Planet Nomads - Review

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Planet Nomads is a Steam early access, open world, survival game on a planet which has varying biomes for the player to explore. In the game, you crash land on this planet and have to survive in the wilderness by yourself. As a lone scientist, you, the player, have to use your wit and knowledge to create whatever basic needs you require in this sci-fi sandbox. The is constantly being updated and is never boring. When starting a new save in Planet Nomads the player is presented with a sleek looking menu which prompts them if they want to play a survival game, or a creative game. The feature is something fairly small, but it proves that the developers have thoughts quite deeply about who they might want to target for their audience. For an early access survival game, it is very good that they have already considered that not many people will want to do the “survival” element of the game and just want to build a cool base or a cool car. After all, not everybody is into resource
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Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - Review

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Clone Drone in the Danger Zone is an early access, third person, sword fighting arena game in which you play as a robot that has your mind inside of it. One of the key features of the game is the fact that your body can have any component cut off, as it is voxel based. This means, you may lose a limb, but you are not dead. A health bar is non existent and auto-regenerating health is certainly not a thing. The game has a skill system, in which once you acquire a skill point from winning a round, you may purchase a skill. These skills range from a clone to a fire sword that burns it’s enemies when it hits them.

Now, this is a review and not just a description of the game. So let’s jump right into it, shall we?

The game plays amazingly. I love how the character is positioned in the centre of the screen and that is the only direction that your character can attack. No firing backwards or any full 360 attacks (at least from what I could tell). Yes, there are some attacks which allow you to kill enemies on your sides and behind you, for instance when you swing your hammer you can hit somebody behind you, but this doesn’t allow you to defend yourself all the time, as enemies will have longer range swinging forwards at you. Attacking straight on is the way to do. The controls are simple and easy to follow, most of them equating to basic PC controls.

The design choice of having a voxel based dismemberment system is amazing. Having an arm amputated still allows you to use your sword, but your hammer and your bow aren’t options anymore, logically. Having a leg cut off still allows you to move, but a lot slower. I love this! It means that you can still survive a hit, but lose a limb. Instead of losing health, you lose functionality and that is genius. However, once you have been hit, you have to spend a skill point to repair yourself. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether a repair or simply a clone would be preferable in this situation.

Skill points are balanced. The enemies increase in difficulty as you progress in skill points. However, if you take hits and have to purchase clones or repair yourself that reduces your skill. I have found that some enemies are near impossible to beat without certain skills. MK3 Sword Bots are the most difficult to kill as they block arrows and swords. If you don’t have the hammer or the kick, you are pretty much doomed unless you can make an Archer bot accidentally kill the MK3 Sword Bot. I feel like the skills have a good set of variety and utility. I have had so much fun trying out different configurations by simply progressing through a different skill. I never knew how much a fire sword would change up my play style. Setting enemies on fire is definitely an entertaining method of killing the robots. How did they get metal to burn? Everything burns.

Amongst other good things is the twitch integration which allows twitch viewers to spice up the game a bit. It’s seems quite fun, but unfortunately I was unable to test its full functionality, but this can allow new and upcoming streamers to have extra depth to their streams. The narrators are also quite funny and their voices are quite unique. After only a few minutes I was in love with their puns.

So what do I dislike about the game? I have to say that the game does get quite repetitive after a while. It is in early access, but the campaign is literally just beating a few levels to then unlock an extra little tad, only to have to do it again. I feel like maybe a change in scenery would spice this up a bit more. Have the second arena not be the same desert looking arena and maybe have it be an underground fight club or something. On top of that, I feel as if there should be more upgrades for speed related attacks. I would love a velocity increase for the bow and maybe a faster jab for the sword. They could be balanced by reducing the size of the impact. Supernatural powers would also be pretty cool and the lack of them confuses me quite a lot. If these robots can set metals on fire, why can they not also freeze metal as a temporary stun against the enemies?

So do I think this game is worth a buy? Yes, it is. I really think that this game is a lot of fun and that a lot of people would enjoy it. It is an early access title though, so development may take ages or it may never be completed. But apart from that, the price is right and the future developments will most likely be amazing. Multiplayer is being considered and a lot of community feedback is being taken into consideration.

-X_Pilot

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