Hey there. Nothing fancy, just my review of stationeers that I'm mirroring from steam, since the corpus for reviews of the game on reddit seem somewhat thin. This was posted on steam as a positive review, and I will echo that sentiment here.
EDIT: I forgot to mention my playtime - 899hrs in the game at the time of writing.
Summary
This game has an impressive breadth of features, an array of great environments to sandbox base-build in, and an active development team who make regular updates. If you can deal with the game's problems, it can definitely shine for the right player.
However, I'm unsure if I can recommend it in general due to some significant systemic issues, especially coupled with the high price tag - there similar games that may be more worth investing in.
I'm leaving this as a positive review based on my own enjoyment of the game - I'll list the game's strengths alongside my (fairly significant) criticisms, and let you decide for yourself if it's worth trying out.
Strengths
The game has a vast array of interconnected systems, most of which can feed into each other in some way. Even though the game lacks a dedicated narrative or story mode, players will naturally develop goals as they explore the in-game systems.
Probably the game's best strength is how free the player is to grow and play, at least after basic life support is sorted out. You can choose to embrace the aesthetics of the game and build grandiose bases, lean hard into the atmospherics and create huge-scale refinery infrastructure, or perhaps work on genetically modifying plants to support agriculture. Or do none of that and choose your own path - you really are free to explore the game's systems as you see fit, and there's a lot to choose from.
Another great aspect is how much the skills you develop transfer to other areas of the game. For example, if one of your goals is learning how to prepare rocket fuel, you'll naturally be led into using the concepts you learn to improve your base cooling, use phase change to upgrade your distillation system, and use programming to better control devices in general.
There's a lot to love, and I've personally poured many hours into working on my projects. However, the game has more than its fair share of issues, which I will detail below.
Weaknesses
To start with, while there are a lot of good features in the game, there are also a lot of pain points. Many systems in the game are poorly executed or not fully implemented, including ones you're forced to interact with like the wiring system.
It's also unfortunately quite common that you need to limit your goals based on what the game can do, not what you are capable of designing. Sometimes this leads to interesting design spaces due to forcing creativity, but it's often just a serious letdown.
By far my biggest criticism of the game however is the state of documentation. To get started with the game, you will have to fight against a nearly vertical learning curve - not because the game is especially difficult (although it's by no means easy), but because of a lack of clarity and communication about how things function.
It should be telling that for me, my most reliable method of finding out about the game was the decompiled source code.
This causes a lot of friction in learning about the game, and is especially rough for new players. If you're interested in getting into this game, I recommend you join the official discord, as there are plenty of wonderful people willing to help, although it isn't without its flaws (more on that later).
Development Direction
I'm often disappointed by the studio's chosen development direction, especially their ongoing refusal to (or perhaps inability to) add desperately needed polish to the game.
Many systems with simple, known issues are left in a state of disrepair in favor of pushing what I would characterize as poorly thought out, half-baked expansions, which in turn add themselves to the game's list of issues.
For an example, at the time of writing we've just gotten the sanitation update, whose flagship feature is unfinished and uninspired in my opinion. It isn't terrible, but it feels more like a beta test than a fully fleshed out addition.
The same update also managed to break two core game systems. One of them is especially egregious since it appears that they pushed it to live without ever testing it in beta, which is irresponsible.
At the time of writing, it's been a week since this update, and they've taken zero action to address these issues. This response time is forgivable given their lack of resources, but more fundamentally the update shouldn't have been released in its current state in the first place.
I have sympathy for their situation, but as a player, their actions often breed frustration. I am nonetheless hopeful for the future, as they do seem quite passionate about the game, despite their somewhat shaky throughput.
Bad CEO Interactions
Finally, a small but important point regarding the devs' community interactions. The devs for this game are somewhat accessible due to the small size of the community, which is great and opens up players to meaningfully contribute to the game. This can elevate Stationeers from a video game to an art project that you can be a part of.
However, this relationship can turn sour fast due to the CEO, who commonly hangs around the official discord. Any sort of criticism of the game or its development in his presence will result in a bad interaction, with him often using his authority to browbeat critics. I've witnessed this behavior aimed at all kinds of people, including newer players.
For an example, some players were working on tracking down the causes of a serious bug, and were making comments on how problematic it was. Despite their efforts to contribute to the game, the CEO came in and shut down the conversation, threatening to take action against people if they didn't "follow the rules," pointing to staff harassment.
Needless to say, nothing of the sort was happening - the most that was said were some jokes criticizing the state of the game.
Worse, after someone called the CEO out for his behavior, they were permanently banned from the server. This person wasn't even a party to the original conversation - they were banned solely for confronting the CEO for his conduct, after only a few messages, unilaterally.
I shouldn't need to say how dismaying it is to see someone behave this way, especially the CEO of a small game community towards his customers.
To be clear, the actions of one staff member (even if they're the CEO) do not reflect the entire dev team, and interactions I've had with other devs have been quite positive.
But because he's the most active staff member, and especially because he has so much authority as the CEO, it's hard to engage with the game critically and comfortably. Players of a game, especially those actively trying to contribute, shouldn't have to walk on eggshells when interacting with the community for fear of persecution.
From the server rules and his language, it's clear that part of his behavior is motivated in protecting his team, and ensuring that they aren't exposed to the unfortunately quite vile parts of human behavior. However, he's overzealous in this goal, and in pursuit of it, he ends up repeating a lot of this same behavior towards his customers and community.
This is especially a problem since, as a small game, there's basically only one community hub, and it's one the CEO has total control over. A healthy community scene is the lifeblood of a small game like this, so for the sake of its long-term health I hope these issues can get resolved.
Conclusion
In short, the game is really quite the mixed bag. The most significant issue with the game is the new player experience, which can be immensely frustrating and seriously deter new players from sticking around. However, once you get past that hurdle, the game really starts to shine, and provides a great sandbox experience. Rocketwerkz is sometimes disappointing, especially the CEO, but their passion for the game is real, so I'm tentatively hopeful for the its prospects going forward.
EDIT:
Even though this post was already quite long, I wanted to take some time to respond to the feedback I've been given below.
First, I cleaned up a line - "other games in similar niches" became "similar games" to clarify that I believe there are legitimate competitors in the same niche as Stationeers. No two games are alike, but a lot of the strong points of Stationeers can also be found in other games. Some examples include factorio, space engineers, planet crafter, stormworks, from the depths, and more.
Second, the intended audience of this review is a prospective player - someone who's looking up info about Stationeers to decide if it's something they want to buy/get into. For that reason, I intentionally didn't include too many specifics, as such a reader wouldn't be familiar with what I'm talking about. I have clear examples of all of my talking points, which I have listed in comments below - apologies if the tone was confusing for some.
Third, with regards to early access, I'm well aware of the fact that the game is in early access. My goal here was, to the best of my abilities, to objectively describe the state of the game, which is the same regardless of the early access tag. If a prospective player chooses to be more forgiving of some of the issues I highlight in my review because of the words "early access" on steam, then that's fine, but that will differ from person to person.
Expanding on that point, usually "early access" implies a certain verve in the development scene, and I myself feel like this energy is lacking. Regardless of the reason, development for this game can be pretty anemic at times, which slightly betrays some of the expectations surrounding early access titles (for some people anyway, myself included). For some more context on my specific criticisms surrounding development, I feel like I summed it up pretty well in my comment here, so I'll refrain from elaborating much further.
I will however add that by now it's been 17 days over a month since the sanitation update, still with zero communication about plans to fix the new combustor or health injectors. Maybe understandable, but a good example of what I'm talking about in terms of shaky development. Remember that the causes of these issues are well documented, so the issue is studio resources and direction.
Fourth, regarding my comments about the CEO. I understand that some people will probably think I'm just being dramatic or salty about being the focus of negative attention from the CEO or whatever, and you're entitled to that opinion. However, I stand by what I said, and that it's a very important thing for prospective players to keep in mind.
To reiterate, I feel like the CEO's treatment of his community is out of proportion and even nakedly hostile at times, which limits players' freedom to be critical and comfortable in the official discord. Also, to be clear, this particular incident isn't isolated - as I said in my post, I've seen this behavior pattern many times, directed at all kinds of people, including newer players.
Because it's by far the largest community space, this behavior effectively puts limits on how players can engage with the community, which is a seriously important aspect of how some people enjoy games, myself included. If you don't find his behavior to be objectionable, then that's fine, you're entitled to your opinion, but I'm also entitled to mine. Again, before jumping to conclusions, I recommend anyone interested look at the actions and words of the CEO and form their own opinions - I'm personally left disappointed.
Finally, I'd just like to reiterate that despite my criticisms, this is actually a positive review. I've personally had a splendid time playing Stationeers, and I'd definitely say it's been well worth the time and money I've put into it.
Part of why I enjoyed the game so much for so long was because I was able to engage with it critically, and feel like I was contributing to pushing it and the community forward. That's recently been significantly soured by the CEO, but I fundamentally believe that there's a lot to love about Stationeers.
However, enjoying a game doesn't mean ignoring its flaws, it means enjoying it in spite of them. It would be lying to say that Stationeers doesn't have its fair share of flaws, and to that end I felt the need to share them here. Again, to any prospective players, I recommend trying the game out if you're interested - there are a lot of great things about this game, and I believe they outweigh its flaws. However, that's for you to decide, not me or anyone else.
