The first thing I noticed playing this is that the dash function feels schizophrenic; while grounded it gives you a short boost in whatever direction you're moving, in the air it gives you bullet time and an optional sideways juke, then boosts you in the direction you're aiming regardless of movement. It feels like two separate abilities that should never have been merged, and if you're ever trying to use it while close to the ground you'd best hope you aren't slightly off the ground if you meant to be grounded or vice versa, or you'll almost certainly die instantly. The next thing I noticed is the brutality and inconsistency of the combat and parkour; sometimes it feels like I drop dead apropos of absolutely nothing, occasionally shots seem to phase right through me but far more often than not I get to deal with somehow being cut down by a single bullet mid-dash even while traveling perfectly perpendicular to the projectile. Sometimes my idiot character will attempt to latch onto a ledge instead of wallrunning, sometimes walljumping just spits me off at an unrecoverable downwards angle for no apparent reason, some parts are generously checkpointed while others will funnel me through a 2-5-minute marathon of one-hit KO BS until I manage to execute the entirety of it flawlessly some 30 attempts later. There were also odd occasions of me clipping through geometry to my death, but the jank was overall tolerable... until I got to the mandatory tutorialization of the first unlockable ability, the Blink. You need to use it to cut through clusters of 3 placeholder enemies at a time to continue the game, but every time I do so it resets me and respawns the targets, telling me to try again. I'm softlocked. I am well versed in and completed Meat Boy, Mirror's Edge, AND Shadow Warrior, but gameplay-wise this feels like one of the worse potential outcomes of melding all three. Which is a shame because the aesthetic and premise were both really grabbing me.
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.
