Hydroneer Reviews

The game became boring for me quite quite quickly. Once I automated my first dig site, I was making so much money that there was no reason to move to another location. I built a nice house, refined my production chains with some extra logic, amassed millions in wealth, and that was it... technically finished Hydroneer in about seven hours without ever leaving Ember Cradle (Starter dig site). There are only five types of ore and four types of gems, and the crafting system is quite limited. Ores can be smelted into bars, gems can be cut, and the only real use for them is creating items that serve no purpose beyond being sold. Blacksmithing is shallow, offering just a handful of craftable items, such as daggers, axes, swords, rings, and necklaces. The only variation comes from changing gem colours or metal types, which doesn’t add much depth. Farming follows the similarish formula... buy seeds, water them, harvest the crops, automate the processing and sorting of these crops, and sell the produce. It’s essentially the same as mining, just without the need to dig for resources. Quests are equally uninspired. For an example, an NPC might request a 15.5-weight emerald gem, so you dig up some emeralds, cut them, compress them into a single gem of the required weight, and hand it over. There’s no real challenge or variety, just repetitive fetch tasks. Overall, the game lacks complexity and meaningful challenges. There are no intricate recipes or mechanics to build a production line around... just repeat what you did at the last dig site and watch the money roll in. I would have refunded the game, but I only realised its lack of depth after the two-hour refund window had passed. This is not a negative review necessarily, but if you're an experienced automation game player who enjoys titles like Factorio or Satisfactory and looking for a challenge, you'll likely find it underwhelming. I fall into that category, so for me, it's a thumbs down. I would only recommend Hydroneer to someone who has never played an automation game before or prefers a more casual, low-complexity experience. If that sounds like you, it might be worth trying.

this game is built so well and i have played it for a long time you also have a relly easy to use mods that just make it more fun

to good to be true love the game got it 3 days ago and i have 70 hours already has my approval

The game is fun and I can see potential. currently it looks and feels very finicky and sometimes frustrating. hats off to you guys as there are no bugs encountered in my gameplay, but sooo many missing quality of life features. I hope this is not the final version and it is still WIP, if so, can't wait to see what features get added!

it fun not the game to play ten mins before u have to go to bed because it takes time to get money over all very fun 10/10 game

Really bad controls, nausea-inducing first few hours staring at the ground and repeating a tedious 14 step process to mine for 1 iron. If you figure out how to pull up the tutorial wiki (game doesn't tell you), and follow it you'll find one of the first steps it tells you is actually impossible as the recipe doesn't exist. Apparently the "multiplayer" is only done through Steam Remote Play with split screen and controller. Can't imagine how much worse it would be trying to use a controller. Unfortunate because the idea sounded so promising. There are much better digging and building games out there.

49 hours into the game and loving it to come back to find my world is completely wiped, went looking online to find help and found out this has been an issue for over 2 years now and is still not fixed to the point the discord literally has a section for shared save files to get you restarted somewhat after your save is corrupt and unrecoverable... Pretty poor from the dev's to bring out dlc before fixing this issue. No point playing when you know every time you leave it may not work when you return, very disapointed will never support this company again!

Worst multiplayer functionality I have seen in a game since N64 split screen games. Even with 2 PC's it is split screen and only 1 player can use keyboard. Other has to use game controller. Multiplayer is absolute garbage. Single player the gam is fun but super buggy and that has never been addressed. It feels like a kickstart game that got abandoned the day it went live.. but amazingly it still gets updates yet nothing gets fixed... This was a 5 star game for first several hours of play as it was assumed that it would get better over time.....

I think its a very good game because you can use your fantasy to make sort of a factory and when you start its a easy to understatement game and you can even play with a controller so overall this is a very good game for its price

I do not agree with the devs in any way, shape, or form regarding their decision to open this game up to Steam Workshop and then immediately turn around and ban people from getting achievements for using said Workshop. On top of that, in the past year, the devs have been made aware of multiple people having issues where their save gets blocked from earning achievements even though they have never used any mods or creative mode and their response, instead of seeing there is a bug and helping their customer fix the issue, turns around and tells them 'tough crap, start over'. Wow! Awesome view there dev! I'll be taking my money back and putting this dev on my blacklist. Thanks!