It’s a lonely, cold universe out there on your own. Now I know how the Curiosity rover felt singing Happy Birthday to itself on Mars back in 2013. When I played alone, I realised what many sci-fi writers have realised space is a lonely place when it’s just you.
When you’re playing with a friend you can easily divide and conquer on the objectives you’re forging ahead with while taking the time to explore the planet’s surface. Much like other exploration and survival titles out and about in the gaming landscape, exploring Astroneer is far more entertaining with a friend than it is alone. In space no one can hear you scream – except Nick, he’s there too The game does a great job of making you feel like you’re exploring another planet and I’ll give it a gold star for making each world feel like you’re somewhere totally alien.
There’s no mistaking that these are alien planets.īy contrast, the sound design is pretty minimal, with snippets of exploratory orchestral music that swells as your travel around the planet, and the dank echoes of dark caves and rustling alien foliage. From blue, red or orange surfaces to tall bobble-headed trees that look straight out of a Dr Seuss book. It’s this weird mix of voxel-geometry with bright and colourful landscapes.
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This means you’re always planning your next move and working out how to keep the base growing while extending your reach into the unknown. These give you oxygen and power when you’re within range. You do this by laying tethers into the ground, essentially little markers that connect to one another in a web. You can also use it to build material and grow your own bridges out of the earth, or try and write your name in the sky like I did.Īs you get out and explore, you’ll need to venture further and further away from your base to find new materials and gather new objects to research. You suck massive chunks out of the map and collect resources in your backpack to take back to your base. You have a suction gun that kind of acts like a big vacuum and looks like a leaf blower. Like the early Red Faction games, everything is actively destructible in Astroneer. You do this through a pretty incredible destructible environment that you’ll have to dig through to harvest all of your resources. Even though some planets have different levels of resources and new sets of materials available to collect. Eventually, you will be able to leave your first planet and explore others, but the loop remains the same. It’s that classic survival game loop get stuff to stay alive, then get more stuff to unlock more stuff so you can… get more stuff.
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At first, you’ll need to explore the world around you, find out what local resources are available and set about building some means of production to upgrade and get more stuff. The goal of the game is pretty open-ended.
The first base building gives you some oxygen and electricity to get you going at the start, but pretty soon you’ll need to start expanding, upgrading and exploring. When you first land on a starting planet, it’ll just be you, a landing pad and your handy terraforming tool. That’s a good thing, and a bad thing depending on who you are.Īstroneer is a survival sandbox, with seven randomly generated planets to explore, massive networks of underground tunnels and a lot of buildings to build, vehicles to drive and research to… well… research. I’d dig a network of tunnels that would drop random passers-by into the planet core.Īstroneer is a bit of a blank canvas, so what you do is up to you and it’s mostly only limited by your imagination.
I’d build a base and call it Castle Nathanael. Astroneer asks the question, “If you were stranded on an alien planet with no objective, what would you do?” I’d build myself a vehicle and do doughnuts on the space-dunes.
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