Eco Reviews

Honestly, just a decent game to play by myself, sure playing solo has it's issues and isn't the easiest thing to do but it's worth it, although the music does remind me of minecraft a little too much but that could be my weird brain associating the two.

If you enjoy building and open world games you will love this game.

The game is one of my favourites. It's got a good skill system and keeps you busy. Though I'm not the biggest fan of the multiplayer side of it, I am quite fond of creating new maps and attempting to go as far as possible by myself. It does take a lot of work and many hours of labour to move forward science-wise, so do keep that in mind, if you plan on not working with 30 other players. I have spend over 800 hours in this game over 2 accounts and they keep updating and improving the game. I recommend it wholeheartedly, to anyone.

The game still has bugs... the keys don't always work to show the commands. There are glitches in it. It runs very hot on my gamer laptop. I like the graphics but they are not always correct. It is a very slow game....

CONTEXT Some of my gaming buddies wanted to try this. We ultimately decided on a different game for now, but I was still curious about trying Eco to scout ahead for our next game. If nothing else, I love the premise, and it sounded like it had some really neat details in terms of how the world works. I thought I might have fun playing on my own. SINGLE PLAYER? --> good luck I tried starting the game. There's no single player option. When I tried to play solo, it asked me when I wanted to play (hours and days of the week) in order to find a server that fit my playstyle. It asked me how long I wanted to play for a single session -- one or two or three hours at a time? I was like, "Uhm, I don't want to commit right now. Just let me dink around." Nope. You MUST use a server. GAME CREATION It took a sec for me to start a new local server. It took a while for the server to start. Along the way, it again asked me what days of the week and what times I'd be playing, and how long I wanted to play for a given session. It also asked if I wanted to limit other players' playtimes to one, two or three hours per day. If they tried playing longer, then their character would get exhausted and wouldn't be able to make further progress. The rationale given was to prevent some players from getting more experience than other players. It asked me how much I wanted to limit my skill progression so I'll depend more on other players. Yep, the game is telling me again that solo players aren't welcome. I limited myself to ten different professions, whatever that meant. CHARACTER CREATION The character creation choices feel like male characters were an afterthought. I'm a guy, and I felt like the characters seemed some combination of being childish, effeminate, non-binary or fairy-like. The clothing choices were few (e.g. two "shirt" options and only four "bottom" options, plus socks and three options for "shoes"). There's beards and mustaches for males, though all types of body hair (beards, mustaches, head-hair, and eyelashes) are forced to be the same color. The longest pants that are available are capris (3/4 length). GRAPHICS I have the best GPU and CPU money can buy, but as soon as I jumped into a world, my computer fan went nuts even on moderately-high settings. That tells me that they have a ton of optimization to do. Granted, it's still early release. I assume this will be a priority for them. Right now, the graphics look like eye candy for kids. It made me feel as though I at 38 am not in the target age-group. Nothing is subtle. Everything is brightly-colored and stands out from everything else in a way that was visually very busy. I think they were trying to make it too visually appealing and they overshot. WORLD The world felt like a modded version of Minecraft in some ways. It's all very blocky. There's water. You can jump over blocks and swim in water. There are lots of things you can pick up and eat. There's a robust nutrition system that looks interesting. (I like that.) There are lots of nearby blocks that look like they might contain some kind of ore. Ok, cool...if a bit too convenient. It felt like I was being placed in this perfect, utopic starting place where everything I'd need for a long time would be within 30 blocks of where it placed me. (I'm sure that's not true, but it still felt a bit too resource-heavy where I spawned.) BUGS There was a sort of tooltip-style tutorial: "Do these 5 things and check the boxes before we give you the next tooltip." I looked up, down, moved around, and tried to press F5 to change to 3rd player perspective, as I was told to do. Nothing. I checked the controls to see what key was linked to this action, and it listed F5. I tried remapping it to F5 by pressing F5, and it warned me that F5 was already being used for this action. (True.) Regardless, pressing F5 had no effect whatsoever. I tried closing the game and restarting it. When I jumped back on my own server, it had me download the map. Again, with an uber-high-end computer, it took about half a minute to do so on a brand new map. It feels so awkward having to download a map from my own computer. I think it should have been designed better. I tried dinking around a little more, but I was already frustrated at it because of the character creation, and as these bugs piled up, I realized I had less and less interest in the game. CONCLUSION I ultimately asked for a refund. If my gaming friends are still interested, I'll point them to this review. If they all want to try it, I'll play with them. I'm sure multiplayer play will be better. After all, the game seems to assume it. I won't be eager, though. I'd like to try this game again. It looks like it has potential, but right now it feels like it's geared for kids and does not support solo play natively. I hope to try it again, and I hope that I'll be able to change my rating and edit this review.

Best game to relax after a hard working day (in RL) Best game for both children and grown ups Best game to socialize with people from different parts of the world

The premise of the game is reasonably simple - you're on a world, that will be destroyed by an asteroid in 30 days. You must get technologically advanced enough to discover lasers, make them, and use them to destroy the asteroid. You also have to do so while not destroying the planet (not killing all the animals/plants of certain species; not polluting too much) The game is ultimately a crafting game where you grind out materials (logs, stones that you grind) in order to make them into crafted materials (that are then used for other crafts and so on). This game is played best with a group of people. It is nearly impossible to win playing alone as almost all crafts are skill-locked and you need a 'star' to unlock them. Depending on how you set up your game, you will manage around 5-10 stars, and you need way more than that to unlock everything and win. There are plenty of public servers to join in order to do so. Personally, I really like the game because it can scratch the itch of "I want to play something but I don't want to invest a lot of thinking in it, I want to just go break rocks" while also scratching the itch of "if I strategize with what items I'm selling to the neighbors, I can make more money". It's simple and easy when you want and can turn into spreadsheets if you also want. I highly recommend for people who love crafting games, but don't want to survival craft - just a chill n' craft.

The game itself is okay fun better with more people ofc. but holy balls the new maintenance system sucks major butt...

I've spent over 170 hours playing this game, and while the concept is fantastic—especially the community, the trading system, and the whole "saving the planet" aspect—there are some major issues. Despite being released in 2018, the game still suffers from severe bugs that significantly impact gameplay. Frequent glitches leave players stuck, official servers experience major lag, inputs often go unregistered, and hunting is completely broken. If these issues were fixed, the game would be amazing. Unfortunately, its current state ruins the experience, and the player base is too small to sustain long-term engagement—even official servers see a sharp drop in players after just a few days.

Been out for so many years now, and they're yet to solve their biggest issue; Significant player drop off after the first day of any server. This game can be playable in singleplayer, but it's 100% designed around multiplayer situations. For now; don't bother with community servers unless you're an established group of friends. Servers die off after the first week leaving a small group of players to carry the whole servers industry. Additionally, the build system sucks ass, and there's an xp multiplier system that penalises you for building with different materials other than what tier you're at. Want to build a stone wall, or a wood floor in your metal tier house? sure; but now your xp multiplier is shot. I hope they fix at minimum their player burn-out because this game has great potential.