The Planet Crafter: Planet Humble Review (Katsuni)
Finished planet humble, it's... good, but has some issues.
First off, it's generally prettier than the first planet, more interesting biomes for the most part as well, and is much better built for the truck to traverse, so it doesn't get stuck nearly as often as before. There's a lot more interesting terraforming effects as well, such as what starts as an ice wall, becomes hollowed out archways, becomes an open area, or how some sections of the map have the entire surface disappear and cave into downward spiraling terrain to reach cave systems and so on.
The downsides are that the grinders are kind of an annoying extra step which are a nuisance throughout the whole game and automating them is a pain to do, there are parts of the biome that are easy to get to and hard to get out of for a long time making it easy to get trapped, and there are some really awkward things placed in terrible locations that aren't really viable until teleportation to deal with. The huge underground cave that covers the map is also really kind of a nuisance because you can't get a map of it since it's underground, and the volcano blots out a large part of the sky of the map as well, which is just where we happened to build our base so we couldn't actually see anything around the base on the map. The story is a lot less complex, there's a lot fewer wrecks to explore, and it does feel smaller in some ways.
It also has you basically finish at about 1.5GTi, so you won't even reach the 4GTi that some of the endgame content requires. This also accentuates the issues with the whole automation showing up late in the game and only starting to get going just as you're leaving, except now you're leaving even sooner.
There are a few oddities as well, like the area near the superalloy mine (which you can't access until far after you would have wanted it) being completely covered with 1200-1500% butterfly larvae, to the point it's hard to even find normal larvae in that area.
These are minor nitpicks, it doesn't make it bad, and as DLC goes, it's still enjoyable. I literally paid full price for a second copy of the game, and for two copies of planet humble, and I don't feel like I regret it at all. It was great to play through with a friend and I did like the new map and getting to see all the new stuff. This is more of a "they can probably do better in future maps if they release any more" and I feel this was sort of a testing the waters learning experience for what does and doesn't work. It's enjoyable enough as it is, but if they ever do release more maps, they'll probably be better than planet humble.
Mostly, planet Humble really emphasises that the drones/autocrafters really heavily need to show up earlier in the tech tree for them to be of any real use, especially since Humble has a significantly shorter endgame to it and less active exploration compared to the first planet.
If you liked the base game, this is mostly more of the same though, with different locations, some slightly different tech tree unlocks, slightly different story and so on. You should still enjoy it a fair bit, but some parts you may like more or less than the original. It does show they can do a lot more than what they did with the original map, and I can still recommend this at full price. It's still about ~35 hours roughly for 2 people playing to complete, which isn't bad for $10.49 CAD. It does have slight hesitance just because there are a few elements (grinders, being shorter) that are a bit less ideal than the original is all. Still worth getting, but be prepared for a range of some of the new stuff to be mildly annoying and some of them being really neat. The neat stuff outweighs the mild nuisances by a fair bit, but it's hard to ignore the nuisances even though they're minor since they make themselves known for your entire trip through Humble.