory.

For those who may be in the same boat - the basic level 1 rail junctions come with automated smart switchers built in.

In non-Satisfactory terms, that means you can run 20 different things onto a single rail, and the fabs/furnaces/etc will pull only the things they want off the line.

Even further, it will propagate all the way back to a source output, so if you spin up a new press or whatever, it will path the required resources from the source to the press automatically, assuming there is a path the resource can take through rail junctions to get there.

BRB to rebuild literally everything hah.

velk said:

Fuuuuuuuck.

I only just realized I'd been accidentally playing nightmare mode because I expected it to work like Satisfactory.

For those who may be in the same boat - the basic level 1 rail junctions come with automated smart switchers built in.

In non-Satisfactory terms, that means you can run 20 different things onto a single rail, and the fabs/furnaces/etc will pull only the things they want off the line.

Even further, it will propagate all the way back to a source output, so if you spin up a new press or whatever, it will path the required resources from the source to the press automatically, assuming there is a path the resource can take through rail junctions to get there.

BRB to rebuild literally everything hah.

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Yes, most factory games use a push algorithm for resources. This game uses a pull algorithm. Completely turns factory building on its head.

The rail speed limits are much more of an impediment in this game than in satisfactory because of how much harder it is to control rail spaghetti in this game. If they implement better tools for controlling the height of rails such as an equivalent to satisfactory's lifts that might help a lot. This is even with the somewhat hidden mechanism for adjusting the height of rail stands.

I'm just working on unlocking mk3 rails now and so every single thing I build is defined by the 4 items per second limit. Even some small factories require multiple outputs or multiple separate lines for an input because they use over 4/sec.
Like right now I'm trying to optimise my production chain for electromagnets and it's getting a little unwieldy. Multiple belts worth of ceramic, Wolfram dust etc for one not very large factory.

Having a pull system changes some simple build concepts that satisfactory didn't have like if you're transporting goods a decent distance you need a storage buffer near the factory because many will burn through 100 materials before the first replacements start arriving if it's too far away.

Don't want to sound like a downer, this game is great and I'm having a blast.

I have upgraded some of my cores so I'm getting invasions and they're a lot harder to keep under control than I expected. So many monsters and the fact that they inevitably swarm and infect the core which disables all of the turrets is definitely a bit of a challenge.
It feels like the turrets don't activate if you're too far away too so you really need to rush in when an invasion starts.

sakkath said:

Having a pull system changes some simple build concepts that satisfactory didn't have like if you're transporting goods a decent distance you need a storage buffer near the factory because many will burn through 100 materials before the first replacements start arriving if it's too far away.

I have upgraded some of my cores so I'm getting invasions and they're a lot harder to keep under control than I expected. So many monsters and the fact that they inevitably swarm and infect the core which disables all of the turrets is definitely a bit of a challenge.
It feels like the turrets don't activate if you're too far away too so you really need to rush in when an invasion starts.

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I am pretty sure there are bugs with long distance rails - one of the first things I did at the beginning of the game was run a rail from a quite far he3 mine back to the starting area, and that line often has huge gaps in the throughput, even though it is buffed by l2 storage at both ends. It all works fine whenever I am looking directly at it, or following shipments from one end to the other, but if I just start hanging around at one end it will inexplicable start losing stuff off the rail. Frustrating given how many upgrades require x thousand he3. I think it's cargo dispatchers or bust for long distance.

Turrets are weird - the basic turret is actually pretty good - they are a better shot than I am, and while their max engagement distance is smaller than the green spitters, they do a good job of blowing the shit out of the other vermin types. Refilling them by hand sucks, but a couple of them make even the hardest scanner events a breeze and they are quick to plop down.

Defense *towers* though, they are vastly better at one thing - spending ammo ;p They fire like a quad machinegun, which would be great if more than one in 50 shots actually hit anything. I've seen one spend 400+ ammo to kill one slasher before.

velk said:

I am pretty sure there are bugs with long distance rails

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Multi rails are definitely bugged, I stopped using them long ago. The multiple rails under certain conditions stop being separate and packets can jump to different rails at every intersection, kind of operating like a merger+splitter. It makes them unusable. I only use single rails and they work fine although it obviously takes up more space.

For turrets I have an absolute shit tonne of them all around my upgraded cores and around all of the nearby monoliths fed by rails and an ammo factory. They are decent at mowing down the aliens when I'm close but if I don't rush to the monolith the bugs seem to get past those towers without issue and I find them attacking the core already. It's weird. I need walls or something like that to slow down the bugs so the towers can kill them before the core gets infected. I'm sure the devs have a lot of work planned for this system because it's pretty janky right now.