Recent reviews by FranEagle

Extremely well curated experience, although I wish it was slightly longer. Would totally recommend!

(TL;DR) It's boring.

This is a fun, casual little game to play to hang around with your friends. And that's it. Unfortunately, there's nothing deeper than that to it.

The exploration side of the game, in particular, is very unsatisfactory: there's nothing that makes a planet unique besides its resources and the color of its terrain. No special challenges (e.g. bad weather, which used to be a thing in the early versions of the game) will accompany you throughout the experience. The game feels fun up until the 8 hour mark, then it becomes a mostly insignificant endeavor, consisting of some basic routine actions: reach new planet, set up base in new planet, mine new special ore in new planet, go back to the main planet and craft a couple of new but mostly unnecessary items to make your journey a little easier that what it already is, and repeat.

Presumably there is a lore, but it's completely optional and rather detached from the gameplay experience. It feels like an annoying chore rather than the ultimate goal of the game.

There are a lot sandbox survival games out there that seek to achieve the same goal and do it far better than Astroneer. This isn't to say that this game is completely worthless of course, but rather that it's not worth your time if you are willing to play it solo and seriously.

It's really good, buy it if you like rhythm games.

Its only flaw is you can't play the entire level in practice mode until you first complete it in normal mode. Which I just find ridiculous! What's the point of practice mode if you can't even use it BEFORE, you know, actually attempting the level?

Artificial Extinction is a cool 3D Tower Defence game which features you, one of the last survivors of mankind, against an ever-expanding army of riotous robots which wish nothing but your death.
The game features ten different scenarios across ten different levels, each with a different conformation of the terrain and set in a different barren biome.

I found this game quite challenging, in fact I haven't gone through it completely, although it varies from player to player according to your background experience with this genre of games. In general, it's meant to be really tough.

The game provided me with good hours of fun and I don't regret spending 15€ on it: it definitely requires a lot of strategy when it comes to placing down the right type of turret that you need, and where you need it. The enemies are very cool and fit very well into the style of the game, and are deadly at the right point. I feel that the resource management aspect doesn't require much attention from the player, especially when the maximum amount of miners is reached and salvaging robots' corpes becomes less relevant. You are never going to idle in any level whatsoever, and always have to pay attention to everything.
Exploiting the vantage points of the terrain is crucial to the success of the mission.

A little bit of additional polishing would have been appreciated, and there are some unpleasant, yet non-gamebreaking bugs here and there, but they are being addressed really fast.

Replayability shouldn't be a concern, since there's an endless mode for those who manage to get through nine out of the ten levels available and as long as the game is updated with fresh new content.