The Planet Crafter: Planet Humble Review (Kesash)
I LOVE this game, but the new planet is just a huge disappointment. There are three main reasons.
The first is the way that you discover one of the new areas. It's clearly off the end off a cliff, the map shows you when you have unlocked the ability to see where resources are. But trying to get there? It just kills you. The reason this is just a terrible design in my opinion is because it works completely differently to how the base map gave you new areas. In the base game you would find an ice wall and your thoughts were 'I know what I need to do, I want to know whats behind there'. With this cliff though its the complete opposite, it makes you think 'I can see whats there, but HOW DO I GET THERE' with absolutely nothing giving you any idea how. This just leads to frustration instead of excitement.
The second main issue I have is the crusher system. This is mainly an issue due to two bugs in the game at the moment, so I don't know how long this will be relevant for. This issue will not become apparent until you unlock drones. The first issue is that drones don't take from the crusher inventory, this makes the resources impossible to automate them.
Okay so not a big issue, wait for a patch so that they can take from the crushers, but this then leaves you with ANOTHER issue. When you get to the end game you will have a T3 drill ONLY mining iron to take iron to each place its needed with drones, this makes it impossible to get bottle-necked with a drill filling with something you don't need, you have a separate drill for each resource. You can't do this with the crusher, it will always give you extra resources that you may not need.
Now this issue should be easy to solve, have the drones take the extra resources to the thing that destroys them... except.. THIS IS ALSO BUGGED AND HAS BEEN FOR MONTHS. So even if they do fix the issue with taking items from the crusher you are still left with a MONTHS old bug making it impossible to automate everything.
Until these issues are resolved then the endgame of the new planet is unplayable for anyone who wants any decent automation.
The last reason is the unlocked areas of the map themselves. The caves. I'm sorry but having almost half your map be basically a maze is just not fun. This isn't exploring and discovering new ares, this is walking through the same place 20 times thinking 'have I been here? did I go left or right? Where have I even been?'. This is just frustrating, not fun, not exciting.
To top all of that off they seem to have completely removed the shipwrecks, one of the best parts about the early game of the base map. Why they removed them I have no idea but in the hours I played the new map I found a single ladder down into a single room. That's it.
TLDR; The new map is frustrating, has bugs that make the end game unbearable and removes some of the best features of the main map.