Recent reviews by samrego

I played this game at release and replayed it recently to check out the Quantum Gravity update. It's not a bad game, I had a lot of fun, but unfortunately there also were a lot of annoying quirks that I want to highlight. FYI, I will try to keep it spoiler-free, especially for the update.

It's impossible to write a comprehensive review without comparing the game to Factorio, so I'll start off with something positive: This game has cute visuals and some light story, whereas Factorio is more serious and does not have a story to speak of. This makes Nova Lands particularly well-suited for a younger audience and people who prefer this art style and aren't looking for over-the-top automatization.

Speaking of positives, for the most part I really enjoyed the Quantum Gravity additions, in particular I felt like mines, magnetoids and levittium power generators extended the previous features in very welcome ways. One thing that immediately struck me as odd, though, was the gameplay pacing. Basically every feature from the update is locked behind the final challenge from the pre-update game, which not only makes it feel very tacked-on but also means there's this point roughly halfway through the game where you're basically just waiting for the last few items to be delivered and feel like you're near the end, only for the game to suddenly open up and throw you into a whole new automation loop. This isn't bad per se, but it certainly seems unintentional.

Taking a closer look at the new features, let me tell you about my experience with item antennae, which take one type of item and deliver it to any building on the same island that needs it. The point is to reduce the workload of the logistics bots that are often overworked on busy islands. As such, it is a sensible feature to implement. The problem started when I tried to increase my levittium production and used more than one antenna for the same item. For some reason, all but one antenna sat idle, rendering my setup useless. Thinking back, that one antenna was closer to the relevant buildings than the others, so perhaps if I'd arranged it differently (and probably less space-efficiently), it would have worked. Again, this "feature" seems unintentional. In general, I had a hard time finding actual uses for the antenna, which was not helped by the fact that it takes two ingredients that are not needed for any other building and so I never had on hand.

On that note, the skill tree was not changed by the update, which is at least a minor problem because part of it is for removing starter ingredients from recipes. This is necessary due to the very limited inventory space, and because this feature isn't extended for the update, your late-game inventory will most certainly be cluttered.

There is one more issue I have with the content from the update. It won't affect your average playing experience, but I still want to mention it. I'm a completionist and there is a finite amount of things to spend the in-game currency on. So naturally, I want to have it all. There is also a very limited amount of things you can sell, and to have enough money you have to sell everything. The very last thing you can sell is one package of black holes. One package is 100 items, each of those takes three neutron cores which in turn take 10 packages, that is 1,000 items, of levittium. In short, you need 300,000 of those. My late-game setup can handle around 6,000 per minute (using the afk house). That means that I need to wait 50 minutes while there is nothing else left to do in-game. Why? To be clear, there is literally no reason to sell this last thing other than to be able to afford everything, and there is no way to do it any earlier than at the very end of your playthrough. So why did the devs choose to make it so expensive? Are they taunting me? I feel taunted.

Finally, a nitpicky quickfire round of quality-of-life issues that were present in the launch version and weren't addressed in the update:

• When you level up, the yellow button in the top left is marked by a red dot, but when you click it (or press tab) it takes you to the island screen instead of the skill tree.
  
• Ratios are impossible to calculate, and by impossible I mean infeasible (see the guide on ratios by malogoss for more detail).
  
• Items on the ground don't despawn, ever.
  
• Turning on the logistics overlay (pressing alt) kills performance for some reason.
  
• The antork you're riding runs off every time you visit the space station and you have to remember to go look for it when you come back.

My theory is that the devs don't play this game themselves. It is no secret that Factorio is as polished as it is because its devs engage with the content they're responsible for on a regular basis, for instance by hosting internal LAN parties. And while I know that the team behind Factorio has had a lot more time and resources to get to its current state, I still feel like a lot of bad decisions and unintentional consequences could've been avoided by simply taking the time to test things properly. Have the devs every played the updated game from start to finish? Have they ever tried working with item antennae the way an average player would? I don't know for sure of course, but my hunch is they haven't, and I really wish they had.

This game could be great, even amazing, but unfortunately it is being held back by a mountain of quality-of-life problems, some noticable only by completionists, others clear as day from the first level-up. It is incredible that the game is fun despite this, but it could be so much better.

Come for the art style, stay for the story. It's great for playing casually as well as speedrunning, though there are some performance issues on my not so new hardware