Eco

The game is one of my favourites. It's got a good skill system and keeps you busy. Though I'm not the biggest fan of the multiplayer side of it, I am quite fond of creating new maps and attempting to go as far as possible by myself. It does take a lot of work and many hours of labour to move forward science-wise, so do keep that in mind, if you plan on not working with 30 other players. I have spend over 800 hours in this game over 2 accounts and they keep updating and improving the game. I recommend it wholeheartedly, to anyone.

If your thinking yeah awesome ill start building my world..... no its long its all in real time and you cant learn skills but once a day so your dependant on having other people playing with a common goal.... this game is great in theory but when you try to play .... it just dosent work im not waiting 33 days to be able to have all the skills ... i wish i could refund this i spent 10 hours trying to learn the crafting i made everything i was able to craft and stone walled waiting on a 24 clock to tick.... no thank you

I really want to love this game - creating a society in which you have to work together to achieve an ultimate goal while not destroying the environment? Yes please! I was ready to forgive the weak graphics for that.

But it's just so unwieldy! Even basic things such as building are completely random. My very friendly server neighbours brought me a lot of building material so I could directly start with a brick house. But the elements just don't snap into each other and it's inexplicable what I'm doing wrong. Also, if you want to renovate your house to go to a higher tier, you have to replace EVERY. SINGLE. BLOCK. individually.

I hope it will get better as it moves through early access.

If you enjoy building and open world games you will love this game.

it was a nice game, but now it is buggy, weird and the animations are not great, i dont know when it became this bad because i revisited it after many years.

When you lay down to sleep in your tent your characteer does not even close his eyes instead he looks at you in a weird way and his leg is bugging through the blanket.
When you open a door it opens in low fps but i play on max settings.
The pickup animation is not great it is very slow.
The eating animation is also very slow.
The proportions are not right (hand is to big)
This game takes a lot of time to do things and yet they made everthing even slower with this st***d animations.
That was not the case years ago, it is in early acccess since 7 years now and this is just crazy for a game that was also selling to schools for 500 $ for ''education''.
I played almost 2 ours yesterday after revisiting and im done with this game already.
So i would not recommend.

Really fun game and very interesting mechanics, the only down side is how quickly servers will sometimes die out. Absolutely would buy especially if on sale

After 80 hours of intense gaming, I would give 4/5 this game. Idea is brilliant, gameplay is interesting (for those who like this kind of games ofc.) graphics is advanced minecraft, might be better, but still base building is great. Trade system is something that kept me going in this game. On official servers where you have limited time of playing on server is interesting idea, so you cant actually slack and mess around. You just have to focus and play smart all the time and use that time to do right stuff and all things you can do are so much.

Bad thing is bugs, lags, delay in arrow shoting, random server disconection, animals walk or crawl on sea.. but the creators of the game have to make something that will draw a lot more people on servers.. lack of people after 4,5 days or even more is really bad thing.. cause way I figured this game or server wipe cant function without everyday active people.. so.. thats it.

My friend describes the game well as being "insanely crunchy". Indeed, the moment-to-moment gameplay is a little janky, and everyone I've ever tried to introduce the game to has been confused with the UI and crafting systems. However, I've never played a game that lets you build a society in quite the same level of depth as Eco. It's truly impressive, and I hope the developers can continue to build on it over time!

i love this game. i generally download it after a patch, play it for about 15 hours straight and then not touch it for 6 months. but the gameplay is very fun and ive met a few people playing it. really enjoyed when they added towns and stuff, though i feel bad now when i abandon my house. but overall this game is very fun and well worth it.

Tutorial alone took a couple hours, game is full to the brim with unnecessarily clunky mechanics

Honestly, just a decent game to play by myself, sure playing solo has it's issues and isn't the easiest thing to do but it's worth it, although the music does remind me of minecraft a little too much but that could be my weird brain associating the two.

Best game to relax after a hard working day (in RL)
Best game for both children and grown ups
Best game to socialize with people from different parts of the world

The tutorial is screwed up just enough that you get passed your 2 hours before encountering bugs that do not let you advance further.

CONTEXT
Some of my gaming buddies wanted to try this. We ultimately decided on a different game for now, but I was still curious about trying Eco to scout ahead for our next game. If nothing else, I love the premise, and it sounded like it had some really neat details in terms of how the world works. I thought I might have fun playing on my own.

SINGLE PLAYER? --> good luck
I tried starting the game. There's no single player option. When I tried to play solo, it asked me when I wanted to play (hours and days of the week) in order to find a server that fit my playstyle. It asked me how long I wanted to play for a single session -- one or two or three hours at a time? I was like, "Uhm, I don't want to commit right now. Just let me dink around." Nope. You MUST use a server.

GAME CREATION
It took a sec for me to start a new local server. It took a while for the server to start. Along the way, it again asked me what days of the week and what times I'd be playing, and how long I wanted to play for a given session. It also asked if I wanted to limit other players' playtimes to one, two or three hours per day. If they tried playing longer, then their character would get exhausted and wouldn't be able to make further progress. The rationale given was to prevent some players from getting more experience than other players. It asked me how much I wanted to limit my skill progression so I'll depend more on other players. Yep, the game is telling me again that solo players aren't welcome. I limited myself to ten different professions, whatever that meant.

CHARACTER CREATION
The character creation choices feel like male characters were an afterthought. I'm a guy, and I felt like the characters seemed some combination of being childish, effeminate, non-binary or fairy-like. The clothing choices were few (e.g. two "shirt" options and only four "bottom" options, plus socks and three options for "shoes"). There's beards and mustaches for males, though all types of body hair (beards, mustaches, head-hair, and eyelashes) are forced to be the same color. The longest pants that are available are capris (3/4 length).

GRAPHICS
I have the best GPU and CPU money can buy, but as soon as I jumped into a world, my computer fan went nuts even on moderately-high settings. That tells me that they have a ton of optimization to do. Granted, it's still early release. I assume this will be a priority for them. Right now, the graphics look like eye candy for kids. It made me feel as though I at 38 am not in the target age-group. Nothing is subtle. Everything is brightly-colored and stands out from everything else in a way that was visually very busy. I think they were trying to make it too visually appealing and they overshot.

WORLD
The world felt like a modded version of Minecraft in some ways. It's all very blocky. There's water. You can jump over blocks and swim in water. There are lots of things you can pick up and eat. There's a robust nutrition system that looks interesting. (I like that.) There are lots of nearby blocks that look like they might contain some kind of ore. Ok, cool...if a bit too convenient. It felt like I was being placed in this perfect, utopic starting place where everything I'd need for a long time would be within 30 blocks of where it placed me. (I'm sure that's not true, but it still felt a bit too resource-heavy where I spawned.)

BUGS
There was a sort of tooltip-style tutorial: "Do these 5 things and check the boxes before we give you the next tooltip." I looked up, down, moved around, and tried to press F5 to change to 3rd player perspective, as I was told to do. Nothing. I checked the controls to see what key was linked to this action, and it listed F5. I tried remapping it to F5 by pressing F5, and it warned me that F5 was already being used for this action. (True.) Regardless, pressing F5 had no effect whatsoever.

I tried closing the game and restarting it. When I jumped back on my own server, it had me download the map. Again, with an uber-high-end computer, it took about half a minute to do so on a brand new map. It feels so awkward having to download a map from my own computer. I think it should have been designed better.

I tried dinking around a little more, but I was already frustrated at it because of the character creation, and as these bugs piled up, I realized I had less and less interest in the game.

CONCLUSION
I ultimately asked for a refund.

If my gaming friends are still interested, I'll point them to this review. If they all want to try it, I'll play with them. I'm sure multiplayer play will be better. After all, the game seems to assume it. I won't be eager, though.

I'd like to try this game again. It looks like it has potential, but right now it feels like it's geared for kids and does not support solo play natively. I hope to try it again, and I hope that I'll be able to change my rating and edit this review.

The game still has bugs... the keys don't always work to show the commands. There are glitches in it. It runs very hot on my gamer laptop. I like the graphics but they are not always correct. It is a very slow game....

The game itself is okay fun better with more people ofc. but holy balls the new maintenance system sucks major butt...

Not for people that cannot work together with others. Very fun game with the right people.

I really enjoy this game! This is perfect for all alike who want to make a community grow and flourish. This is a great game to do to relax and unwind. Love to play this with my husband as well. Over 1200 hours on this game

Been out for so many years now, and they're yet to solve their biggest issue; Significant player drop off after the first day of any server.
This game can be playable in singleplayer, but it's 100% designed around multiplayer situations.

For now; don't bother with community servers unless you're an established group of friends. Servers die off after the first week leaving a small group of players to carry the whole servers industry.

Additionally, the build system sucks ass, and there's an xp multiplier system that penalises you for building with different materials other than what tier you're at. Want to build a stone wall, or a wood floor in your metal tier house? sure; but now your xp multiplier is shot.

I hope they fix at minimum their player burn-out because this game has great potential.

The game is ok, its EA and it shows as not every profession is fleshed out properly. They lumped the painter in with scientist which shows they ran out ideas there, its a weird placement for a profession.

Some craft recipes dont make sense like the bookshelf needing high tier lumber and paper when you already can make boards and dowels at a lower tier. The point of a bookshelf is its storage is to put books into you dont make it already filled with books.

There are weird gamified choices that make no sense like room tier level. It doesn't matter if I make my house out of crap wood or top quality wood the stuff inside should still function the same. Glad I could mod the game to remove this weird restriction but only for my sever, I would be stuck with that bad design if I play on any other.

There is weird inconsistancy with stack sizes like dirt. You can hold 10 in your hands, store 10 in a wheelbarrow but only store 5 in stockpile and only dig up and carry 1 with a shovel. They really should all be the same number across the board its another gamified thing existing for no valid reason. Also when you compare dirt to other blocks like building materials you get even weirder stack sizes of 15 or 20, who knows why you can only carry and stack 15 mortared stone when you carry and stack 20 bricks, they are very similar and would weigh about the same yet have a different stack sizes.

The game also has some weirdness with encouraging the player to increase theer house xp multiplier like having 3 toilets in your bathroom, its out of place and feels like the game is telling you how to build your rooms also bloating up the space needed for those rooms.

This game takes a while to get good and I'm not confident enough I will like it. But Steam's refund policy is 2 hours, and it has taken me almost that long to figure out some very basics. and im simply not confident enough i'll like it to go over that 2 hour allotment. If only there was some limited demo of the game that let me play around and learn the mechanics without a timer

Eco is one of the most unique, interesting games I've ever played. On the surface, it looks like any other block based survival game, but when you dig deeper, you find that's just a veneer - the real game is actually about developing community. That's not really a skill that most games require or gamify, and you'll have very different experiences of the game depending on the community you find yourself falling into. Nevertheless, Eco is a masterpiece filled with unique concepts, and clearly a labor of love.

The building requirements are excessive and cannot be disabled.

To put down 95 percent of crafting tables they have to be built inside a room, and each crafting table calls for a specific tier room. The tier of the room is based on the material that's being used (adobe, wood, lumber, bricks, concrete etc) and you HAVE to use slanted roofs (so forget about underground bases it's not going to happen). This restriction makes all buildings needing to be built with the same boring boxy concept.

If you have any sort of open hole in your roof or you're missing a door it is no longer considered a room and the crafting tables won't function. Certain crafting tables that have exhaust stacks STILL require to be inside a room but also requires a hole in the roof to ventilate. But if there's a hole in the roof then the room is no longer considered a room so the table does not function. It's obvious that the dev's want a building built in an extremely specific way because they can't figure out how to code it in a way that allows for a variety of different style buildings

Its a pretty decent game, very social and very time taxing game. I would def recommend playing this over a vacation as this game runs for a long time.

it's a good game to pass time and have fun with other folks

Players are helpful and the game is fun once you understand what to do. Teaming up with neighbors is a blast.

Server connections can drop out often, making a long-running game difficult to catch, but if you miss some time on it, you might not be as close to the apocalypse endgame as you otherwise would. Eating food and gathering resources can be very slow.

it is a very awesome game, economy systen, ecology system, simulations of real world scenarios (grounp and air pollution), law system, government system.

this game is minecraft on steroids, it is what minecraft should have been from the start, endless gameplay, play however you want to play it.

i have 40 survival games and this is my favorite, a game of peace and chill to just build and evolve. i play almost all survival games singleplayer mode but i do recommend 3-5 players because there is so much to do and it just makes the progress faster.

i am hosting my own server and playing with high difficulty solo mode and just my go to game to chill and relax and enjoy, the game has come a long way and is still beeing developed and these developers are very good at what they do, you will haave a good game for a long time and the game is just getting better and better.

what would you do if you could be the boss of an entire planet? or maybe co boss with 2 cities? how would you run it?

many games teaches us alot of things in real life, this game learns alot about politics and government, and how to be green, and economy :)

9 of 10 stars, the missing star is because of the graphics, it could be better but atleast it beats minecraft by miles. you get used to the graphics and its a beautifull world still

I thought this game would be fun but I very much dislike just how much mechanics are locked behind multiplayer. I remember starting up this game, not having anyone to play it with and being so excited to experience all its mechanics, but I was only able to do a small handful. I'd very much love a version in single player that allows you to work with npcs but unfortunately it seems the devs aren't interested in that. Neither did I want to play with randoms so I got a refund. The game defo has some interesting mechanics though and if you ever want to live in a minecraft civilisation video that seems to be what they're going for. I was super excited tho it seems the single player was simply too limiting

This is a amazing open world sandbox where every choice you make has consequences from throwing stuff on the ground to making entire species go extinct and the fact that you have to mange everything while preventing a meteor from hitting you is a great concept for a goal.

Absolutely love this game. It does have a bit of a learning curve but if you are willing to talk to people in the world you will have a great experience. This games problem is the amount of servers when you log on will be a bit overwhelming to choose one. Find one that has fewer days and more people. Chat trade and make friends and this game will be amazing for you. It is the adult version of minecraft.

Pretty fun game lots to do and figure out many animals pollution and so much more

Game is very very bugged, don't buy it in actual state....

It took so long for me to feel comfortable with my basic skills, but this game has amazing depths and breadths. Can't wait to see where it goes.

Love the game, both single and multiplayer. Lately I've been playing multiplayer. It is one of the only multiplayer games I have actually enjoyed. MP, it is actually a kind of community simulator, in which you specialize in certain fields, and set up a shop to sell your wares. Of course there is more to it than that......

The perfect place to relax. It's a great building game on the surface, but it has so much depth as an economy sim. All the details and collaboration is amazing. There is freedom to set up your own environment and rules. It can be as complicated as you want it to be. Constant balances and updates.

ive never made it past carts and the first car wheel but its still an amazing game

A bit unpolished for the moment but a great project to spend time on overall

Masterclass but you have to immerse yourself in the game and play with a community or a lot of friends to enjoy it.

honestly it wasnt worth it
server choice is luck of the draw
RIP eco free market

If you play on multiple devices, say a desktop and a laptop, then do not get this game. Whenever you join a server on one device you cannot join that server on your other device even tho the steam account is identical.

I was on the fence for recommending or not recommending this game.
It's... fine, but a bit grindy and uneventful for gameplay. I last played a while ago though and with the right (large) group of people it's fun, so I give this a pass and recommend it.
If you only have a couple people it'll probably feel more of a grind than fun.
Basically, the people make the game fun, so it's a bit hard to recommend, but, they are still adding and improving to the game, so I give it the thumbs up.

Around 700 hours as of this review. I've played off and on over the years. This is thumbs up, but not really an enthusiastic one. A lot of hard work was put into this game. Some of it works, some does not. Development is at a snails pace, and often places its priorities in areas that are nice but could be put elsewhere to keep things fresh and people coming back. The community is really the only reason I've come back.

There are plenty of different types of careers for different play styles. There is so much information in this game that it takes time to learn. But I love those deep games with all the statistics. In fact I wish it had more. At the end of the world I'd love to know who mined the most sandstone on Tuesdays, or who ate the most single thing the most, or who ate the things they thought tasted horrible the most. Make some obscure awards each round to keep people interested in sticking it out until day 31. The problem is most servers tend to die 3/4 of the way through.

There is no X factor. There is no random something that really keeps things fresh. Like the dolphin statue. Make rare gems, rare items, rare animals, fish, events. How about different endings? Maybe the laser destroys the asteroid but all the smaller chunks are now going to crash down a month later? How about small asteroids hit randomly weeks before and contain ore for some rare T6 recipes?

How about alternative methods to destroy the asteroid (as space race?) One team lasers, one team Giant Rocket...

Boats were nice but nobody uses them. I think trains or minecarts would have been far more useful to automate mining.

That being said I have enjoyed my time and I want to play more but it is only the MODS that save this game. Vanilla is just too tedious.

Mining was fun and they broke that now. At least give us a slider on world gen so we can customize the size and density of deposits. Spread the ore out a little more. It becomes tiresome needing to mine in 3 spearate biomes as a miner profession.

So much room for improvement in performance as well. So many voxel based games know how to preload chunks and reload them ahead of time. This game you can't drive in a vehicle on any server without needing to stop to wait for chunks to load.

I don't hate it. I love what they tried to pull off and I'm also tired of waiting on this snails pace of development to continue to make this game something much more. Then again I've met some really nice people and I'm generally a solo player. So it does get my thumbs up. It is worth the purchase.

Mods have saved the game from someone playing this once and then leaving.

Great game! super intricate and interwoven with other players... its a great experience! highly recommend! cant wait to see where they take this game!

great game, my favorite part is pulling out a chainsaw latter in the game and completely cutting down the jungle(s) and redesigning them as i like. i can either make them as dense as ever to harvest even more wood or i can make shapes like a man fallen over board from a ship drowning. the limitations are unlimited and just take time. make sure to keep thinning your jungles if you want a certain shape though.

its a job and not that good of one. it would only be fun hanging out with the guys and maybe a challenge if you make it a race.

If you have a good group of friends to play with, this game is great and an easy recommendation. Basically the game is minecraft but with a fully functional economy and governmental system compete with laws, voting, money printing and more. Better yet all those systems are fully moldable by the players in the server so it really does feel like a societal simulator.

I don't recommend trying to jump in solo though. The game does very little to teach you its complicated mechanics and the Wiki is out of date more often then it's accurate. Also given this game is all about cooperating as a group over 30-60 IRL days trying to play with random people on the internet is about as inconsistent and frustrating as you would expect it to be.

I don't recommend this game after my experience today I spent 3h connecting to the server and creating my own game and two days back I also spent 3h connecting to my friend's game unsuccessfully.

Sorry for my english it's not my native language.

It's a fantastic game that I've sunk way too many hours into because it's so much fun. And I don't play with people I know either, I can only imagine how great that is.

Amazing game, have only played solo and I could so see how great this would be in multi player. even fun solo

Best game of the century. I mean it. It deserves a lot more players, because it is essential to collaborate with all active citizens!