This is a complicated one

On the surface it's amazing. Adorable graphics with outstanding presentation, easy multiplayer fun, stress-free alternative to the oversaturated base-building genre. Astroneer nails the feeling of having your own little space colony, with vehicles you build the way you want, terraforming tools to shape caves and build roads, planned out rocket trips to efficiently pack your stuff. It's fun. It's enjoyable, but...

As we dig deeper, things start to get a bit mixed. For starters, there's hardly much of a gameplay loop, yet the game asks you for so much that it overstays its welcome by a lot. It's way too much content for not a lot of variety in it so while it doesn't take long at all to unlock and build the more advanced types of buildings and tools, it's followed by dozens of hours of just mindlessly completing boring chores across the different planets for either unlocks that rarely help or sidegrades that are rarely worth it.

Speaking of such, the game is adamant on never giving you actual permanent upgrades, your inventory is limited enough as is (by design of course, it's the main advantage of bringing vehicles to your explorations) and yet with every upgrade you unlock the more stuff either permanently occupy your slots or has to be left behind. The satisfaction of unlocking an upgrade is immediately confronted with the downside of its backpack cost. Take the oxygenator for example, it's crafted with most advanced material in the game, there is nothing beyond it, by the time you're able to craft an oxygen generator you'd think "gee, i've been dealing with oxygen for so long, i've finally earned the solution to it" and then... not only does it occupy an inventory slot, its energy cost requires you to bring an energy generator with you if you want to actually keep it on at all times. I know this might sound like a nitpick, or that maybe i'm just bad at inventory management, but asking me to constantly reconsider which of my own stuff i'm actually able to have is, quite simply, not fun.

And that's the thing, that lack of convenience permeates through the entire experience. The game opts for a diegetic UI wherever it can, meaning its UI elements are for the most part, in-universe. Of course, this isn't a bad thing at all, it's a clever way to immerse you in the experience. But unfortunately they leaned so heavily into it that it gets in the way of gameplay. A lot. Crafting items without a proper menu means constantly scrolling, organizing your inventory has to be manually dealt with every 5 minutes, resource canisters are unreasonably inconvenient with the way they were implemented to use no menus. Base building as a whole is honestly made absurdly challenging.

It's a base building game. A space base building game. Above all else we're supposed to visit these planets and set up our colonies. And yet in this visually stunning universe it's extremely impractical to properly build a presentable base. Allignment tools are inexistant, even with the adequate tool mods the terraforming isn't functional enough for large scale bases, the "painting" tool is laughable, there's essentially no fine-tuning of anything. I like to keep my bases tidy, i like to have them look presentable. But Astroneer seemingly tries to get so much in my way of doing so that after a couple planets of putting in effort, in most locations my bases ended up being just "here's all the stuff i need in roughly a line".

And that's the thing though. Despite all that, despite all the frustrations, despite all the questionable design choices, my friends and I were still having fun. The game is fun! It controls nicely, the fantasy of exploring space is right up my alley, and despite its lack of automation (there's some elements of it but they're kinda terrible) it still scratched a similar itch to something like Satisfactory. Despite all the problems i listed, i'd honestly still give it a positive review and recommend it for it's uniqueness and ambition and genuine success in most of what it tried to achieve. Unfortunately... my final complaint is what really tips the scale for me.

As of 2023, Astroneer has a cash shop and pseudo live-service FOMO events for limited time cosmetics. Let's tackle these one at a time.

I, personally, don't mind cash shops depending on implementation. Yes it's a paid game but i understand they have costs to keep it going and whatnot, and this is indeed a case of "it's just cosmetics!". My problem is that "it's just cosmetics" comes with a big caveat in my eyes, and that is what's my power of customization in the base game itself. Astroneer cash's shop cosmetics not only outnumber the extremely limited selection of base-game cosmetics by an order of magnitude, it's also on a completely different level of quality. Yes it's just cosmetics but cosmetics are part of a game's experience. I enjoy working towards unlocking visuals and having the actual customization be paywalled is a huge bummer. Even the basic visor colors are paid. Cheap, yes, but paid. This removes experimentation, this diminishes the reward of being gifted an achievement cosmetic when they're still so low-effort compared to the cash shop. What's more, the cash shop is the first option in the game's menu, with a little sparkle attached to it as well so you're always going to look at it whenever you open up your menu.

Then comes the limited-time events. It really saddens me to see this kind of thing becoming common even in indie games. This isn't an MMO, this isn't a competitive multiplayer game, this game has little to gain from trying to inflate its player retention through such a cheap tactic. I'm not against bringing new events to a game, ofc. Halloween, Christmas, Anniversary events, sure, bring the content! Please stop making them actual limited time in your singleplayer (or in this case, small group co-op) games, let me change my own calendar date. Whatever Fear Of Missing Out effect you want from me during the duration of your event will turn into a terrible feeling of "I Missed Out" afterwards. That just makes me not want to play a game, specially when without said events the cosmetics are so limited outside of the cash shop.

Individually i might have been able to look past these factors, but both together, and added with the frustrations described prior, turn Astroneer into a game i might reccomend trying out if you can, but not playing to its fullest, and certainly not buying it.

A wonderful experience in so many fronts. Personally would've preferred if it leaned more heavily in its roguelike elements, but i understand why it's the way it is.

The gameplay is great and addictive, controls are tight, sound is amazing (specially with 3D audio!), visual design and graphical quality are both absurd, the storytelling isn't for everyone but if it's for you then you're in for a ride. Finally, if you have the means to use these, then the haptic feedback and adaptive triggers on the Dualsense act as the cherry on top, really pulling you in.