Saturday, June 9, 2018

Planet Explorers - Initial Thoughts

About the Game (From the Steam Store Page)

In Planet Explorers, it is the year 2287, one of the first colony ships sent out by Earth arrives at the planet Maria, in the Epsilon Indi Star System. During its landing sequence, something appears in front of the massive ship that causes it to lose control and crash into the planet. Some of the colonists survive in lifeboats, but what they find is an unforgiving land filled with creatures ready to outlast the visitors from Earth. Now the survivors must explorer, gather, build, create, fight, and ultimately, build a new home.

Game Modes

Planet Explorers features single and multiplayer modes.

In single player there are 3 distinct selections

  • Story Mode – Story mode is the main meat and bones of the game, it is the action-adventure-rpg-somewhat-4X segment, offering npcs, missions, colony building, farming, training, diplomacy, and of course, a storyline that you can follow or ignore. This story features a 17X8km world map with many unique character, landscapes, biomes, locations, and over 140 types of potential enemies. Even though we’ve made it seem like a very action oriented game in the trailers, in reality, players can choose to not fight so much as to just plant a farm, make some food, keep the colonists alive, negotiate with the sentient aliens, and defend the perimeter from the local life forms. That can still eventually arrive at the ending. And yes, there is an ending. Story mode also features coop with other players.
  • Adventure Mode – This mode is based on a procedural map generated from a seed. It comes in a 40X40 kilometer map. Players will be able to complete random missions, defeat bosses, dive through dungeons, and explore different landscapes. This mode also features survival and versus.
  • Build Mode – In this mode, there are no enemies and an infinite amount of building material. It also currently comes in a 40X40km map. Players will be able to build whatever they want in this mode, including everything in the Creations Editor. Think of this as the perfect testing ground to test everything you build. Or…it’s your place to build your garden without ever worrying about the pesky aliens.
Previous Playtime

0 hours

What Was I Thinking When I Bought This (Also this veers into my expectations towards the end, so consider those sections combined).

In the waning days of the blog, I have a difficult line to walk. I want games that are interesting to talk about, but I also want to start adhering to my new rule of only buying games that I have a concrete desire to play immediately. Also, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this. Not because I don't think the blog is worth it, but because I'm hoping to have a smooth transition to getting back to my broader hobbies and money I spend on video games now is money I'm not spending on roleplaying books or trips to the museum later.

This is made especially difficult with my particular Steam wishlist. It is, if you'll forgive the euphemism . . . speculative. There was a period where I was just going through my discovery queue once a day and just wishlisting everything that was even notionally in a genre I like to play.

My reasoning there was that a lot of these games would eventually go on sale for a ridiculously low price, on the order of 2-5 dollars, and when they did, it wouldn't be much of a risk for me to take a chance on a less-known publisher or far-out concept (that's why my second choice for this slot was Car Mechanic Simulator 2015).  Eventually, I came to realize that if I followed up on every such lead, I would be doing this blog until the day I die, and I had to draw a line.

A fine enough sentiment, to be sure, but despite my new resolution, I never actually got around to pruning my wishlist to a more manageable level, which means that at 4:00am this morning, as I was trying to find my next game to play, I was left with the task of sorting through almost 500 candidates.

What I wound up doing is sorting my list by price, scrolling down to the highest amount I was willing to part with at this time (15$) and just working my way up until I found something that hit the sweet spot between price, novelty, and satisfying my spontaneous gaming cravings.

Planet Explorers is a survival crafting game with a story mode. The screenshots make the monsters look pretty slick and the environments, while nothing to write home about, are easy on the eyes. Plus it looks like it has some pretty powerful customization tools, which could be fun if they dovetail nicely with the gameplay.

And besides, I'm only going to be doing this for another week and a half, so what's the worst that could happen.

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