Stranded: Alien Dawn Review (Bolin)
Yes, I would recommend this game for people who like simulation/strategy games. This game is AMAZING, it's kinda immersive, has beautiful graphics and a good combat/defense system BUT, it still needs lots of polish.
For example:
- Evaluation prompts: In this aspect, this game behaves like a predatory mobile game/gacha. It keeps asking you in-game to rate it until you give 5 stars to everything. Could be a bug, but happened in all save files that I tried. I know that feedback is extremely important, specially given the early access aspect, as it should be because this game needs some serious balancing. Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing or saying that the game is bad; on the contrary, the game is amazing and it innovates in a lot of things that I love in this genre.
- Crafting: It takes way too long to craft anything. Other games had this issue in the past, but not like this one. Things break all the time, even faster than you can replace them. By the time a survivor finishes crafting 1 Electronics part, for example, other 3 to 4 things that need it had broken already. The same with clothing, as if you had discovered Clothblossom late in the game as I have, you will have an extremely hard time with clothing, since to get fabrics you will have to Hunt > Cure Leather > Tailor or make Veggie Leather, which is equally time-consuming. By the time you finish doing all this, your survivor will have had multiple breakdowns from being naked all the time. In games like this, the crafting is one of the most important mechanics, since there are raids all the time and you always need to have spare resources. I believe that if the crafting/tailoring/assembling time were cut by half or 30%, it would be much more rewarding and enjoyable;
- Apparel/Machinery Durability: One of the reasons that makes people attracted to this kind of game usually is its similarities to reality-related themes and situations. People want to feel at least a little realism in their computer-generated simulation games, so it is extremely immersion-breaking, at least for me, the durability of many things in this game. Take Freezers or Refrigerators for example: if you have one or two of these items, they don't just go randomly breaking all the time for no reason. I know this is just a game and this is one of its mechanics to force the player to plan ahead and have spare resources, BUT, I think that it is absurd the way it is now. The same goes for batteries or any other electronic equipment which, as I've stated before, take an eternity to make. The clothing and armor follow this same line of thought which, as I said before, degrade at lightning-fast speed while you tailor at the same pace as a tortoise with leg cramps. The rate at which apparel/clothing degrades should be waaaaaaaay lower, like the Refrigerator example, your clothes don't just go randomly popping holes or tearing themselves for no reason and even though there is some fight (I will get there too), even survivors who don't fight get a taste of this;
-Cost/Recipes and Products: The cost and output of many resources need a lot of balancing. For example, concrete in real life takes 1 part cement to 2 parts sand to 4 parts aggregates like gravel, crushed stone, more sand, etc to be made. In this game is 1 stone > 1 Concrete. I think that maybe sand, clay and other materials will be added to the game eventually and I really hope it will, but to get Concrete you need to: Research it > build a smelter/furnace > supply it with fuel or electricity and wait some time. I think that the player should be rewarded with a better ratio for this exchange, given that again, this is veeery time-consuming and takes way too long to have a good amount for the price asked. Besides that, apart from defense, I didn't see that much of a difference in insulation between using plain stone or Concrete, since by the time you have it researched, your base will be almost completely built, either by bricks (which is weird doing it the way it is, with plants) or just simple wood. ALSO you can get carbon that just takes a little mining and a research to be used, way more reliable and, since nests kept appearing for me all the time, it was much reliable to use than stone, which is quite scarce and hard to get, I must add. Again, the costs and products of recipes need to be balanced to make the player WANT to make it, otherwise it is just a recipe that no one will use because it is not worth the time.
- Raids/Combat and Random Events: I like games with big waves of monsters, and I am personally a big fan of games like Starcraft of They Are Billions. But we are not in this genre. If the game is gonna throw a big wave of monsters at my base, I don't want the immersion to be destroyed by a conveniently placed Solar Flare seconds before it, just to disable my defenses. It seems extremely artificial and I've never seen in happen in any other game, specially Rimworld, where I think this game took a lot of inspirations. The developers must remember that a game must be a rewarding experience, not a frustrating one of course, we have Soulslike games in mind when talking about game frustration, but even in those (the good ones), there is ALWAYS a way to overcome the challenge. Having three Solar Flares happen sequentially and coincidentally minutes before thousands of enemies are coming to swarm my base every time after them is no fun at all. The Storyteller or AI doing this decision needs to be adjusted to not put these events so close to each other so that the player won't associate a Solar Flare with imminent raid. Those two can happen at the same time, SURE, but only SOMETIMES, and not all the time in late game.
-Recruitment and Exploration: The way it is now, it is extremely hard, almost impossible, to get new Survivors. I have done some testing and read some discussions online and it is a common belief that the number of survivors you get is seed-based, meaning that if you had the bad luck of getting a bad seed, you will be stuck with the number of survivors you choose when you started for most part of the game. This is bad, extremely bad, because as you advance, you will need more hands, lots of it, and even if you go on expeditions all the time, chances are that you will never find anyone alive. I *think* that the chance of getting a survivor in a expedition must've been wrongfully set to 0.00001%, because there is no explanation that, for a game about building a colony and survivors, you can't get any of the latter. In Rimworld you have raids, you can capture a live raider and recruit them. In this game, you're stuck with your starting ones and good luck (or seed searching). There should be other ways, like events where a survivor approaches, a cargo pod with a survivor crashing near you or anything like that. You guys either could do this or enable pregnancy.
- Social interactions and relationships: I have a theory that, in the Universe of this game, surviving an airship crash makes everyone an complete a**hole. Seriously, you can play all the game with the survivors fighting side by side, dining, working and even sleeping together, and, for some reason, they always end up hating each other. The relationships don't develop in a fluid/human-like way. The characters always say bad things to one another, even though moments ago their lives had just been saved by that person. The only way to make they liking each other is to make them spend LOTS of time together, forcibly or if they already had a relationship pre-game in their bio. Again, this goes into the same realism I said before. If you crashlanded with other people in an alien planet, I doubt you would go out of your way to be mean or disrespectful to other people. I had multiple playthroughs and everyone always hated each other, they were almost always with -80~-90 relationship with everyone. I mean, COME ON. Even the worst person would eventually find at least someone that they could relate to.