I really enjoyed this one. It's not perfect, it can get annoying, but it's also such an obvious labor of love with many charming little design ideas and quirks that I couldn't help but love my almost 100 hours with it.

The big thing is how you interact with the game and the world. Astroneer has a quirky and unique interface where you interact with the world with your character's backpack in a way that's going to sound very complicated in text, but is actually quite elegant and clever in practice. On a controller, you can move around and pan the camera as you'd expect with the sticks, but you can also press a button to not only bring up your backpack, but also summon a cursor for precise controls, which allows you to more exactly interact with mineral stacks you've mined or machines you've built. You can bring up the backpack to enter precise mode, grab something, click down the backpack and get a clearer view as you move the item you picked up. You also have a terrain deformation tool, which is reqally just a videogamey magic mining tool that lets you erase the world voxel by voxel and if said rock voxel happens to have malachite in it, you'll obtain some you can smelt into copper. The tool also has elegant and ismple mechanics for not only destroying the world, but building it so that you can shape the ground as you please.

Related to the controls is that everything has a little plug on the back, even natural resources you find in the wild, which clearly communicates that you can stick tihs red plug into red holes in your various machines and storage units. The controls and the visual communication just click together, even if they might take a moment to figure out, and the elegance and intuitiveness really doesn't translate well to text, I realize, but in practice it's often a joy to control and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything quite like it.

The game itself bills itself a survival game, but really, you don't have to care about eating and sleeping and you'll only die from lack of oxygen (and a few pesky plants that can attack you), so I consider it to be more of a My First Factory Game. Like Factorio for Dummies, such as myself, who have never played one of the more hardcore factory sims. You start by mining composite and resin, with which you build simple things that allow you to build more advanced things so you can mine more advanced ore and so on. The game's got a pretty steady and obvious progression curve that feels so good that I didn't mind completely rebuilding my base with my new gear a whole three times. At first, my base was chaos with just whatever I had just unlocked placed down, and then I rebuilt it with some flattened ground as I had both unlocked new machines and figured out how to sculpt the world a little better. Then I managed to unlock the large shredder, destroyed everything with that and erbuilt it with some endgame machines and platforms (which are used for all of your devices as the platforms have some mild automation to them, meaning things like how a smelter will automatically grab any unsmelted ore that's placed on the same platform as the smelter). I never do that, and it's a testament to how much I like the game that I not only rebuilt my home base three times, but I also built some fairly respectable bases on about half of the seven planets (while also not really feeling like adding another 100+ hours building full bases on all of them).

That's really about all there is to say about this game, honestly. It's basically No Man's Sky, except with a much more reasonable ambition level for a small team and that works much better out of the box with less crashing and other issues. Instead of the entire universe, Astroneer "only" offers a solar system with I think five planets and two moons you can visit, and that all have different ore and such so that you have to fly between various places to expand your home base and for example set up an iron mining operation on the glacial planet so that you can bring huge stacks of iron back to home base and build more advanced things with it (or smelt it into steel to build even more advanced stuff). It's a hardcore tinkering game where there's always something to do, tons of running back and forth to fill up on aluminium while your soil centrifuge creates resin that you can use to build even more things. And then you remember that you also had to jet to that moon real quick to further effectivize your mining operations there, which ends up with you accidently spending two hours there moving things around, driving your various mining vehicles and just joyriding on the hoverboard because that thing is tons of fun. It's basically a nightmare for ADHD players, but in a mostly good way, because I found myself being sidetracked constantly, and needing to bust out a notepad to remember what I needed to bring to where, but I was always entertained by the mechanics, the visuals and the atmosphere.

There are negatives, of course. Towards the end of the game, I was fantasizing and wishing for a button to "dump all backpack minerals into smelter" or some such, since even though the control scheme is unique and charming, it gets real old to manually move 50 stacks of malachite or whatever. I'm sure this is much better on a mouse, because the game offered little to no sensitivity options for people who had gotten used the controls but wanetd fasted movement. I think, maybe, that one of the mouse sensitivity controls (since even the PS5 version of this game offers mouse and keyboard options) slightly sped up the cursor even with a controller, but that's only slightly and the cursor ends up feeling painfully slow once you're 50 hours in. I also thought that the skill tree and the 3D printer menus really needed a overhaul, as they're very horizontal and it's quite difficult to get an overview of what's available. IF you want to use the small printer to make a medium storage silo, but you've previously used it to create a drill for your rover, the best move is to put the required materials in your backpack, interact with the printer and then just hold right on the d-pad until you notice the "required resources" box light up (because you have the materials in your pack). I would've preferred a regular, vertical list or a box full of icons or something, because it gets real messy when you have everything unlocked and the creation of things isn't anywhere near as elegant as the interaction with them is.

The biggest negative, however, is that you can't truly automate your assembly line. You can move materials around automatically, but in a way that's kind of cumbersome, and I decided that no way was I going to try to build an automated line for the chemical, uh, thing that converts for example graphite and hydrogen (or whatever gas it was) into graphene. That means you have to automatically feed multiple ores AND gasses and setting that up is possible, but also a major pain. The huge issue, however, is that you can't infinitely mine ore and I think it's a big mistake that the ore extractor doesn't simply cheat. By that, I mean that you have to actually place the extractor on a real deposit, which runs out, so you have to move it when it's done, and I think the extractor should've just magically created ore out of thin air, as in you can place one in your base, tell it to create malachite and now you have the possibility for true automation of the whole line. Instead, you have to move the enormous and cumbersome extractor around with your buggy, fill up huge resource containers and then automate from the container on. There never is an unlock that lets you mass mine huge amounts at the same time, and there never is one that lets you automatically collect ore either, which feels like a bummer ending to a very engaging and entertaining game. I wanted to end as a space mining god, but instead the game just kind of fizzles out as you realize that automation is either impossible or a huge pain to set up and even though I enjoyed the game enough to completely rebuild three times, I wasn't into the idea of doing it a fourth time.

Speaking of endings, there is a story that emerges as you play, and I have to spoil it to tell you how bad and disappointing it is. So stop reading if you don't want spoilers! You see, the plot, as it is revealed in an endgame quest that was patched into the game in one of its many updates, is... "It was all a dream." Yes, the universally most-hated ending in any story is the ending here. Technically, they tell you that you've been playing a simulation, but really, that's just the scifi nerd verison of "it was all a dream" and it sucks. So everything I did was for nothing? It was all just make-believe as my consciousness lives in a simulated solar system? Why would you write that? Thankfully, the plot is a very minimal part of this game and it's really a wonderful and entertaining busywork game.

In short, I really recommend this game to anyone who thinks it looks interesting and I might even come back to this game in a year and see what major updates its had, as it's still getting content and new features even after all this time. I realized the other day that the game has been out, including early access, for over seven years, so it's nice to see that it's still being updated. I had quests added to the game as I played in march of 2024. If you're even reading this review, you should probably just go buy it! It's so cheap on sale and I think you'll have so much fun. I did!