Nightwater

I wish there was a thumbs up/down 50/50
I mean, straight to full release without a bunch of early access? Looks pretty, is functional? Yes, I have to give it that.
BUT.. it's just boring. I have 1000+ hours in Satisfactory, this is my type of game, but it's just too... plain.
After unlocking 5 areas... it's not an automation game, it's just like a grindy basic game. Like a mobile tycoon game.

I don't care about the lighthouse
I don't care about my memories
I don't care about the minigame
There is zero drive for me to continue.

4.7 hours at time of review. I will bet everything that no matter when you read this review, it will be 4.7 hours on record. This is being uninstalled and I'll forget it existed by tomorrow.

I played the demo when it first released, and really enjoyed it. I stopped playing and added the Release date to my calendar.

Now that the game is out, I bought it right away and as I am on the couch (weekend) I opted to play with a controller. Words can not express how half-arsed the controller integration is. The tutorials still told me the M&K Keys, and there are no settings or controller config to let me work out what buttons to press. Every interface is awful with a controller. Why do I have to press A after moving the cursor to anything, just to bring it up, then press right 4 times to get to the craft button. Its truely horrible to play with a controller.

I have turned the game off. I may give it another go on M&K during the week. I may just refund it,

It's very cute, and very basic. I didn't try the "dungeons" and basically just played the automation portion, which is underwhelming. Oh, and don't be fooled by the official trailer: the game does NOT look like that. Nice bullshotting, dev.

You basically get access to a biome, put up some mining equipment to grab the resources, use the resources to unlock the next biome, repeat 4x times. The automation options are very sparse and the room for building cool stuff just isn't there. Everything you build ends up looking really chaotic because it's too much effort to lay things down properly (there's no vertical building, no snap to grid, everything clips over each other, resources will spawn on macines). So for the automation stuff I was super unimpressed. Satisfactory isn't much more expensive than this game and it's 4000% times better, but they had an actual budget.

I'll Youtube the ending if someone bothers to finish it.