Just tried this today and heres some feedback (v2.5):
- How does the game save progress? Game either didn't tell me or it wasn't obviously visible anywhere.
- Game start felt overwhelming due to being zoomed out, seeing a lot of detailed pixel art with multiple directions to starting walking towards, but thankfully the starting location is peaceful overall so I was able to walk around and gradually learn to interact with machines/objects. It still felt rough as an experience. Suddenly a skull appeared on the screen warning about a swarm, meanwhile an asteroid slammed on top of the space station and blew up which also freaked me out.
- I haven't died ingame yet and dont plan to, but I noticed I have stuff in my person inventory and the spaceship inventory. I assume my stuff is lost if I die, so is there a place on the space station to securely store my things? I couldn't seem to find a storage cabinet to put my things in there. I'm also concerned about dropping items if they will dissapear after a while.
- Mining is fun and I like that shooting aliens isn't too spongy on the first planet. I tried the prequel to this game and stopped playing it because it was a slow grindathon to even take down a basic alien nest/egg thing. The starting power level in Terrene is much nicer.
- Player/ship stat upgrades feel rather meh. I have to collect 150 gold nuggets just to get an increase in energy, hp and oxygen by 1 point, which barely registers as a meaningful change when doing stuff planetside.
- Crafting and inventory system feel awkward. I'd rather have a menu that simply tells me to increase a secondary item count if I have the collected goods for it, instead of doing "read tooltip, press spacebar, drag, spacebar, drag, etc" stuff. Autosort of inventory would also be nice without needing to press the manual autosort button each time.
- Since everything is so small in the game due the art style and zoom level, I get often confused what is a live alien, nest, pickup or other thing. It would be nice to hover the mouse over a thing to reveal what hp% condition it is in (terrain tile, enemy, surface prop, etc) and the name of that thing and what I could gain from it.
- Some things on the space station could use more information or introduction to say what they do, namely the compost/farm thing, the purple liquid tank.
- Walking around the space station to get to different machines to do stuff on them feels tedious and artificially lenghtens the time to play the game without anything worthwhile happening as a player experience. I just wish that experience could be streamlined or made more compact/faster/efficient/quicker somehow.
- While flying the spaceship to the planet, I felt a bit scared to slam into the ground because I didn't see an altimeter or any other way to know where the surface of the planet was as I was flying towards it.
Overall not a bad game so far. It feels a bit awkward during the sudden unguided start, meanwhile playing I get a confused sense of what anything is on the planet and what I'm I doing this for (what is the ultimate end goal or progression of this game) and many of the game mechanics seem like I only learn how they work after I mess around instead of getting a clear introduction to them prior. I will play it more later, I like a lot of parts about it, especially how I can freely pilot my spaceship and physically fly it to the planet and switch to hover mode to "land on it", sort of like a Super Metroid experience. That is pretty cool.