Out There: Oceans of Time Reviews

I can't in good conscience recommend this. Maybe in a few months (or years, at this rate) when the big issues are ironed out, things will be better, but considering that this game was meant to release a year ago, it should be incredible by now. Good: -The ability to drag resources directly into the fuel, oxygen, or hull is the best quality of life improvement from the original game I could have asked for. -The increased interaction with other life is very enjoyable. The trading system is awesome (if a bit overpowered), and I like building a massive crew. Bad: -Expeditions suck, for many reasons, and other people have explained the main failures better than I can. Some of the less game-ruining ones, however, I'd like to discuss. For one, the mini-game to find anomalies is incredibly tedious, and adds nothing. Sweeping a planet for the 20th time isn't fun, it's just a waste of time. Also, what's the point of multiple anomalies per planet if you can only actually visit one? From a gameplay perspective, having to choose is interesting, but there is no in-game explanation for it, which just makes it frustrating. -It's easy. From someone who beat Omega Edition multiple times, it's *mind numbingly* easy. I understand that the difficulty was the biggest criticism of the first game, but a hard mode would be nice. Specifically, the fuel costs are nearly negligible, expeditions have basically no downsides, there are too many slots, and there is no longer any incentive to min-max. Out There Omega was, at its core, an inventory management game; this game has somehow managed to trivialize that aspect of it. Bugs: -Wormhole generators aren't very useful, entirely due to their map. You have almost no frame of reference: your goal pointers go away, your trail is gone, and it changes the way you've angled the camera. This cost me a game. -Sometimes, when you've finished an expedition or looked at an abandoned ship, the game thinks your cargo hold is open when it isn't. Clicking the button to close it does nothing, and exiting to the main menu and coming back is the only solution. -Expeditions cause ridiculously low frame-rates. The graphics option in the settings does nothing to alleviate this. -If you fly away from a planet you have discovered an anomaly on, but haven't visited, the anomaly disappears. I desperately wanted to like this game, and I honestly feel robbed. I expected much better considering the original Out There's quality.

If this was under 10 dollars, I would recommend it as a decent time waster. Right now though I can't recommend it. I liked the visuals and sounds. The concept looks interesting: Explore a universe, explore planets, harvest materials to survive and build things, find new ships and new party members. Sadly, the exploration is pretty much pointless since there is nothing unique to discover. Harvesting materials is either busywork so you can keep travelling or to build modules that only make travelling more efficient, which is moot since there is hardly any point to exploring. Exploring planets with your party is also repetitive since there is nothing really unique to discover. No cool items to find nor lore or secrets. You can discover new ships, which sounds great, but their only difference is the looks and how much space they have. The point to having more space is just to make things less tedious which feels unrewarding. The game play loop is basically repetitive maintenance to get materials and fuel so you can get to the next place so you can get materials and fuel etc. So, how is the story then? The premise is interesting, but the execution is extremely shallow. The characters act and talk like they are 12 years old and although the story introduces some cool concepts the way it unfolds feels immature and like I said: Shallow. There are multiple endings it seems, but the one I got felt very unrewarding without any choice in how it turns out (The judge ending) and I did not feel like doing the busywork to get the other ending(s) Final verdict: If you can get this game for a big discount and want something mindless to just keep clicking through then it's decent. For it's full price or until they release an expansion which greatly expands the game play I would say to skip this. Alternatives for this game would be games like Diluvion, Rebel Galaxy or Between the Stars.

I was a huge fan of the original Out There, for its moody atmosphere and depressive protagonist. This sequel is remarkably unchanged, given how many years have passed, but with all its surface maps it keeps the same mechanics and rather melancholy storytelling. Not for everybody I guess but in this era of games with too many damn features, it's nice to play something retro and yet rewarding :)

I'm completely fine with the monotonous gameplay because it evokes the same feeling I would expect when travelling through space. It's fine to not have too much action at once, and I think this game is an upgrade over the original where objectives are much more clear and the paths to them are more defined. What does not pass the bar for me is the amount of gamebreaking bugs there are in a game like this. Objectives in this game are broken to the point where you will lose a significant portion of your save data, and literally be unable to progress in the game. There are no backup saves, or ways to revert saves to help fix these issues when they arise, and the devs are terrible at responding to bugs and feedback. Their discord does not work to submit bug reports and the discussion thread is rarely looked at. I would not recommend this game on the basis of how unplayable it actually is, not because of the gameplay.

Oh my god what did they do? I was waiting for this game for so long. How can you release it in such a state? I love OT. I played the first one more than I should have. Refreshed the Steam page the 26th several times so I can buy and play the second one asap. Launched the game, graphical bugs. Quit. Relaunch, ships cargo is invisible. Quit. Relaunch the 3d models head is in his chest. Ignore, continue to play. It's still fun. Half an hour later cargo disappears again. If I hadn't love the mechanics of the game so much I would have returned it asap. 2 developers and 3 publishers and you still release a game so buggy? Did you only work on the extra content you are trying to sell? Deluxe skins and wallpapers. Really? You have added the "on planet" missions but they are as boring as it gets. You seriously need a better game designer and try to think less money more product. Why having 3d models if they are just going to stay put without moving. No one would have cared if you had nicely drawn still images instead. Devs and designers made the worst choices they could make for this game. I hope the devs wake up from their dream and start to support this game with bug fixes and new content updates. Like maybe a more sandbox way of playing the game? For me they had one of the most promising IPs in indie gaming now all they have a "mostly negative" game. Congratulations devs tap yourself on the shoulder, count the euros you earned through selling deluxe skins and start working on fixing this game you charge 18 euros for!

I don't want to give that game a negative review but... I got to say, the biggest new feature, the away missions and the related new moral resource kills it for me. That despite I really liked the predecessor and had this one on my wish list for a long time, me. These forced away missions turn a relaxing casual game into a pointless grind fest. The game got quite an update regarding the visuals and story animations. Also there are multiple languages included right from start, although the game contains a lot of text! I also found no bugs yet except for quite huge frame drop when you do away missions and don't use a good graphics card. The problem are the away missions themselves. You now have new resource called "morale", that goes down whenever you jump between star systems. You can only increase it by completing away missions and visit villages while doing so. That means, you are more or less forced to do these missions. On the other hand you can't do them whenever you like because there is a cooldown of two jumps per crew member. So you not only have to do them but also in a certain interval! Before you can start such a missions, you have to compelete a mini game that gets quickly annoying. The missions then turned out to be very time consuming for usually little rewards. In the first "Out There" game, you landed on a planed, talked to some aliens and maybe drilled for resources. Quick and simple. Now you walk arround like 20-30 minutes on a single planet, mostly because you can only move like 4-5 tiles per turn, no auto-walk possible to already explored areas. You also have to do some micro management and evade dangerous tiles by walking longer ways arround. That has probably to do with the system they had in place during development, where you could only stay on a planet for a certain time so you had to choose whether to take the risk or not. Either way, I can't get into these missions, they just take too long for too little reward and also get boring quickly. There should be a an option to auto-resolve these, like it is with any other event in the game. Probably to somewhat offset the annoyance that away missions are, you can now save manually in some star systems. I actually had no problem to lose in the old game without being able to load some save. But there are run took also only like 2-4 hours, if it went really good, so if you bascially complete the game, in average it was more like 30 minutes to an hour if you screw up. Here most of my playtime are away missions with very little overall progress.

You complete the story line in about 4 hours. Then, you are left with the choice to either continue to do the same repetitive stuff you did for those 4 hours from a save to maybe see a different outcome (depending on when your save was), or restart to complete the story line in a different way doing the same repetitive stuff for another 4 hours. The game is just so narrow in scope and depth.

Game doesn't have save on quit feature. You quit the game - you lose ALL your grindy repetitive progress. To save the game you have to find a rare spawn, which you find roughly every 30 minutes - 1 hour. So yeah. Something happens, you get a phonecall, or you gotta close the computer - tough luck bud, lose hours of gameplay. More points - Game is bugged. Questlines dont progress 100% of the time, forcing complete game restart. Like, start new game kind of restart. Game has visual glitches which require you to quit to title to fix - but hey, if you didint save your game, you lose all your progress! Morale is bugged. Small point, but if your morale drops low, your crew leave you. There is a point in the game where you have to sacrifice your crewman, giving you a permanent -2 malus per turn. No matter what you do, that -2 will continue to tick. Even if you have +5 or +10 bonus per turn - dont matter. Its bugged, goes staight to zero, you lose all your crew. game is repetitive as hell. Fly, click, collect resourse. Repeat. Build ship modules that let you fly, click, collect further, faster, harder. Thats literally the entire game, the entire 99% of gameplay is exactly that. Every once in a while you get to send your crew on expeditions (hey, if you didnt get morale bug and still have a crew, that is). Expedition is running across the map and clicking a button. More interesting, but after 2-3 hours of game, all expedition events and permutations you have seen, all 6-7 map types you have seen, and it becomes another grind. Would I reccomend this? Lol no. And not because of money. But because this is your life, and those hours you spend mindlessly flying from planet to planet, you will never get back. Go spend time with your girlfriend. Go watch a movie. Work out. Stare at paint drying on the wall. ANYTHING is more fun then...this.

so i played the beta or demo or whatever it was and they had a mechanic where by exploration was risky and challenging because you would run out of "energy" while exploring, this was over tuned in the beta and made the game very punishing/un-fun. they have decided to remove the "energy for exploration" mechanic entirely. which aside from removing an aspect of what made the process tense and risk/reward it has also left the game feeling hollow as a significant part of the character abilities and items are based around making the process of exploration more efficient which felt rewarding when it mattered but just pointless now that they don't? the strange thing is that lets say they changed the mechanic to something as simple as running out of energy results in your ship collecting you automatically (i.e you can no longer explore, this could mean you fail the main objective of said exploration) then it would by all accounts make the game design around this process of rewarding players with better exploration character buffs/items still valid. if i had to guess i would say they backed out of their original vision for the game in wake of many complaints about a system that needed work rather than removing. which is a shame. Trouble is the game-play loop of exploring and levelling up crew really dose feel gutted without that distinct need for a challenge to overcome. right now exploration is really more of a click and point adventure rather than the tense decision making process it used to be. then again if i had publishers/players protesting about a core mechanic then i too would feel very tempted to just remove it for the initial sales. hopefully they will add this component back in as an "option" sort of the difference between story mode and normal for those of us that like are rouge-likes punishing.

short version: original OT's resource grinding is a bad centerpiece for a longer roguelike space exploration/adventure game. long version: it pains me to not be able to recommend this. I love the original game (65 hrs on it & more to come) & waited patiently for this, but I don't think what they did here works. what makes me play the original is that's it's short, unforgiving, mysterious, and to the point (get home) and I love the art style & music. this game is easier, has expanded gameplay mechanics which are.. ok, neither good or bad, but make things take longer. since the game takes longer, it's more frustrating when bad luck wipes you out (although there are save points now in white dwarf systems). things I like: the music's great, being able to finally take hydrogen out of the scoop & put it directly into the engine is great, and the greenhouse mechanics are kind of cool. things I don't like: dropping the original's comic book style, the morale system is an unnecessary chore because the characters are void of personality, the character writing is really bad (apparently this game's dialog was written by a professional screenwriter, but you wouldn't know it), the character models are fugly, the planet models don't look near as cool or varied as they did in OT, planetary exploration is repetitive, the labyrinthine star path you have to follow feels arbitrary, the story is generic space opera stuff... but the core of this is still a resource grinding game so there's little narrative depth (not w/these characters, anyway) or a conflict (since combat isn't a feature). the original game is about getting home & grinding resources because you HAVE to, this game is about saving humanity (or something) & exploring, but with no straightforward objective & expecting you to enjoy grinding resources & taking care of your unlikable crew for the fun of it. I don't know who this is going to appeal to. I think the hardcore fans of Out There are going to be disappointed at the generic new look & all the shoehorned-in time wasting mechanics. And I think anyone new to it looking for a space roguelike are going to find it strangely lacking in depth for an asking price of >20$. Pick it up on sale, I guess. that's all I've got.