This is one of the most exciting third-person space exploration/survival games to this day. Welcome to ‘ASTRONEER’, which was developed and published by System Era Software. Now, let the space exploration mission begin!

You are landing on an unknown planet, intending to travel deep within the earth or to other planets with varying danger levels, building up your settlement and expanding your knowledge throughout the solar system.

Starting the game off, you land in a small pod with the goal of expanding with a neat mission log platform that guides you through missions. Upon completion of a mission, you gain an item or research points known as Bytes and use those Bytes to unlock new items to help expand your base.

I enjoyed the ability to create a custom base by building throughout the solar system with items snapping into place, making the gaming experience all that more exciting. With many planets to explore, some having rare resources that aren’t available on the planet you landed on, opening more advanced building recipes.

Astroneer has such a creative and unique crafting system with different tiers of ores and materials, with some needing to be smelted to create vehicles or new buildings like a soil centrifuge, which extracts natural resources from soil collected by your mining gun, with some upgrade modules being slowly made available for your mining gun, making hard materials easier to dig through or even expanding how much you mine at a time.

It also has a strange sense to it, with mysterious structures around the world which upon activating, create worldwide teleport locations, making travel to the other side of the planet much more accessible. Slowly, as you make your way through your missions, more lore and exciting exploration start appearing, like spawning a research wreck out of an artifact, which threw me for a loop.

What other way could you make Astroneer more fun? You can add your friends to the world with 2-4 players, allowing them to join in on the fun with little worry. You can join and leave at your leisure, even allowing others to participate in their place, making it a thrilling time for everyone.

Astroneer fully supports a mouse, keyboard, and controller, making every playstyle available. The mouse and keyboard are pretty fluid, taking advantage of WASD and being close to other keys like F for accessing all items/machines, E for activating and deactivating your mining tool, T for throwing down Tethers, R for accessing your mission log, TAB for accessing your research tree, and finally, shift for sprint and space for jumping. The controller can use a more native layout as there aren’t many buttons to map, so it feels natural and easy.

The graphics are interesting, with various shapes and colours for terrain and space visuals that are vibrant and mixed with multiple colours. It’s almost like a distorted world with planets flying past, creating real depth in the open sky. Besides shapes, all structures are well-detailed with bright colours, making them stand out throughout the world. Some buildings also have cool animations when they are working their magic.

The sound in Astroneer felt unique and natural for the game’s entails, with the occasional spooky space sounds, windstorms smashing everything around, and even listening to the generators running and fueling the forge.

Even mining resources change with each new resource and go through stronger ground layers, giving a distinct sound. What surprised me was the research on animals making music, filling your ears with blissful sounds.

Overall, Astroneer is a fantastic game. It still holds strong among the big boys to this day. With such a unique gameplay style, making every moment fun, new and thrilling, it’s not hard to see why people rave about this game. With continued support and auditions added to the game, I’d say the adventure isn’t over yet, and I can’t wait to see what they bring next.

Written by: TypicalCambieAU