Xenominer Review : Update 1.31

You are hurtling through space at sub-light speeds. Your ship, a small scout cruiser, slows down as a rather bright star comes into view. As you deal with the massive g-force of your ship's sublight engines cutting out, you hear a slight tearing in the ship's hull. You glance at your monitors, and note your inertial dampeners are beginning to fail. After making a quick prayer to your gods, you dash for your space suit, helmet, and what minimal survival supplies you can find. You take a last glance out of your window, and see a fast approaching pile of rock you could barely call a planet. Was this the target, or just a way-station? The useless thought is driven from your brain as fast as it came. Your ship is about to crash land on a probably unknown planet. The last thing you hear is the crashfoam from from your ship deploying like mad in every direction. You'll probably survive, but for how long?

You wake up to an informative and helpful artificial intelligence personality, known as Daisy, kindly guiding you to your next move, your next desperate action, as you seek to make this planet your home for the time being.

Xenominer puts you into a different world, but makes you feel like it's yours. What I mean to say is, it will inspire moments of wonder, and terror, just as easily as a trip into a deep unknown forest would. I had never played a "voxel" game before this, so didn't quite know what to expect. But now that I have, I'd probably never play any other besides this. The gameplay is just too sweet, too interesting, and too addicting to ever let another game like this into your life.

Let's talk about the game:

Graphics:
It's hard to talk about graphics without breaking it down to its elements. Every piece of this game has been hammered out and presented in a top notch form. The GUI/HUD overlay always feels modern and easy to read. The EKG-like meters for health and radiation are fun to look at, if a bit hard to understand at first. The pick, your main tool for gathering resources, is a wonder to behold, actually sniping bits of matter into your stasis generating backpack via a stream of energy, whenever you need to gather materials. The blocks themselves have been redone from the bottom up as of update 1.31, meaning there is seamless blending of the materials you are harvesting, and the structures you create will be visually pleasing. The skybox, an epic depiction of a Saturn-like ringed planet, that transitions from day to night often, is also a wonder to behold. Another beautiful sight is the mushroom like landscapes, mounds of crystals, ice and surface regolith. This is all procedurally generated, depending on if you choose a random or chosen seed, but the algorithms in place make it look really marvelous, meaning you'll never be disappointed in what you find.

Gameplay:
As was said before, the gameplay puts you right into the world, to the point where you will be scared and running for your very survival off the bat. You will find yourself a scared running rabbit at first, before you slowly find yourself gaining confidence and new ways to survive, and build your life on this planet. You won't last long, or may die of boredom underground, if you don't make good use of the crafting system, so let me explain that now. It is all based on your ability to build technology. Research and development, finding the right resources, and maximizing your resources will help you a great deal in creating an effective life outside of the tunnels. I myself found I wanted to take to the skies, using a programmable bot to take me into floating islands, and building glass domes so that I could survey the various areas. The sun, as you find out soon, is deadly. Luckily, building a structure with glass is easy, and you can usually find ways of building above and below ground, and constantly digging. The 'bot' is a fun part of the game that also needs mentioning. For those ambitious enough, you can learn to program him quite easily to help you on your way. Eventually you will want to upgrade to a high level pick, and jetpack, among other things. What you build and why is really a mystery still. I imagine the real gameplay elements are coming in the future, for now, it can degenerate into a build-fest sort of thing.

Sound:
I thought the sound was nice, but I didn't really enjoy the music so much. I felt it got a bit tiresome the longer the game went on. A few options for how this is done would be nice in an update. The sound effects themselves seemed fine.

Difficulty:
I didn't find the game as difficult as I originally perceived it. It does a much better job of scaring you, than actually killing you. Nevertheless, you may find yourself dying a few times if you are careless. Simply finding the spot where you died and picking up your items is usually a good idea. If you don't find them quickly, I'm sure they'd de-spawn and you'd lose them. But you seem to re-spawn with a nice bit of equipment. Still, this is probably a good reason to buy one of the storage containers to keep your more valuable resources in.

The Sci-Fi:
The last question we are all wondering, is how is the world building, the sci-fi. What's to come of this franchise in the future? I can say that the world building seems quite solid, and they seem to have a really good handle on the "hard sci-fi" elements that hard core sci-fi fans will seek out. Ideas like nano-technology and asteroid mining, artificial intelligence on a grand scale, etc, are all here. This means that there really is no limit to what this company, Gristmill, can do if they have and continue to get the resources. They aren't one of the "mine-craft" clones to cross a million sales yet, but if they do someday, I'm sure they'd bring more to the table. For these reasons, I'm not very interested in multi-player unless it's to help build the world in some way, make it more complete. Nevertheless, multi-player does seem like it's on the horizon. This is definitely a game we'll be watching with a close eye, over here at the sci-fi hub. Check back during the next update.

Verdict: 4.25/5 (because we know it's a work in progress, expect this to go up on the next update)