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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Megatect - Review & First Impressions

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The following review of Megatect will be my old Steam review, but refined. Many parts will remain the same, as my views of the game haven’t changed. I will also have my first impressions of the game in here too!

First Impressions:
So, I first booted the game from Steam and found myself a custom launcher. I was a bit confused as I thought that the game would throw me right in. I hit the play button and nothing happened. "What?" I thought to myself as I quickly googled the problem and found no solution. I continued to attempt to "repair" and "redownload" the game from the launcher to no success. I then decided to check to see if the game was downloaded correctly from steam though the "Verify Game Cache" function in the games properties. I did this and found out that 7 files had not been downloaded. Within 2-3 seconds I had those files and went back into the launcher of the game. It worked! I could download the game with no issues and finally got in.

Once the menu loaded I was blown away. The game, although in an early access stage, still had a very nice and sleek looking menu. The game looked and navigated quite professionally and is substantially better than some other early access games I have tried. After a bit of fiddling I managed to get the graphics to what my computer could run them at and then decided to load up a world!


I was feeling a tad bit lazy, so I decided to load up somebody else's creation. A very easy, and simple to use, navigation allowed me to load up somebody else's map that they had created. I could edit it, play on it, and even interact with it. From what I can see, nothing was missing from the user created map and everything was working just fine. From here on I got very excited. I wanted to make my own map. A map I could call “home”…Or “X_Pilot’s Evil lair”, but whatever.

I loaded up a new map and got to work. After about an hour of learning the controls I had finally gotten a hang of it! I flew around adding blocks, destroying blocks, placing enemies, placing guns, and of course, placing jump pads. I finished a bit of my map with many jumping parkour areas and some more difficult jump pad areas to reach. Overall I got a fun map that I played on by myself for some time. I then decided that this wasn't enough. I needed a bit more of something "cool". I went into the menu to see what I could grab for myself and found hidden doors. Well, I used them as floors.

Once my map was finished I decided to see what else I could do with the game. The maps options were quite in depth with details such as: Gravity, Time of Day, Theme, and also Day/Night rotation being possible within the options.


All this review really is so far is a documentation of my first experience. Let’s get reviewing, shall we?

The game does have amazing graphics. The style is simple, but not overly simple. It works well for the style of game that it is. The game is also insanely fun. I’ve spent many a few hours in the game fiddling around with traps, weapons, arenas and more. The game doesn’t seem to have any problem with blocks and I found none to be missing. The developer really does mean “plethora of blocks” in the description of the game!

The game is also quite cheap. Sometimes cheap can be bad, but for this early access title, it’s really a good thing. It’s allowing itself to be accepted by a wider variety of people by making itself more accessible. It also isn’t bound to one play style. Whether singleplayer or multiplayer, this game isn’t limited. You don’t have to be alone, but if you want, you don’t have to play with anybody.


Now, the game is amazing. It truly is, however, there are always negatives. One thing holding me back regarding the game is the one man development team. The game is amazingly well made, but as the community grows, pressure will be adding up onto the sole developer of the game. Currently, the game wasn’t pulling in enough money to keep him afloat, so he’s had to search for other jobs and put Megatect on hold. Hopefully he will get back on his feet again sometime soon!

The game also has a standalone launcher. I understand this was done to account for people that bought the game before it was released on Steam, however, it does affect when the Steam users find out an update is released. There are also no publicly hosted servers, which is quite a shame, as it would be very fun to join in with a random person and build something awesome!

So would I recommend the game? Yeah, I would! It’s an amazing game and despite the developer having to leave the project for a while, the game is still very playable and very fun! It’s a game that is so deep in the sandbox genre, it is anything it really wants to be. It’s a tool that provides players with the ability to play the game how they want to play it! I loved this game when I first play it, and almost a whole year later, I still love the game!


-X_Pilot

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