Welcome to Oxygen Not Included - The Ultimate Game Review!

Hello Steemers and Welcome to my new series: The Ultimate Game Review!

In this Series, I share the very best reviews from our friends in the comment section of Steam. These Reviews left by myself and thousands of other users on the Steam Platform. Every Review is Credited to the Original Poster by their steam name from the Steam Gaming App. None or these reviews are taken from professional writers on blog sites, websites or articles. These are all just people like you and me and their thoughts after trying a game.

The reason I decided to do this was because most Gaming Reviews always seem so one sided, perhaps the Author has an agenda, perhaps they are predjeduce or a bigot. Who knows. With this series, I feel like Gamers, like you and I will get the absolute best experience possible when trying to determine whether the game is for you or not. The reason being, we will get to see the thoughts of not just 1 but many "Average Joes" like you and I and their thoughts after playing a game.

So please, sit back and Enjoy this Ultimate Game Review that I've compiled together for you!

Fun & Addictive

by Game_Dude

Very addictive, physics based survival game. Manage all sorts of problems while building and expanding an underground outpost. You need water, oxygen and many more ressources to build your home.

Example of the Physics: You have a coal power generator which creats carbon dioxide. Poisonous to humans, but heavier than oxygen. If you build grates in your base, carbon dioxide will drop down, and oxygen will raise up through your base. Hydrogen is lighter and will leave your base topside. It is important how you design your base, where you put what and which gases or liquids come and go.

You will need clean water for toilets, showers. That water becomes polluted and in turn will be useful for plants as fertilizer, and other things.

You're left with designing the sewage system, powering your machinery up and doing many more things. Which you do indirectly. You will give orders to collect, build, fight.. and your crew will take care of them. There's also the option to prioritize certain tasks over others.

Your crew can gain levels and improve their skills by practice. They have also at least one positive and one negative trait at start. Choose carefully there!

Oxygen Not Included is in Early Access and has only a limited amount of researchable items. The tech tree looks like just the beginning of one, yet offers already a wide number of items and possibilities.

Developed by the guys who made Don't Starve, I have faith that it will go the same way their previous game did. Which was exemplary.

As of now it offers already several hours of gameplay.

I can't Recommend

By Shaiel

Edit to change my review from earlier: It's literally unplayable and gives me the same error message after around cycle 28. It was fun at first figuring out what works and what doesn't work, but the game is broken and I can't progress because it keeps on crashing. If my idiot duplicants are dying because of shenanigans, I still want to try. But if the game won't even save my progress and keep crashing then what is the point? I keep reloading the save file (of like 6+ hours worth of work) and it just crashes again and again, so basically it has been a huge waste of time. I'm mad. It is absolutely not enjoyable to come back to my destructive, puking, crying characters again and again and again, without ever getting any progress despite building and reloading and trying. There is no reward, and the game crashes and the rebuilding doesn't end. Is this the experience you wanted us to have?

Also, whoever added the duplicant stress response of destroying things in the base & excessive vomiting - you really meant for that to happen??? There's nothing rewarding about your characters destroying your own base. In real life that would be the equivalent of self-injurious / self-harming behavior.

Things I initially liked:

• I like the art
• I like the urgency / survival aspect
• I like the micromanagement
• The interface was a little bit small and at first not very intuitive but I was able to zoom it and I paid attention to the little texts and details to understand what on earth was going on
• I don't like the feeling when my duplicants are starving / entombed / stressed out from working. There's a bit of a claustrauphobic feeling as well while you're digging around in the dirt and seeing all the pollution and things you have to sweep
• I am a little bit OCD about germs in real life so I love-hate that I have to disinfect stuff in this game

I was super hesitant to get this game for $20. However despite the negative reviews, I finally decided to get it yesterday when they pushed the new update with the germs. I loved Don't Starve & DST (have played hundreds of hours combined for DST on PC & PS4, depending on which friends wanted to play with me), and I supported those games when they were early access as well. I recommended this game previously but not anymore. Fix your game, Klei.

Not Enough Content

By Pulse

I am sorry for this game but at the current state it is not recommandable.
The base features are unfinished or not well executed (Fluid simulation is too slow and lacks depth and farming/food is confusing). Although the idea of this game is great, updates are released too slow and it looks like there is no real plan for the finished product. I hope that this will be fixed - not by adding new confusing content (like germs) but by creating a good idea of how the finished product should look like and streamlining the existing content and then adding new concepts and more buildings.

An Amazing Concept, Executed Poorly

By Vorg

This is a great game and an amazing concept, but it just falls flat. I cannot really place my finger on it. I just want a better game that is more fun to play. As it is now, I still play the game, but usually just find myself starting over because of some odd bug or error.

1. It is far too complex to be enjoyable, you will spend most of your time building pipes, wires, and pumps.
2. There is no point to the game beyond pure survival.
3. The base building concept seems like it would be amazing, but it is tedious and often ruined by one small miss-step.
4. Starting a game is tedious, having to roll through characters to get ones that are not stupid (see #5).
5. Odd characters, I often get cooks that are afraid of cooking and wont do that job function.
6. You can start with a bad map due to terrain generation ... after spending 10 minutes selecting characters.
   

ONI has only slightly missed its mark. The game could EASILY be corrected by simplifying a few of the concepts. ~Honestly, your characters can build a supercomputer but not a space heater?
~Why not just make a junction tile that has pipes and wiring built in for those of us that dont want to mess with it? Just the let pumps determine what goes where, example: turn pump "A" on and then set pump "B" as the exit source, as long as the pumps are connected by tiles the pumps will work ... done.
~Why cant your characters throw away jugs of urine? They just sit on the floor and the characters wont sweep them up.
~The characters need to vaccum up items off the floor like 10x faster, honestly, junk everywhere all the time.
~Nobody gets hypothermia from falling into water for 2seconds, andcharacters should not stay hypothermic.
~Add easier filter systems

This is one of the few games that I just want to be easier and far less tedious. I dont mind that the characters can get heat stroke or hypothermia, but it is annoying that it happens so much. You make one small mistake, or a toilet breaks, and your characters go to the bathroom on the floor ... or, more than likely they will go to the bathroom in your water supply.
I just wanted a neat base building game, but this is micromanaged survival.

Bad Devs

By Terodan

While enough fun to sink some hours into it at the current state, there is simply too much and not enough to do at the same time. Lots of Stuff that you can build in the game are so reliant on micromanagement, that after a few initial buildings etc you never really have some actual gradual expansion of your base where you improve and fine tune things, but several large projects which usually involves A LOT of digging/ressources in order to actually have them work in any meaningful way. Thought you can finally forget about electricity after you have gas generators since last time I played it was impossible to get any meaningful amounts of hydrogen? Nope it produces wastewater, which in turn produces polluted oxigen which makes people sick. "But now polluted water is important for farming! (which is also a micromanaging nightmare) yeah... it is but it is not delivered in a pipe like any normal person would expect, nope it collects in a puddle under the generator, releasing disease spreading polluted oxygen. Not to mention that the water pump that you need in order to actually get it into a pipe usues quite some of the electricity that generator actually produces.
Or that you actually need polluted water to water your plants. Maybe because of the fertilizer you think? Nope because you need fertilizer too. Which you btw produce out of drumroll polluted water.
The devs may or may not work on this, it sure seems like they are mostly on vacation or work on stuff to make the game even MORE micromanagy (looking at you weird new disease mechanic thats supposed to come)

Fun for a Few Runs

By Chipz

The game is pretty fun for the first two runs of the game, then it gets highly repetitive with little to do and explore.
I despise the AI in this game, as they take three cycles to mine some algae, so they can breathe, but they end up doing random things the whole entire time.
Red alert, which is an option to prioritize work instead of they own wellbeing, is the worst.
Their stress goes up so high after a minute or two, that they end up going crazy, ruining everything.

Although I love how you can design your own little base however you want, there is NOTHING else to do once you are fully setup.

Assuming you can live long enough and prevent your whole colony going insane, the game is all about gathering algae, until you can buy a machine that can turn water into oxygen and hydrogen. Once you do that, you need to buy a hydrogen based machine to create power. Create a machine to make polluted water into clean water, place a few vents to get rid of polluted oxygen, then you're mostly done as long as you can manage stress.

What to do after that? I dont know, explore? There isn't a clear objective in the game other than getting your colony to thrive.

I recommend this game to people who just love resource management.
I don't recommend this game if you're like me and get bored restarting a game after your whole colony goes crazy and people start breaking massage beds to reduce stress, then if they are fixed one person hogs the bed for 3 cycles of day/night, then people go insane and break everything yet again, but this time EVERYONE is insane and cant fix the massage bed.

^basically what happens everytime I fail.'

Overall, needs more work and a actual goal.

Final Verdict:

75/100

Great sound effects and art style, intriguing mechanics, fun and rewarding gameplay. It may become another Klei's hit but still has a big issue that needs addressing.

Once you've learned how everything works (by trial and error or from tutorials) and develop a stable base, you have reached the end game and there's nothing else to do except extreme end-game challenges (like making liquid polluted oxygen to turn into clean oxygen or condensing polluted water to purify it). It becomes too easy making the replayability factor tending to zero.

It's kind of disappointing since Don't Starve is so much more challenging. Even after you've learned everything, the risk of failing is always there which is not the case for Oxygen Not Included.

That said, the price they asking for is a bit much since you will reach end game stuff after 16-20 hours or so. Still, I believe is a great game, just a bit overpriced for the amount of reward you'll be getting.

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