izigame.me

I thought this was going to be a game only about optimizing your factory in an essentially sandbox environment. What I got was a rich game with a very well designed alien world to explore, with subtle messages about environmentalism and the beauty of nature contrasting with the efficiency of machinery. There are literally breathtaking vistas, vast beautiful cave networks, impossible alien landforms, and completely on point music and sound direction. The slightly sinister feeling nature of your FICSIT overlords lends some deep nuance; what are you actually doing here? What role are you playing, and who are you serving?
I'm not an optimizer. I enjoy efficiency, but I'm not one to overdesign to get there, so my bases end up having a naturalistic "base camp" feel, while my friends are building towering factories with rows and rows of machinery. I'm really glad to say, this game supports both playstyles fantastically. I see my friends having a blast designing and organizing monolithic black cubes full of layers and layers of machinery, whereas I love spreading out and nestling my machines in with the trees and cliffs.
The one thing I would dock this game for is that the ecosystem feels too player-focused. I want to see predators chasing prey and fighting other predators for territory. I want to see animals that consume resources, and possibly animals that caretake and develop their own resources as well. This might not be the game for that, and if you're also wanting to see an alien ecosystem spring to life, I highly recommend Subnautica. However, I can't deny the intentional design I feel in segments of this game. Collecting power slugs to me feels like collecting Missile Packs in Metroid. They are usually placed in areas that have a similar challenge feel to them, and are a wonderful reward for exploration. I can't wait to find out what Somersloops and Mercer Spheres are for, because they provide such an intense incentive to explore that I think is missing from some games like this.
There are still bugs and glitches, particularly with enemy AI. It's very rudimentary and when you master kiting enemies, they don't provide that much of a challenge, even with the Xeno-zapper. It's only when they congregate and team up against you that they feel like a challenge. On the other hand, that complexity is used to great effect in the placement of hostile mobs today, so I can't knock the simplistic AI too much because it combines and scales difficulty fairly well, despite the somewhat limited toolkit for designing these encounters.
Also, placing the Space Elevator is a religious experience. I don't care how jaded you are, it's a masterstroke of technology that that sequence plays out so organically and dynamically. You really *feel* the scale of the structure, and it changes the skyline forever.
I feel like there are still some quality of life hiccups around inventory management. As an FPS player, I often find myself hitting the number row to switch my in-hand equipment, only to remember too late that those hotkeys are for your building toolbelt. I'd love a way to switch between modes, even if it just means holding shift while pressing a number gets the build mode quickbar, and just pressing the number equips a new item to your hand slot. On the other hand, there are some very nice Quality of Life touches that I appreciate once I've gotten used to the quirks of this game. Actually placing buildings is decently streamlined, and I appreciate the way building off of foundations allows for a very granular angling. Once you're started building a foundation to fit the area, the 90-degrees snap-to-grid functionality feels very useful. The only complaint I have here is the sometimes janky feeling of trying to get conveyors to snap together. It can be very finicky about what counts as a valid angle, and the feedback isn't always clear about why a conveyor can't be constructed. "Encroaching others' area" ends up being a somewhat frustrating exercise of shimmying things around in minute ways just fiddling to get the lines all connected.
Honestly, though, the game is beautiful enough to warrant the price tag. I don't just mean graphics specifications and technical aptitude. The design of the game's assets and their placement creates spellbinding beauty. The way biomes flow into each other feels extremely organic and immersive, and I've never seen transitions so smooth in any other game. It feels like it surpasses Breath of the Wild in this respect, and some of this may be because setting this on an alien world helps smooth over any strangeness in geology or botany that would subtly break immersion otherwise. There are so many systems in this game to become familiar with, and the tech tree feels so rewarding and rich that it compels me to develop more and more. All in all, this is genius design. Mad respect.