TLDR: A survival crafting game that doesn't quite understand its own genre. The aesthetic is there and it has its moments, but the lack of cohesion between exploration and progression make it one-dimensional and frustrating. The game clearly takes major inspiration from Subnautica, which is great, but because the game design elements aren't there, it ends up falling short.

You are stranded on a baren, inhospitable planet. Your goal is to slowly terraform the planet by increasing the atmospheric oxygen, pressure, and heat (and others later) by building machines that increase these numbers over time. As the numbers increase, you unlock new recipes to aid in survival and building bigger machines to increase the numbers faster. In order to build the machines you unlock, you must collect resources embedded in the ground all over the map. As you terraform, the planet changes and new areas can be explored.

It's multiplayer, the asset choice is great and fits the Subnautica nostalgia vibe, it has some great scenery in the late game once the planet has been terraformed, and did some cool things with automation (albeit limited). Visually, the game is very appealing and I loved building all those huge machines.

There's a lot of shared language in the genre of survival crafters, which comes with certain expectations about progression and how you interact with the world. Deviating from this is risky if you don't have a plan, and it's clear that Planet Crafter had the vision but not the plan to properly execute it.

In order for survival crafters to work, exploration must drive progression. The way this is typically accomplished is as follows: Motivation -> Exploration -> Discovery -> Progression. You see this in Minecraft, Subnautica, Raft, Abiotic Factor, etc. In Planet Crafter, progression and exploration are disconnected and there is no discovery. The tech tree tells you the next thing you have to build, you collect the resources to build it, and discovering new resources before you need them does literally nothing. In typical survival crafters, you move the tech tree forward by discovering new resources. Because of this issue, the exploration and progression feel entirely out of sync - exploration is unimpactful, and progression just happens in the background.

This lack of internal cohesion has another consequence: obstacles to exploration which would normally serve as motivation, instead become frustrations. For example: In Subnautica, your limited oxygen is what motivates you to explore because you naturally want to go deeper; as you do, you discover new resources and unlock items to solve that problem (Motivation -> Exploration -> Discovery -> Progression). In Planet Crafter, limited oxygen doesn't serve the same motivational purpose because no amount of exploration will solve it - you have no agency. The problem will solve itself when you happen to unlock a better oxygen tank, and until then exploring just sucks. Another example are the cave entrances blocked by ice or rocks; there's no motivation or discovery, you just have to wait until your terraforming meter gets high enough that the ice melts or you happen to unlock explosives to remove the rocks. In short, none of the obstacles presented in the game motivate exploration, and as a result simply become annoyances.

The main storyline is that you are a convict marooned on this planet, and your punishment is to terraform it before you can leave. There are a couple other side-stories, but they are ultimately inconsequential. For example you find the remains of an ancient civilization and read some messages left by them, but this barely affects the main story and ends up being rather underwhelming.

• There are phantom resources that can't be mined throughout the map.
  
• Non-host players become unable to deconstruct rooms at some point in the mid-game.
  
• The storage locker has its label on the front, meaning if you stack them to save space you can't use it.
  
• When using the teleporter you see an awful strobing effect that could be an issue for anyone with photosensitivity.
  
• So many players report being frustrated by moving the base to a location that ultimately gets flooded. Just tell the player what Y-value they should get above, it wouldn't hurt anything.
  
• Once the jetpack is unlocked, it becomes your primary mode of transportation, except that when inside a base you get caught on the upper lip of every. single. door frame.
  
• The jetpack only makes you hover a bit off the ground, you don't actually get to fly upward. This is strictly enforced, so if you jump off a cliff and start flying, you are forced downward faster than if you had just fallen normally - super weird. This also means that if you are high up and need to cross a gap, flying over the gap will make you shoot right down into it. The trick is to stop flying so you can manually jump over the gap... it's just so clucky I cannot believe it wasn't flagged in early access. You can also opt to look straight up while flying which makes you fall slowly, but then you can't see where you're going. It's a nightmare.
  
• You can only use unlocked items in the automation system. This means that if you've found a new item that isn't unlocked yet (or have an un-craftable item (like blueprint chips or terra tokens), you can't have any storage lockers request it. Also, once you do unlock new items, any containers which you set to "supply all" won't have it, so you have to go to every container and re-select "supply all" every time you unlock something.
  
• Exploring the crashed ships in the late-game is not fun, it's just a chore; the unintuitive maze-like structure is random, visually uniform, and uninteresting. Even then, the only reason you do it is to grind for terra tokens so the reward is barely worth it. We were so excited when we built the portal generator, only to realize that its sole purpose was to wander through more crashed ships. We never used it again.

I obviously don't expect to influence the development here, this is just a summary of what would need to change for the game to be worthwhile, in my opinion.

1. Move most of the unlockables into a tech tree that is unlocked exclusively via exploration and discovery. When you find a new ore, you unlock new tech that uses that ore. This makes progression driven directly by exploration. The terraforming numbers should only influence the planet's stage.
   
2. In the early/mid game, you need to give a player a better option than to carry around 6 oxygen canisters or the 6 ores you need for temporary habitats. You don't have to reinvent the wheel - once it starts to become feasible/necessary to build temporary habitats to go further, just give the player a path of least resistance: the Seamoth. Introduce a little rover that carries a nice hefty oxygen supply and extra inventory space. Make it faster than running, name it something cute, and the players will fall in love. Early game solved.
   
3. Now that you have a rover for long-distance travel, you can fix the jetpack so it isn't just an upgrade for your boots. Let the jetpack fly as high as you want, even if for a limited time - it doesn't allow the player to get anywhere they couldn't already by building stairs. You can even make it slower for horizontal motion because it's not meant for that. In fact, this also naturally solves the door-frame problem; because the jetpack no longer replaces your sprint button, the player isn't going to use it to move around indoors.
   
4. See the bugs and other issues mentioned in the last section.