Nova Lands Reviews

You can get a dog. Game of the year.

An excellent factory sim for the Steam Deck.

Forager but full on automation + space content

Really fun overall. Reminds me of stardew valley mixed with satisfactory.

Other negative reviews say the same thing, it's good but the end leaves for improvement. You automate entire islands, ensure production is at it's highest capability. All for, a health upgrade that I don't need? Could be insanely good, but right now it's just not bad

Game is extremely fun , if you want to play a simulator game with chill life . This game is good for you. Easy to understand and discover!

This is a really fun game overall. The combat is super simple, but still quite fun with three boss fights. It definitely takes a huge back seat to the crafting, though. 90% of the crafting is satisfying, making each new thing reached feel like progression. It's only at the very end that crafting slows down to almost a halt and starts getting tedious. I wish there were a few more QoL things like being able to set priorities for certain actions or putting a limit on the amount of resources that are passed from island to island. Also, the very end game feels like it lacks a few items to make it really feel complete. I would have loved to get a central item system you can deposit items into and which you can access from any island, like the ME system in Minecraft. The art is super beautiful, I have to highlight how much I enjoyed watching the little animations and that I loved the way the different crafting stations look. I wish for more automation / adventure games like this!

Nova Lands is an ambitious blend of survival, exploration, and colony-building set against the backdrop of a mysterious alien planet. Developed by Mindstorm Studios, the game challenges players to not only endure harsh environmental conditions but also to establish and expand a thriving outpost amid the unknown dangers of Nova Lands. With its deep crafting systems, dynamic ecosystems, and a strong emphasis on player choice, the game offers a richly immersive experience that demands strategic thinking and adaptability. The gameplay in Nova Lands revolves around resource management, base construction, and exploration. From the moment you crash-land on this uncharted planet, survival becomes your primary objective—gathering food, water, and materials while fending off hostile wildlife and unpredictable weather. What sets the game apart is its attention to ecological detail; flora and fauna interact in complex ways, and the environment itself can influence your settlement’s success. Seasons change, weather can shift rapidly, and natural disasters may strike, forcing players to plan ahead and design their bases to withstand a variety of threats. This dynamic world feels alive, making each decision—from where to build to what crops to cultivate—carry real weight. Building and expanding your colony is a satisfying and intricate process. The game offers a wide array of construction options, from simple shelters to advanced laboratories and defensive structures. Each building serves a clear purpose, contributing to the survival and growth of your community. Crafting is detailed and multifaceted; players must research technologies, gather increasingly rare resources, and manage their workforce efficiently. The management aspect extends to your colonists themselves, each with unique skills and needs that affect productivity and morale. Balancing these human factors alongside environmental challenges adds a compelling layer of depth. Exploration is another cornerstone of Nova Lands. The planet is vast and filled with secrets—ancient ruins, alien artifacts, and hidden caves beckon the curious, promising valuable rewards but also dangers. Venturing beyond your base requires preparation and caution, as hostile creatures roam the wilderness and hazards like toxic swamps or volatile gas pockets pose constant threats. Exploration not only yields resources but also expands the story and lore, gradually revealing the mysteries behind the planet’s origin and the fate of previous expeditions. This narrative undercurrent enriches the gameplay and motivates players to push further into the unknown. Visually, Nova Lands strikes a balance between realism and stylized art. The environments are lush and varied, ranging from dense forests to arid deserts, each biome rendered with attention to detail. Day-night cycles and weather effects are well-executed, enhancing immersion and adding tactical considerations. Character models and animations are functional, with a focus on clarity over complexity, ensuring that gameplay remains smooth even during large-scale colony management. The UI is comprehensive but well-organized, presenting complex information without overwhelming the player. The sound design complements the visual experience with ambient noises that capture the alien world’s atmosphere—wind rustling through strange foliage, distant animal calls, and the hum of machinery in your base. The soundtrack is subtle yet effective, underscoring moments of tension and discovery without becoming intrusive. Audio cues also play a vital role in alerting players to threats or events, such as approaching storms or enemy attacks, which is crucial given the game’s survival focus. One of the challenges of Nova Lands is its steep learning curve and the density of its systems. New players might find the early game daunting as they navigate resource scarcity, complex crafting trees, and survival mechanics simultaneously. However, the game rewards patience and experimentation, with a well-paced progression system that gradually introduces new mechanics and technologies. Occasional bugs and balance issues can arise, but the developers have shown commitment to patching and improving the experience through updates. Overall, Nova Lands is a compelling survival and colony simulator that delivers a richly detailed, challenging, and rewarding experience. It shines in its integration of environmental storytelling, resource management, and base-building, offering players a chance to carve out a foothold in a hostile alien world. For fans of survival games who appreciate strategic depth and exploration, Nova Lands provides countless hours of engaging gameplay, where every decision can mean the difference between thriving and perishing on a strange, beautiful planet. Rating: 8/10

tl;dr: forager if it was an automation game. i would overall recommend it but i do think you should know what you're getting into. this is an automation game without basic automation qol and arbitrary bottlenecks. the early and midgame was really good but as you get into the lategame problems become more apparent. the rest of this review will be highlighting my frustrations with the game but the short version of it is i had fun but man this game is so flawed and i don't think i'd recommend it to people particularly “acoustic” about games like these. but even after all of these criticisms i would still recommend it to a more general audience because it's fun despite those grievances. things take ages to craft in the lategame and endgame. it is also hard to get ratios of items to craft right for more complex stuff because different inputs have different crafting times so it's not all about lining up the resource count for each item in the chain but the time it takes to craft them as well, which is practically impossible when endgame items have 20 steps to make them. lubricant is the "fix" to this as it speeds up machines but lubricant itself is less of a cool power up you add to machines to speed them up and more of a necessary resource if you don't plan to play this game like you’re watching paint dry. to put it into perspective regular lubricant takes 72 seconds to make and gives a 3x speed bonus. super lubricant takes 216 seconds to make and gives a 4x speed bonus. ultra lubricant takes 1152 seconds to make and gives a 16x speed bonus. many endgame items take 2304 seconds (over half an hour!!) to make one so you see why lubricant is really just another input good disguised as a "buff". not to mention ultra lubricant is basically the last item you will make in the game, it is the most endgame of endgame items and i stopped playing before i made one as the game bugged out and just started making my items disappear for no reason (in a system that makes 10 quantum computers, 6 neutron cores which require 1 quantum computer each, and 2 black holes which require 3 neutron cores each, how do i consistently end up with no spare quantum computers and sometimes not even enough neutron cores to make 2 blackholes??? the game will randomly make 3-4 quantum computers or 1-2 neutron cores disappear into thin air, and there is literally no other machine or system using any of these goods so i know the logistic bots aren’t just taking them somewhere else) one of the most annoying things in the game are the bots. first of all they are arbitrarily capped at a limit of 5 per island. especially in the early and midgame this is a big problem because you have to use a lot of collector bots and maybe some fighting bots and there aren't enough logistic bots to handle the items. this is less of a problem later on as you unlock buildings which can do the job of collector bots (first advanced farms in the midgame and then drillers in the lategame) but even then there is the second issue, bots are dumb. collector bots can only gather one specific resource which makes the earlygame a pain but even when you phase them out logistic bots aren't any better. they can only carry 1 item, so they can get easily overwhelmed especially when you arrive at the packaging stage where you have to package hundreds of items into one item. you can mitigate this by using drones as much as possible but drones have their limits too as they can not deliver directly to machines, only to chests, which then have to be picked up by logistic bots. the game gives you magnets to deal with this issue but problem number 1 it’s endgame stuff and packaging is between midgame and lategame and problem number 2 machines have to be next to each other which is a huge pain due to land issues i will get to later. but the biggest problem by far is the fact that there is no priority system for the bots. if you have two systems using the same input good, one of which requires logistic bots to deliver 90% of the input goods to and the other 10%, there is no way to make them actually do that, they will deliver wherever they want because you can't tell them to prioritize one thing over the other. so you will have to go and manually disable/enable logistic bot access to the 10% system to make sure most of the goods go to the 90% system. for example i had a system where i made titanium and needed most of it to be put on drones and shipped to be made into reinforced metal and some of it to be packaged and made into titanium drills. the bots sent almost all of the metal into packaging to be made into titanium drills instead and starved the reinforced titanium factories. this exact problem happened 3-4 more times in different systems. a priority mechanic not existing in an automation game is nuts. the islands are hexagonal even though all the building is done on a grid so you end up with a lot of wasted space at the corners. if you need to expand your production as a result of more items being unlocked there is no clear place to expand after a certain point too, so land is also an arbitrary bottleneck, made especially worse by the aforementioned long production times (and items vanishing) forcing you to scale up production, but you physically can’t because there is no space left. have fun with the 3 islands you can’t build on which only exist to house a single boss each. this also makes magnets even worse because you will need the machines to be physically next to each other which means changing your entire supply chains and waste a lot more space trying to fit different sized machines next to each other rather than packing all of them up together into one huge blob. the spacewalk minigame is a somewhat integral part of the lategame/endgame as the resources it gives can give you a permanent 50% (lategame) to 100% (endgame) boost to all production. but the game itself feels very out of place and is frustrating to play. you have very floaty controls and yet have to do precise movements, and the more resources you gather the worse your controls become until you have to drop the resources off. you will have to juggle two timers while doing this as well and if the timer ends before you deposit your current resources they’re lost. at least it doesn’t take that long to get all the items you need but when the biggest compliment to a minigame is that you can do it and be done with it fairly quickly you know you screwed up.