SquareWorld Unpixeled Reviews

I Like it. Played Squareworld over 50 hours.

The game is acually not bad once you get the hang of it, I just wasn't paying much attention.. Sorry game Dev

I had this game on my wishlist since 2018 and with the current sale price I decided to give it a chance. First impressions are very positive. The mechanics are a mix of Terraria, Minecraft, Starbound and some other games. It seems there's a decent variety of creatures, workstations and items to craft. There's a lot of planets to explore (at least from what I saw on the map, and what introductory quest suggests), so there should be plenty to do in this game. I wondered why this game never took off, as I see it still gets occasionally updated (last update in 2023). I think it just lacks enough reviews. It only has 9 counted reviews, and I heard that after 10 it gets recommended much more in Discovery Queue, so I hope my review will help, as the game looks like it should be way more popular, especially at this price point.

Don't waste your money on this garbage. An unplayable POS game. The game is so broken it's not even funny. You need to make a account for MP play. Why? Lots of MP games where this is un-needed. Even though the game lets you reassign keys, the game doesn't register that you reassigned them. For instance I changed the recipe book from 'R' to 'C'. The game kept telling me to hit 'R' for recipe which had no effect. In game objects don't line up. For instance, trees floating in the air. First game: The house you start in, you can't reach the top floor where the bed & chest is since you can't jump that high. There's no way to get to that level to see if anything is in the chest. The tutorial tells you to craft a chest with 2 logs and a stick. The problem is you don't have the tools to actually get the items needed. You only start with a sword and 27 apples. So how am I supposed to chop down tree? Am I to magically pull everything out of my butt? Instead of monster garphics, I got floating attacking red squares. There we go again, press 'U' to open quests, but the key does nothing. Hit F1 for help, nope, no help there, shows you the original keys, not how you reassigned them. Gets confusing after a while. Great now I have 2 red floating boxes at my house and 1 black box shooting at me. What kind of POS game is this. Second game Once I left the house I couldn't get back into it since it was too high up. I just ran around until I died since I couldn't get any resources. Can't chop down trees with a sword. Wow, I got some really colorful language for this junky game. Came across a monster that didn't look like a box but I couldn't damage it. After 5 minutes of beating on it with a sword and half dead, I gave up. Well, found out you just run around and maybe pick up some resources. What an innovative idea. Third game: No need for grappling hooks, your character can automatically climb walls, which was how I was able to get back into my house on the third game. Well, that's dumb, I can climb some walls but not others and there is no way to tell which ones. A floating tree fell apart and provided me with some resources. But I still wasn't able to make any tools. No way to harvest stone. At the bottom of the recipe window it says "use mouse wheel to turn the page" which does absolutely nothing! To think I actually paid for this. The game doesn't actually explain how to use your resources to craft anything. i tried clicking on the recipe, then moving the resources, then cussing alot. After clicking around, all the recipes disappeared forever. Fourth game: Uninstall, leave negative review for this POS game. I supposed there could have been a good game there, too bad it's impossible to play or get anywhere. A game for me has to be playable and a enjoyable experience, otherwise nobody is going to want to play it. What this game mostly achieves is to piss you off to the point of wanting to grab your monitor and throw it at the wall in frustration.

I can't leave a neutral, but that's what I want to leave. S.W.U. is an awkward game to me as far as visual styling, menu flow, combat, etc. Everything is just not your typical experience in jarring ways. The world I spawned on is pretty much flooded. There is no wikia for this game nor guides as far as I can discern in my short Googling for them. You are allowed to place bricks in mid-air. You are allowed to break blocks from a fairly far distance from your character. I've yet to figure out how to make anything beyond wood, because the furnace doesn't melt ore into ingots -rather it cooks things (it should be called a stove). I need a blast furnace to smelt ores. Issue is that I don't see the type of stone on my map, nor have any direction for where I need to go to find said stone. I'd assume from the bestiary that if I dig down deep enough I'll hit a hell layer like in Terraria. I don't have a pickaxe, because it can only be made with a anvil product of ingots from the blast furnace -so I'd argue that I'm already in a hell of a situation as it stands. In the lootable containers of structures I'v encountered in the overworld layers, I've yet to find any ingots of iron. I don't believe I could substitute tin or copper, but I also don't have ingots of those either. That being said, if I can get this rolling, it seems to be the point where the game really starts opening up as far as what you can do, once you can smelt ores into ingots and then make the other fancy work tables, etc. I also haven't noticed any penalty on death. At least, I am just returned to my house without any loss of inventory. Maybe I'm losing experience points or something I'm not aware of? I really like how the trees sway in the wind and if you cut one segment of the lower part it will cause the rest of the tree above to break down. There are ambient sounds instead of music, and it is amazingly natural and fitting. I found a 24 hr station on YouTube that plays relaxing ambient music and just have that running in firefox as I play this for music. I still have a ways to go in unlocking things. My inventory is packed with items and I'm running out of places to stick chests to store it all. Inventory is a mess BTW. SWU really needs to take a que from Minecraft and have and back and forth (between inventory and container) auto stacking of resources. The max stack size appears to be 80 units, which is also awkward. So yeah, that's my experience so far. PS - You can play offline and that process is, once again, awkward. It will prompt you to give your character a name. FYI, you have to input the name in the USERNAME field. Yeah, that's not a streamlined UI experience at all. Then you will be prompted to name the planet and that's all there is to playing offline.

Alright, Conczin, you win. Again for those who don't wish to read 40 odd paragraphs of suggestions this is a summary of this game as it stands, Its an okay game, far better than many other out there, but falls into many traps that other fell into as well, Sounds sound too ... 'sharp' and can get annoying after a while, Graphics are pretty good, controls are odd to say the least. Im not saying its a bad game, so keep an eye on it ;) In terms of the controls: When you play a game like this (a 2D side scroller survival game) there are commonalities with controls, Normally the space bar is use for jumping, not "W". Also its more common to use "E" to interact with objects instead of clicking them. But those are small gripes I can live with, A more suitable option is to implement some form of key-binding option into the game. That lets people who play alot of these kinds of games (Like me) to use a control scheme they are familiar with. Next, Tutorial and 'Shortcuts': Yes Tutorials are important, but there is more than one way to create a tutorial, think about how Minecraft or Terraria do their tutorials, since it appears thats what you're roughly aiming for with this game. Having a help key (F1) is really useful. However you have the ability to do somthing with it, try merging the crafting manual with the help key (F1), that'll clear the number of hotkeys to remeber. (If I may suggest it, check out, It'll give you some ideas to improve the tutorial for your style of game. No im saying you've done a bad job, but that you have room to make it better.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCPcn-Q5nKE This will be expanded apon in a bit.