A game that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

[DeadMG]

Here's my feedback after playing the game for about 150 hours: Eventually, it really sucks.

In the early game, there's a lot of fun to be had watching your dupes scurrying around, learning to dig carbon pits, and many other things. But over time the game just becomes more and more frustrating. I restarted several times and got a bit further every time but now I'm at the rocket and I'm not gonna go back to it. What's the problem? The main issue is that once you start dealing with different atmospheres and temperatures, the game's mechanics ensure the maximum annoyance of the player.

Did you accidentally dig the wrong thing, or worse yet, dig something and then have it fall and dump some hydrogen/chlorine/whatever in your base? How unfortunate because Dupes cannot vaccuum up gas pockets. If you let a ton in it might be concentrated enough to justify pumping it out, but if you have just a few spots, it just sits there annoying you forever. Polluted oxygen is just the worst because it will just sit around and not concentrate itself enough. No matter how many Deodorisers you build you will always be stuck with these horrible annoying spots of poxygen sitting around in your base which will never be clean again.

How about you work hard to keep your atmospheres separate? Well, the game doesn't have any remotely intuitive or obvious solutions for this despite it being an important mechanic, but you can use liquid locks if you ask somebody else how to do it. Just one slight problem though which is that it turns out that Dupes move liquid around so your liquid locks are inconsistent as hell. You build your nice hop lock, then 30 cycles later you notice all the unwanted gasses pouring into your base because some Dupe moved that one drip somehow.

But of course, let's not forget the tedium of building the liquid locks in the first place. Sure, the first time you do this, it's fun enough. But by the time you're building the tenth liquid lock, it's pretty tedious. Is there any way to re-use your constructions? Of course not. Enjoy carefully micromanaging the Duplicant mopping and the deconstruction order and all the rest of it every single time.

Speaking of which, is it really necessary for gas pumps to suck so much? It takes an eternity to pump out even a small space. Of course, you can use the tile filling method instead, with the deeply fun side effect of having to micromanage your Dupes so they build everything in the correct order so they don't trap themselves or gas pockets in the result. Every time you're filling in the last few tiles piece by piece.

The behaviour of Dupes is also deeply annoying, especially in how inconsistent they are. You build a shower, but sometimes they just don't use it and the game never tells you why. You build Decor buildings, but sometimes they just have to go walk by the Heavi-watt wire and not get a good Decor bonus anyway. You build a Great Hall, but sometimes they just don't get the morale bonus for no apparent reason despite the fact that they eat every cycle. I put the effort in to building these things but then I just don't get the reward I actually want of spending the skill points. Decor in particular seems like a spectacularly pointless mechanic which will never yield a Morale bonus that you can actually use on skills, even in theory.

The need to continuously micromanage the Dupes gets old pretty fast, really. When your Dupe gets stuck the first time, it's hilarious. When you need to rebuild your farm for the fourth time, it becomes a lot less funny as you must tediously micro them every time to construct or deconstruct things in the proper order otherwise they won't be able to get it done.

And God forbid the game should actually tell you the information you might want to know. Here's a "fun" exercise; build a Drecko breeding room and then set the creature dropoff to too many Drecko. Will the game warn you that it's too small? Nope. Gotta wait for all your Drecko to arrive, then finally realise you did it wrong. Then realise that it took so long for the damn things to breed that you built other things in the space you otherwise would expand the ranch into and deconstructing anything is such an enormous pain so now you're just stuck with this nonfunctional mess for the rest of the game and then you don't have enough fibre for carpet tiles which you subsequently realise were pointless to build anyway.

The early game is a lot of fun because the player tells Dupes to go dig something, and they go dig it. The mid/late game is absolutely horrible because this dynamic is totally broken. The Dupes aren't remotely smart or capable enough to handle liquid locks, mechanical filters, vacuumed-out steam rooms, constructions bigger than 4 tiles tall, etc on their own. The player has no way of re-using their commands, no easy way of cleaning up their mistakes (especially those that involve gasses/liquids/heat but even just constructions) and just repetitively micros the Dupes in the same tasks in the same way over and over again hoping they don't contaminate their base.

The game asks the player to design and construct increasingly complex arrangements, but never improves the tools on offer to make this an actually fun experience. This results in a game that used to be a lot of fun becoming incredibly aggravating.

[Charletrom]

What I have found with the game is that the tools/approaches ARE present, but they are not necessarily what you think they “should” be at first glance. I have spent hundreds of hours in sandbox mode designing and testing ideas that simply did not work at all. But when you finally figure it out, the payoff is huge.
 

Consider using sandbox tools to delete small packets of gas etc if the process of cleaning them is no fun for you. Of course there are mods that mitigate many of the issues you raise.