The setting and gameplay loop: magnificent. Chef's kiss. Steady learning curve and decent room for flexibility and creativity in how you approach teardowns. If it were just this, it'd be 4-5 stars and an easy recommendation. But then we get to the story. Have you ever seen a Neil Breen movie? It's honestly like that, only without the comically surreal bad acting and shoestring production values that are the critical ingredients in making it whatsoever tolerable. The story is a Neil Breen movie that is somehow presented in utmost sincerity, thrust at you insistently, forcibly between every strictly-timed work shift of gameplay. It would have been tolerable as background radio chatter DURING the gameplay loop, of which there is also a fair amount, but the game feels the need to pull you aside and chide you for excruciatingly long stretches for wanting to actually bloody play it. There is no skip, no fast-forward, no option to play without this travesty of a 'story' unless you abandon the career mode entirely and just play in the sandbox, which doesn't quite hold the same appeal. I've never seen such an otherwise enjoyable game brought so low by the addition of such an ill-conceived and executed framework that never needed to be tacked onto it in the first place.
I should like Planet Crafters. It is entirely inside my wheelhouse and seemingly universally beloved, but every step of this game is like pulling teeth for me, and it's mostly down to clunky underdeveloped UI/UX that remains untouched from the original Next Fest demo from years ago. The onboarding is terrible. You start the game with a vague rolling list of objectives that may or may not be self-evident from their title, but offer no hints as to how or where they may be accomplished. Certain constructions can only be constructed indoors, some only outdoors, and some higher tiers of construction invert where they can be placed. Some of these are logical, others completely nonsensical. Even once you figure out those elements for yourself, you always have to deal with the awkward system of installing upgrade modules and the perpetual "programmer interface" that's just unpleasant to look at and deal with. The upgrades screen in particular is a nightmare, with each specific tree of upgrades just being an unbroken horizontal list that you have to click on furiously to scroll through. 90% of the game is running around, managing your oxygen levels, pointing your Future Gun at stuff and clicking at resources to pick them up, which just reminds me of No Man's Sky but somehow worse. The remaining 10% is building stuff which will fight you tooth and nail anytime you try to dig in and make it look decent. Support structures are all but mandatory to keep shelters from hovering, but then when you attempt to build the shelter it has zero snap-to with the support structure and either sinks into it or ends up hovering anyway. The terraforming mechanic is a novel idea to give a sense of progress, but that progress is frustrating and unsatisfying for me when all it boils down to is slapping down a bunch of machines wherever you feel like. Ultimately it ends up feeling like a janky, directionless sandbox that hands you a gold star every time you build enough of one kind of thing.
Soulstorm certainly accomplishes its job of being a more worthwhile story followup to the first game. It's just a shame about almost every possible aspect of the gameplay. Way back when the first Oddworld game released on the PS1 and was a surprise hit, the studio got the mandate from their publisher: push out a sequel inside of 9 months. Against all odds, they managed to pull it off and delivered a game with more levels, more puzzles, more interactions, more mechanics, more challenge, more Mudokons to save... and a story that was a bit of a nothingburger. Still, Exoddus was a hell of a game, and fondly remembered. The main mind behind the series has wanted a do-over of Exoddus for a long time, and while Soulstorm does provide a more serviceable story, told in an ever-imaginative world with some genuinely breathtaking visuals, the gameplay rapidly gets bogged down in a hodgepodge of misinformed, underbaked, overwrought, buggy, inconsistent, frustrating, repetitive mechanics and encounters. You have to tangle with checkpoints (and sometimes unfixed gamebreaking glitches) that can and will lock you into unwinnable situations and force a full level restart, constantly fumble with an utterly vestigial crafting system, deal with some genuinely terrible level layouts, be miserably hamstrung by the karma system in everything you do if you want the True Ending, and worst of all, have to both survive and efficiently dispatch the threats in the mass escape sequences. It's not a bad game to watch an abridged playthrough of, but it has ironically become the mirror version of Exoddus; it went all in on presentation and had no idea how to build a fun game around it.
