Recent reviews by MooBurger

I had never really heard of the Emergency franchise before (probably because I'm American and it seemed very Eurocentric), until one day, somehow, I ended up in the open beta. I got totally addicted to the game loop and as of this review I am in the top 100 players. After the beta/test ended I ended up buying some of the older games in the Emergency franchise while waiting for this to officially release.

Anyway, I really liked the limited slots and fighting against time feel, and I actually prefer the simplified mechanics of the new game (for example, in Emergency 5/20th anniversary edition, you have to micromanage firefighters to interact with standpipes). There is also a card-based "perks" system now. And because the sequence of missions on each map is dynamically generated, there is still some freshness, like trying to deal with 5 police missions in a row.

Not gonna lie, some of the grind is real but since it's PvE-only it's not really P2W as everything but cosmetics can be gained just by playing missions. I haven't spent a single real money in the hundred hours I have spent in the game. You can sometimes get the premium currency for free, so technically you could get cosmetics for free but that's gonna take months. Sure you can spend premium currency/real money to upgrade but in the end real teamwork is still the most important thing. There's not enough content to justify spending real money though.

This is sort of a city builder, a logistics sim and an RTS rolled into one. The RTS portion is semi-optional, but it does allow you expand faster than without playing those maps. Logistics-wise it's a balance of several resources and money required to satisfy your pops. If you don't supply your pops, they won't grow, but once they start moving in and you start upgrading them, they'll demand more and more and more. It's way more casual than its predecessor, Anno 2070, but I always thought 2070 was a bit too tryhard with the landmass allocation and having to optimize around support building radius. While support buildings in 2205 do have influence radius, they are more much affected by pop count, and you usually get enough landmass to not have to worry about optimized placement, especially with the DLCs and if you are a smart Ferengi and acquire other corp's lands earlier on. I've restarted 2070 multiple times when I first started because the unoptimized layout did not produce enough pops or product. There's a stock market mechanic mini-game that Offworld Trader was inspired by but I haven't really played around too much with it.

TL;DR: 3D/voxel Terraria-but with vehicles. It's sorta like single-planet No Man's Sky with the similar color aesthetics but with better crafting and worse aliens. Verdict: Probably worth it during a sale.

• Voxel building/crafting. You have your basic building blocks. It's not as block-based as say, Space Engineers or Empyrion but this also means certain objects are less "blocky" - for example, walls have sensible aesthetics without having to calculate pixel counts to get matching angles. You can make cars with 3 sets of wheels and there are 2 and a half types of liftfans for creating aircraft. The modular pieces reduce the effort required to build functional items. Mass effects are modeled with center of gravity. Wheels are attached with suspensions and there is some friction modelling.
  
  
• Biomes and exploration. The world is procedurally generated, although in EA the generation templates are a bit limited. You currently have a max world radius of 24km, along with oceans (although unfortunately there is no real underwater vehicle propulsion yet). You can set the ratios of the day/night cycle, and there is a random precipitation weather model (it snows in higher latitudes for example, and rains in lower ones, with temperature part of the survival mechanic). The terrain is mineable but you can't "put back" material you excavate. There is a minerals and crafting progression system with different tiers of materials and upgrades to crafted items. The different minerals are found in different biomes which encourage exploration.
  
  
• Survival mechanic. There's hunger, thirst, fatigue, health (physical damage, including falling damage, toxic damage, radiation damage and temperature damage) modeled. You get a personal jetpack like in No Man's Sky.

• Zero alien diversity. There's only a few types of trees and like 4 species of animals modeled, and only one of them is maybe semi-humanoid (but all they do is throw giant rocks at you, Gorn-style).
  
  
• Single planet experience. There are no mechanics to leave the planet currently. So all of No Man's Sky, Empyrion, Space Engineers and even Astroneer has this beat.
  
  
• No real farming or cooking mechanic. There is food, of course, but it's generic to like 4 things with varying stats based on 2 farmable items. You can't plant trees to regrow them or harvestable bushes. Starbound has this beat hands down (even without Frackin' Universe mod).
  
  
• Single-player only. At one point multiplayer seemed to be in the cards, but was iceboxed by the devs. I'm ok with this, as I play Starbound/Terraria and Astroneer completely by myself, but this is causing other players to negatively review the game (like they did with NMS).

• Poorly optimized. Also, your game freezes for 1-2 seconds every time it autosaves. But this is somewhat acceptable during EA/Alpha
  
  
• Your multitool is stronger than your gun. There are players on both sides of the fence of whether there should be guns in the game. But I mean, you get weapons in NMS, Empyrion, Starbound/Terraria and even freakin Space Engineers, so.. (and in SE you need mods to actually spawn NPC hostiles). The main way you deal with hostiles is by smooshing them with your vehicle. Of all of the 3D open world scifi-exploration-survival-crafting games mentioned so far, only Astroneer has no guns (but it doesn't have real aliens either).
  
  
• You can't collect dirt. This means that all the terrain modifications you make to the planet are permanent.

This is a good competitor against Osiris New Dawn, and could be a good competitor against Empyrion if it implemented: combat, space travel, multiplayer and farming/cooking.

Basically Starbound is more or less Terraria-in-space with a gazillion procedurally-generated planets with each planet having a primary biome and up to several mini-biomes, as well as minibiomes underground. Starbound was started by some of the original Terraria devs.

Builtin-Pros:

- Good basic 2D block building framework
- IN SPACE
- Housing
- Farming
- Exploration
- Has multiplayer with dedicated servers
- Has a basic builtin wiring/electronics building framework allowing you to craft and place switches/sensors.
- Extensive Lua-based modding and scripting

Out-of-the-box Cons:

- Lack of weapon types. I mean there are a lot of generated variations but are all based on short sword, long sword, spear, axe, hammer, pistol, machine pistol, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, auto rifle, sniper rifle. (moddable)
- Lack of useful/weapon craftables (most of it is cosmetic or food items) (moddable)
- Can get boring
- Depending on what kind of player you are, questing isn't very impressive, but at least there is more than before.
- No more drills (previously, in early beta you could get/craft destructible drills which made digging faster than using your matter manipulator, now the matter manipulator can get upgraded but the fastest speed is still not very fast compared to the old diamond drills). There is probably a mod which adds this back in.

1.0-Pros: (Pros introduced in 1.0):
- You can get ship crew now.
- NPC villages give quests with rewards.
- Hunger meter re-added (actually this was added back in during the unstable/nightly pre-releases).

1.0-Cons: (Cons introduced in 1.0):
- only 6 hotbar items per hotbar now (but you get 2 of them) and default-equipped quickslot removed
- Can't teleport back to ship unless the sky is visible (ok I sorta get that, and it's also probably moddable).
- Can't stack food items (this is due to food degradation but there is a mod for that now).
- Appears ore is more rare (probably to get people to travel more to get stuff rather than just farming one or two planets per star type).

You can walk around the planet as one of 7 playable races by walking continously in a given direction and you will end up where you started. Each planet as a reachable core made of lava or impassible solid (moons). The planets are located within star systems. You have a "ship" with expandable rooms which serves as your main base of operations that can retain all of your stuff when switching multiplayer servers and from where you can travel between planets, beam up and down from planets, and travel between the star systems.

I usually play this in single player, where I engage in farming (it's actually slightly more fun than the farming in Stardew Valley, imo), going to planets, looking for cool NPC villages or NPC dungeons.

I have been playing this since it was in Beta and on Steam Early Access. A couple of years ago, during the Koala series of beta releases, the universe was split into 5 sectors of varying NPC diffculty and you had to beat a boss to open up each sector but otherwise there was no questing. In the next release, codenamed Giraffe, each star was given a radiation type, requiring protective gear (for supplying air, radiation immunity, heat immunity, cold immunity) for each of the more exotic biomes (aireless, radiation, hot, cold). Bosses were changed so that they would reward the appropirate protection level so you could get to harder planets. Boss missions were handed out from a respawning NPC base which is beamable from your ship was added with additional quests. In 1.0, the complete backstory and lore was fleshed out and you get a single main quest-giver which lets you play out the "plot" involving some cataclysm and the various races. The protection gear is now craftable. NPC Villages also now give out quests which give you items as rewards and can reward crew members for your ships too.

1.0 lags less than beta for me, on GTX 770 and i5-4690 with 8gb ram. In beta I had to restart the client every few hours due to memory leak which seems to be improving (1.0.2 update released today supposed to fix another leak).

It's a great little game to get by on until No Man's Sky. The soundtrack by Curtis Schweizter is also very relaxing even out-of-game.