Lightyear Frontier Review (agatha)
Bought it on steam sale, still don't feel like it was worth it.
Pros:
It's a very pretty game. Beautiful, bright scenery, and distinct areas.
It has a good soundtrack. Very calming but stays in the background so you don't notice it enough to become repetitive.
As long as your storage is within a certain distance of your home, you can craft directly from storage.
Cons:
Storage is a mess:
- When you need to find items for buildings outside your home area you will have to sort through every storage finding where it is.
- All storage has weight limits, including player inventory. If you are over the limit you are unable to jump, run, or fast travel home until you fix the issue. But each storage container is also limited in weight and once you hit that limit, you can't deposit more. There is a large storage unit, but that is limited to one item per unit, has a tedious list of ingredients to get, and has a massive footprint. Even a handful of them would end up with storage outside the home limit and therefore outside crafting limits. Additionally, having to go through multiple single-item storages to deposit and withdraw is awful.
- you have to open a storage container every time you want to find out how much space you have left in it.
Crops are awful:
- they take half a day to water, even fully upgraded.
- trying to plow plots is messy, slow, and tedious, but planter boxes will trip you up when you're trying to complete a hazardous event, leading to lost crops.
- you also have to keep gathering more wild seeds (or paying for more) because seeds don't drop in quantities enough from your planted crops to expand to the point where you can start working on mutant varieties.
Exploration is clumsy. You can do almost nothing on your own, and your vehicle is clumsy and awful to handle in every form. There are no upgrades that change that. You will fall over a lot, you will become encumbered a lot, you will end up building storages everywhere to hold things you can't carry, meaning there's bits and bobs of items *everywhere* in the world.
You have 18 minutes in a day. Watering crops quickly eats up at least half of that. Add animals to the mix that you have to water, feed and pet, that's another quarter of the day. Talking to the people who visit the planet, more. Crafting what you need for upgrades, more. Exploration? Well, the good news is that staying out all night doesn't do anything bad, it'll just cycle to the new day and you'll still be right where you are. BUT, you have to be back to harvest and water your plants, and to defend them if you end up with an event. So you'll spend a lot of time clumsily travelling to more and more distant areas (and therefore eating up a lot of daylight, even if you ignore your plants and animals and start out first thing in the morning), just getting started exploring, then have to run home again only to do the same thing over again.
I do like the idea of the game, but I'm on day 60-something, and all the above built up the annoyance until I had a toxic bubble event, tripped over my freshly made planters that were replacing the plowed ground, and lost a lot of plants because I couldn't get to the bubbles in time. And at that point I felt that 'tired' feeling you get when a game just won't let you enjoy something, and I saved and quit. I'll look in on it from time to time to see if improvements have been made, but at this point in time I wish I hadn't played past the refund time limit.