Hydroneer Reviews

Honestly not the worst game I've ever played, but its pretty darn close. The setup is janky, the movement it horrid, being able to only hold one item at a time while trying to build a massive infrastructure to increase profits and handle commissions makes this game a unique kind of pain. The world seems cool and the technology is interesting, but this game needs some serious quality of life improvements that even the DLC didn't fix. I got this game because of the video Crowmeda did on the base game and the DLC, but the execution of this game is so rough that it feels like the game itself is fighting against your success. From the lack of inventory, constant item clipping, terrible terrain management tools, completely jank progression setup, and the worst part by far has to be the currency that you have to PHYSICALLY HOLD and carry around with you while trying to buy items instead of simply having them in your inventory or a wallet, instead you have to constantly keep track of your currency and ensure you don't leave it somewhere which only gets worse by the fact there are TWO types of currency. I got this game because Crowmeda looked like he had fun even with the struggles, but this game feels impossible unless you're going to dedicate at LEAST 20 hours into just getting a base FUNCTIONING not even well adapted, just functioning to a degree where you can try to accomplish side objectives without babysitting your base every waking minute to ensure that something doesn't break or that ore isn't spilling out all over the ground because you can only pick up one item at a time and if by some unholy miracle you miss a bucket because there's no other way to store ore and gems in this game you have to pick up EACH peice of ore ONE AT A TIME! Like come on, I've seen games half the price manage resource harvesting better than this.

If you haven't accidentally filled your entire underground base with dirt and crashed the game multiple times trying to clean it up, then you aren't playing it right.

Devs Abandoned the Game Claiming it was "Finished" Even When Multiplayer is STILL not in the game, and Passing some bs about it not being possible... Their New Game coming looks good, but I am shocked they're just ditching this game after coming back and releasing a DLC...

I spent hours building up a small processing chain, learning how to use pipes and conveyors and hand-placing every last detail. Then, when I upgraded from tier one dirt processors to tier two I discovered my moron of an engineer put the water inlet (for power) on a completely different side of the machine: hard requiring that I redo my piping just to upgrade. No. Every component has to be hand-placed just to get the most basic of setups off the ground. I am not ripping up my build and redoing it for the sheer hell of it. It's busy work in a game that already expects you'll be making multiple hand-placed builds across different plots of land to access higher quality materials. On a different note, I would have liked an option to disable the day-night cycle and have permanent daytime so I could consistently admire the machines working in clear, bright light.

This review is on the cusp of being a yes, but it surprises me that this game isn't marked as early access. There are so many little things that are such a pain. Dropping items into the correct location (make sure to change the drop crosshair color) shouldn't be this annoying. It might collide with something above it, or it might bounce off something in your container. crouching probably won't help you either way. Terrain manipulation sucks unless you're using squares like Minecraft. you're not cutting a smooth tunnel. Jumping out of the pits you make is a miserable experience. One part of the map has a lift, but there's no fall damage. There's no point in waiting. you can drive through the lake between the first plot and the main town because the water is ankle deep no matter where you go. I appreciate the gameplay loop, and will put more hours into it but there's something disapointing about the level of polish. It strikes me as a bit unfinished.

I honestly don't understand why I can't just drop this bucket of ore into the furnace directly, Why do I need to stand above the furnace, hover the bucket in the right spot and then *hope* it goes in? I also don't understand why the start is so insanely slow. Lemme just turn around back and forth for an entire hour so I can afford to turn around back and forth for another hour so I can afford my first automation machine which will suddenly quintuple my output without any input on my part. Imagine if Satisfactory just started with hand mining every rock for an hour but you have to deposit every chunk of metal you got in between each swing.

Its fun until I accidentally spill 200000000 iron and crash my entire PC. Would do it again though.

Hydroneer is basically a factory sandbox game combined with elements of idler/clicker games. Incremental games, I guess. Compared to fullblown incremental games, you might not find it that satisfying. Compared to other factory-type games, it's sort of basic and you might not find it that satisying either. When I wrote it out like that, I'm wondering to myself, "Why did I spend 30 hours playing it?" which means a ramble is coming in. I mean, first off, it has splitscreen coop. I figured I'd coax my wife (and best gaming buddy) to play it as well and it would stream so very well, because if I was doing something dull maybe the other player wasn't. But also basically it gets me right in the engineering gland. I have found myself spending a few hours at a time trying to work out how I'd set up a processing line on the surface, while getting a bunch of drills deep in a mine, and how I could do this tidily. (Currently: By digging a careful diagonal trench through the earth which I can then tidily cover up.) So that leads me to somethign this game does differently: It has diggable terrain. Techtonica does too, but you can swiftly see the digging matrix, if you will. This game lets you dig out essentially random balls and blobs and swiftly make really lumpy, messy tunnels that look like a maniac with a pickaxe went crazy. Though it also gives you tools to smooth out the digs and make them polished again, which is way more satisfying than just having a pre-polished cube hacked out of the earth. And if you get bored with that, there's also a digging machine you can purchase that you can drive and dig with. It requires a very deft hand to use well, and maybe presurfacing tunnel floors so you don't overdo it. So it's sort of the reverse case of too much power in the hands of a player. It's possible to, with a lot of patience, gradually undo digs, but far better to not mess it up in the first place. Not to say this isn't without quirks, granted, some of which I'm... uncertain about. Overall game direction, and the inherent clumsiness of object manipulation. The clumsiness of the game is something that will make or break you, frankly, and I should have discussed that at the top of this review. But, aha, I didn't. I'm not getting paid for this, so there's no editor. But what makes the game clumsy is that the player can only hold one item at a time, regardless of its size. Carrying a one-tonne drill? Want to carry that shovel? Put the drill down. Done with the shovel and need a pickaxe? Put down the shovel. Saw a little loose nubbin of dirt the size of a marble? Put down the pickaxe so you can pick up the dirt. There are a few conveniences to make this somewhat less onerous - a toolrack exists that you can load up with four tools, and you just haul the rack around, set it down, and pull out the tool you need. Not great, but less onerous than running back and forth for your tools. There's also a few transport vehicles (a cart, a truck) you can get hold of right away, which you can load with a number of items and transport them all about as required. Working around this clumsiness is part of the game, and I usually solve this with my weird tractor-pickup hybrid, pulling it up as close to the workspace/shop/quest-client as I can, so I can pull things in and out of what's become a rolling inventory. I can live without a massive inventory/toolbar the way most games tackle this, but for heaven's sake I must surely have pockets. Let me keep my money in there! The game's direction is another issue. Basically, you start off penniless with just enough basic tools to get you to process a bit of minerals, and those bits of ore can be sold for money. Money will let you start buying tools to improve the processs, and then automate the process, and after a few hours it's more-or-less entirely automatic and your gameplay revolves more around expanding your workspace, a bit of maintenance, and getting more machinery to dig things up faster... and "quests". There's a bit of blacksmithing in the game. It's relatively basic. People will request a bit of jewelry, a melee weapon or maybe an ingot, and will offer you payment in "tokens". Those tokens are needed to buy tier 3 equipment. I forgot to mention there's tiers of dirt; as one digs deeper, superior tech is needed to do anything with it. The first two tiers can be purchased with regular cash (selling your mining leftovers will soon earn a ridiculous amount of money), but the third is had only with tokens, and that requires quests. What makes the quests annoying (ish) is they'll ask for, say, a sword to be made of at least 150 "weight" of gold, or whatever, and to keep the game's item count down it's optimal to keep each resource as a single, giant lump. The only manipulations possible are "cut in half" and "merge", so you wind up cutting a 62k "weight" ingot down to 123.5 or something, and then casting about for even tinier slivers to try to get up to (or past) 150, and then casting that random collection of slivers together to get the singular ingot you need. (To be fair, later on you can afford to be like, "Aaah, 242 is close enough. Let's go!" and the quest-giver is happy either way.) There might well be some quest chain, but the second step requires a tier 3 resource I've only just started to harvest at 30-something hours. Because I wasn't rushing it and just goofing off, having fun. So I can't speak to that. And with all that out of the way, there's apparently farming. Which can be pretty awfully clumsy. And it starts you off with a little trowel, dripping water onto a singular seedling out of a singular bucket. And, in time, you'll probably have it all automated and harvesting great fields of it using a combine harvester I've been making googly eyes at for awhile now. Anyway. All I can say is that this review feels really disorganized, but I've enjoyed the game as I've been using it mostly as a cornball sandbox and just making things a bit harder on myself than I strictly needed to be. Plus maybe I guess I like driving steamrollers around or whatever. For the price I paid I certainly can't complain one bit. We may eventually stream this thing, if I can convince the missus we should do it. Who knows? But we're chatting and affable 99% of the time, so if you got to the bottom of this review, you're exactly the sort of people that'd get on with our style. http://www.twitch.tv/fdejeuner. Hope to see you there. (And thumbs up for this game, all things considered.)

I like the game idea. Really. I played it in early access, and more since release. But it still feels so basic and unfinished. I get the idea behind no inventory and doing all by hand - but it gets tedious quite quickly. 5% of the game are the real automation and being happy about ressources collecting in your smelters. 95% is running around picking up one item by one item with your hand to transport it and put it down. Buying stuff in bulk? You need 40 pipes to get the first part of automation going? Good luck carrying each pipe individually to the checkout, and then to the truck. You could use the cart, but this only makes it marginally faster. It has many systems, but none of them are truly thought out - and new tiers feel like they change their inputs on purpose to mess up your entire automation you build so you have to rebuild everything one - by - one. And every item you don't need anymore? Is somewhere still on the ground in your base And true automation like control over bar sizes, how much is being smelted is locked behind logic circuits that 99% of players won't even wrap their head around to understand to get it to work. It feels like the entire world was designed to waste your time, so you won't notice that there isn't much else to the actual gameplay - like the crafting for new tiers being inside a mountain that needs an elevator to get down, and you need bars to craft them, but only after you got your money down there to buy the recipe. And then you craft... every drill... one... by... one...

The initial grind to automation is very fun, and addicting. Then once you have tier one automation you almost NEED to upgrade to tier two. Unfortunately once you have reached that point the game kinda loses all meaning. sure you can buy new, bigger plots, just to do the exact same thing for not much benefit as there is only so much you can buy. I got to tier two automation with two drills on the starting plot and was able to easily buy every thing there was to buy. I personally had no reason to even buy new plots. its good fun for a day or two, but after that unless the gameplay REALLY resonates with you its not gonna be fun after the point i've detailed.