Empyrion - Galactic Survival

I have (at time of review 75 hours) in the game. I highly recommend this game as it seems to be pretty balanced and really good mods for it as well. Keep it up!!!!

Absolutely recommended.

Steeper learning curve than 'No Man's Sky', and in most ways a lot less 'arcade' like... No Man's has some tech thrills, but gets repetitive quick. Empyrion, however, is so technical in other ways of building and designing, it'll take years to professionalise... but you start having fun, quick.

Empyrion probably needs to expand worlds making them larger, with real-world distances... mayhap randomize creature creation... maybe add 'predator' level creatures that hunt other creatures... but this is on its way to being awesome.

Still rough around the edges, but is a decent single-player experience along the lines of Plant Nomads for the first part of the game (before going interplanetary). The controls are pretty confusing as each device seems to need a different key to enter and exit it. TAB does one thing, F4 does exactly the same for a different inventory, and I usually end up pressing a whole bunch of exit buttons before I hit the right one to exit a particular inventory. Annoying, but not devastating. The keyboard control is cranky as I get a lot of repeats when I hold a key down, so I'm auto-walking off cliffs unless I carefully tap W one step at a time, otherwise I just take off down the cliff. The crafting is a bit too easy, IMO, and should take longer to work up to the "factory" and large fabricator. But still worth the price, and the planetary scenery is gorgeous as long as a sauropod isn't ripping you to pieces.

I really tried to like it... I don't. The beginning is not that fun and I guess the game is just not for me.

This is a fantastic game. The Reforged Eden workshop scenario makes it a very fantastic game. I have played it more than any other game.

In comparison to allot of building based space games this can be counted among the few that actually has a universe that feels alive. I think that these game designers understand that not everyone wants to play online with other people, and as a matter of fact want to get away from people. At least in this game their are npcs to interact with and fight with. The NPCs seems to be a working progress but the game doesn't feel completely empty like Space Engineers does. So far Im very happy,

Staying away from this one. Bought the game years ago for me and my son to enjoy. After about 8 years we decided to come back to the game with me buying 19 copies or more for a few people I game with to join a server. We decided to play In the official server rather then modded to learn the game with nothing but bad experiences from that point on...

1) The bugs In the game that can cause you to lose ships or hover crafts Is funny at first until you cannot get your ship back.

2) We have lost ships that were built that vanished Into thin air.

3) Mechanics and NPC's are buggy making the vanilla game trival to play and enjoy.

4) Discord support from admins (CHAD BRADLEY) come of as A#$HOLES.

5) Your ship can get stuck If you switch permissions after docking ships (MAJOR HEADACHE).

6) Bugs and exploits that allow players to take advantage of the game creating major headaches for host.

7) Playing In the official servers get boring to many due to how easy Its setup for players to get ANYTHING and EVERYTHING by sitting at a trade station and every 10 mins you can sell bridges and matrix's to a trader to make unlimited money.

We decided to pull the project when the server had a Improper shutdown and for what ever reason the factions were wiped and players experienced players found a way to steal everyone ships not understanding that the actions they caused made people not want to play anymore, shooting the only true pvp server avlb Into the ground.


I have a long laundry list of crap for this game I really do not want to explain. We decided to try to host our own server and make a PvP environment for the players but even setting up a dedicated server using the emp tool was a nightmare. An experienced player that has played for 8 years or so even had trouble helping to setup the server. Just a space game wasted with the potential to be something more. We will not be touching this again.

Play at your own risk and sanity...

This game is janky and has an ugly UI. If those turn you off just avoid it. That said the game is pretty fun if you have some patience. I recommend doing the tutorial because the base game doesn't really help you out.

There seem to be 3 major overhaul mods

Reforged Eden 2 - this is the most popular and the one I'm playing. It is a little grindy but has been fine for the most part.

Ad Astra 2 - from what i could tell it is a casual mode for re2 with a few other features.

Star Salvage Reborn - i couldn't get this one to actually work but apparently you don't need to mine or craft. You salvage ships. Seemed cool but I couldn't do the first mission.

I could barely play an hour of the this game before i got bored.

LACKING sooo much Graphics are actually mid not nearly as good as what is displayed.

Needs a better tutorial faze, Needs a better build mechanic
Game is hella Clunky and it feels more like a game that was smooshed together than a game that has a purpose.
Im sure ifthe more you put into the game it will get better but ts missing too much at this point to actually get a recommendation.

Terrible game, everything is badly done. Don't waste your time or money.

The Game looks good in general and I am interested in it but my new modern hardware seems not enough, so I think this company would need help to solve the issues. The game is lagging on a GForce RTX 4080 too much for the low level graphics quality it is providing. Nothing more to say.

I m not going to lie, there are a few other games out there that are better than this. But the game is okay, all things considered. It s pretty buggy, sure, but the mods makes the game better. Reforged Eden 2 is a fantastic mod

This game sux. Don't waste your money. That coming from a guy who bought it on sale. There are a lot of similar games out there that do the same things so look around and try one of those. Space Engineers for one. I hate buying games that suk. This is one of those.

Oh, one more thing, if you only have 8mb RAM then it's def a hard pass.

Edit: AS pointed out that should be 8GB of RAM. For a game with subpar graphics this one is a thirty SOB.

The game I always come back to play again.
Solo is fun, but its at its best flying in to a planet to take out a xirax outpost with a couple of your friends. Laughing so hard your eyes are watering and that one friend keeps dying in the exact same spot. Such a blast.
This is one of those games I always have installed. "just in case" one of my buddies wants to play.

I like this game because it's very open world and has lots to do. Trading, Pirate hunting, POI's for first person shooter. Ship build and base building is fun.

So far, this is the best ship design program I have found in regards to panel by panel customization. I know it is technically a video game and some others are supposedly better for realistic flight physics, but all 86 hours I have spent on here is just having fun designing ships in creative mode.

Well after 1900+ hours what can i say, its pretty clear Emp is my go to survival space game, deff a must try, its not perfect, but its the only space game that scratches allot of my needs in a space survival game

Forget Starfield. No load screens, more planets to explore and an even better ship designs.

I love this game. I have over 900 hours, several giant playthroughs, and dozens of self made blueprints.
That said - Its a buggy pile of shit that requires almost constant monitoring of your save files, copying files to prevent corruption, regular re-loads of games to prevent enemies/entities from desyncing. Its badly optimized, the options are all arrow through instead of drop down, theres dozens of known bugs, some leading back to 2017 or earlier.

If the devs spent any amount of time updating this game to work through the buglists, turned on cloud saves, and provided any level of support for workshop besides just having it enabled, this would be a nearly perfect game of this genre.

It blends VERY fun, but un-technical gun battles, ship battles, exploration, salvaging, questing and more in a really fantastic mix that is a true joy to play when it works correctly. When it doesn't however, it's the most annoying pile of shit immaginable.

I really hope to see the devs do SOMEthing with the state of the game, and to anyone looking to pick it up - download Reforged Eden 2, and enjoy a ton of hours of fun.

Trashwear. Totally broken.

I had to fiddle with the settings to get the controller working and the game running at workable framerate. doesn't do things that basic games can do to make it playable when you launch it.

It looks like a game that was made in the 90's. Really shit graphics. Underwhelming.

Don't bother with this one. The devs don't care to listen to the people playing it and give the players things many request. Don't bother asking for machines to do something that only makes sense for them to do, you won't get it. It's their way or the highway and the players don't matter.

Empyrion is a great sandbox survival simulation game. Personally I love how you can just do what ever you feel like without being forced to progress through game story lines or set up game quests.
For a game created by a smaller lesser known developer Empyrion is at best fun to play, but clunky graphics, a ton of small game glitches like getting stuck in a wall or floor.
I really appreciate the vision the developers had when making this game, because they went all in when it comes to scale, detail and overall freedom to do as you please in an open universe simulation.
As far as playing the game outside of sandbox mode, it is very slow to progress where most of your time will be searching, locating and then slowly mining the materials you need to build a tool, only to find that it is to mine another resource that again lead you to need yet another. Basically the crafting absolutely every tiny little thing becomes long and tedious at best, which is why I think I only lasted maybe an hour in survival mode before switching to sandbox mode.
At least in sandbox mode you can simply manufacture tools, equipment and building parts without the need to spend literally days gathering a dozen or more resources for one item. It must take weeks of gameplay to self build a home base of any decent size.

I would recommend this game for those into survival simulators, but trust me it is way more fun cutting out the tedium and playing in sandbox mode. Oh, and if you are in sandbox mode you can simply float yourself out of glitches where you find yourself stuck in a wall, floor or even just frozen in midair unable to move. The magic float button sandbox mode offers gives you a way out without needing to reload or worse if you haven't saved... restart all over again.

Feels like a poor version of Minecraft. The user interface isn't good. Confusing help text throughout. Some text is capitalised, some isn't, and it all just feels amateur. Not going to put myself through more of this game which feels like someone's weekend project in Unity.

Besides having the most garbage server browser on planet Earth, it's actually an incredible game.

far better than any other space sandbox games where you can do anything and don't get attached to the story line like in the no man's sky and most importantly, this game get's updates and bugfixes continuosly.

Sadly buggy game yet it does so many things right and really well I still enjoy it immensely, from the working medical stations and beds on the ship to the faction system and base defense with turrets.

Laughably bad. Looks like a bunch of free assets slapped together to make the next "10 minute winner" indie game competition.

Great game if you like building! takes awhile to get used to it though, at least for me it did but its really fun once you learn the ropes!

I did enjoy this game for the state that it was in, but I wouldn't recommend playing it for anyone who was thinking about it for this one reason. My friend was banned for 80yrs by the developer. Get this, we were talking in our group chat about problems with the game. Complaining if you must know on issues we had with the game. My friend happened to make a comment about the devs. Then instantly he was booted from the game and told he was banned for from the game for 80 years for his comment. Like the creep who made this game must have been some sort of peeping tom. Because he was literally monitoring what we thought was a private conversation between ourselves. We were not in global chat, we were using our faction chat talking with each other. The dev didn't like our opinions so he abused his position to make his childish point. I will never play anything from that company again. There are plenty of other options out there that I can get my entertainment from besides playing a game from a developer that annoints himself king of his digital world. He can go F(%$ himself.

I just hit 3k hours in this game and thought it was high time I wrote a review. Needless to say I love the game and have played it for many years. It has changed so much over the years and I love where it is at now. The developers have put a lot of work into the game and are still actively working on it.

Food poisoning and bleeding simulator. Kenshi's world is more forgiving.

7 Days To Space Engineers if it wasn't so bloody complicated you need a PhD in Rocket Science. It IS good don't get me wrong and I did play it once back in Alpha and refunded it cos it was looking absolutely horrid. Dear Developers, your game looks good but I hate to admit that the competition looks better already so even though you upped your game already and yes it is a Voxel based game, SE2 is one as well, is no excuse to be slacking in the graphics department.

That being said Empyrion already looks a mile better than what it used to look like. It plays relatively well but I think it would benefit from some Story focussed Scenarios and some CPU/RAM optimization which unfortunately is a sickness all Voxel based Games suffer from.

Regarding the Story focus, as a VA myself I'd be GLAD to lend my voice and creative abilities to the devs cos this is a game I initially gave up hope on and now start to believe in myself as I can see that these devs are MAKERS. I mean they just up and went and did their game anyway, contrary to the harsh criticism, taking it into account - honestly it must have been incredibly hard work to get there and now it's surprisingly good. Some games in the Space game genre aren't offering things that Empyrion has and if these guys leverage that well enough? Ooooho, this could be a real banger soon!

But enough of the coulds and woulds - Empyrion in its current state needs WORK. It's SOLID but it needs WORK. I can imagine the multiplayer experience being kind of fun but as a sandbox game it lacks exactly what SE lacks as well - direction. Sure you have missions and factions but nudging the players into feeling like they got many more options than just your average survival and faction grind tasks is more than just planting Quest NPCs into the world and telling the player via popups there's a frequency nearby.

Meaning it lacks engagement but not as much as other sandbox games. It's going somewhere with it, for sure but in its current state you need much more patience to cope with it.

I've played this game multiple times since its inception for long periods of time. I've made custom scenarios, setup dedicated servers for playing, etc. It's really a very enjoyable game that will pull you into it for days at a time.

Honestly, through all the survival games I've played, I just cant like this one, heres my reasons why.

1: The UI is clunky, often cluttered, and many functions are not immediately clear.
2: The tutorial is not only full of mind numbing text walls, but VERY poorly streamed youtube videos that will play like a slide show and remain unresponsive to any attempts to turn down the ear splitting max volume.
3: While pretty, the environment leaves much to be desired in the way of interaction, maybe I'm unlucky, but to spawn in, have 1 Poi within 3Km of the drop pod and maybe 3 underground veins [2 of which were silicon] the aprox. 27 minutes I spent just roaming with the scanner out to only ever ping those same nodes over 1Km away was disappointing.
4: Withing 10 minutes I found water, and died to it because apparently once your head dips under, swimming is not an option, though more to the point, neither is climbing a mild slope to walk out, your character wants to die and be free of this hell, help them.
5: The voice for the tutorial. I bet you'd expect 'oh I hate ai blah blah.' no... it's just ear gratingly awful to listen to and made me personalty want to take an ice pick to both drums.
6: interactions and their confusing introductions. Why is shift-f practically a multi-tool interaction? It's used for eating food, using just about any expendable resource from your inventory, oh and... picking up place machines... I easily had an immediate issue of running back to queue up some gear, only to accidentally scoop up the crafter and have to drag it from my inventory again. thats to say nothing of the strange way it implaments 'take all'.
7: Debuffs and conditions. I don't know if maybe it's just part of an invisable clock or something, but I ate my energy bars and a few vegetables while running around and my character seemed fine with that. Maybe 10 or so minutes later, I suddenly have indigestion with no warning, my hunger gets tanked, and I'm unable to do anything as even the few herbal plants I had on me didnt cure it and died. granted I can just spawn right back near the thing, but I generaly deem it a bad thing, when I have to ask why I died, and have no way to get any concrete answer.

All in all, this is my personal experience, it may differ from yours in a number of ways depending on your starting options but thats that. You may see I don't even have 1 hour of playtime, and personally that's my warning against this game. I can usually get enthralled into games like these within the first 10 minutes and find something to do that will lead me on a journey for hours, and even if I only play that game for say 6 hours I'd consider it fine as I'd likely go back to it, or at least that's my thought process. Unless this games suddenly overhauled from the ground up I will likely never touch it again.

I am sure the devs have worked hard on this game, and I do applaud that they've put in the effort to put their ideas out there, but it's simply not for me. For those who enjoy this game, more power to you, and always reach for the stars.

Game has tons of glitches as of 030325 the instead of fixing the original the company makes new DLC's that work even worse. The workshop is the ONLY thing saving this game and because of the ship designers this game has a great open world to fly massive ships of all kinds in. The game is very time consuming I have over 380 hrs and I don't even like this game.

So little warning that something about to kill you - you just die. So many brutal game play mechanics

I really like these type of games, but the controller interface is so clunky and counter-intuitive. Of the 2.3 hours I have played, I estimate 1.2 of that was trying to figure out how to get it to do what I want to do next. I will try mouse/keyboard next and update my review if it makes it any better.

Great game!!

Character development could improve a lot, buying skills with credits makes no sense.

There is a missing opportunity to use exploration and reverse engineering. You should learn how to make ships and base assets by exploring different planets and finding shipwrecks and buildings, then disassemble their parts a number of times to unlock the corresponding skill.

Still, had a great time playing it!

only limited by your imagination when it comes to building ships, easier to deal with than space engineers, but graphics are not quite as good, still a lot of fun though

A really good, involved game, but the tutorial needs a lot of work. The tutorial is not really relevant to game play, and it's boring. The game is great.

this is the only game i need. it's like legos, but also you can build a lego space ship and go to space, and then explore and endless galaxy, collecting and upgrading your lego spaceship. and its got fps combat, which isnt great, but adds to the world building. i havent even explored half the aspects of the mods, which are more combat focused. one draw back is the building is somewhat limited. more "blocks" of sharper angles/curves would be amazing. TL:DR perfect balance of survival and building, in a space setting (like NoMansSky but more Legos)

something like that

Empyrion is an extremely janky game with a steep learning curve, but once you get past the initial hurdle and it all clicks, it's an amazing experience. You'll have to look past some flaws like the rather lackluster ground AI and enemies spawning out of thin air inside POIs. There's also loads of design flaws in the mission system that require very specific steps, which can lead to you breaking them, but luckily the devs recognized this and let you skip objectives. A big flaw which also affects mods, is the fact that some updates will require starting new games in order for new content to show up in your game. Despite the flaws, the ship/base building, world design and feeling of exploration are great. Designing my own original ship was really fun.

The visuals can be a mixed bag where it sometimes looks great but then you get wonky looking character models or stretched textures all over the place. Performance is alright overall, but the new UCH bases in the experimental build have some performance issues for me.

I've played through the vanilla main story missions and the new UCH missions in the experimental build and I enjoyed most of it, but some missions were a bit tedious, though most of them were fun. The last UCH mission has a bugged section though, which makes it incompletable unless you noclip through some locked doors. There was a distinct lack of space battles against other vessels in the missions though.

The survival aspects mostly matter in the beginning or when you get stranded somewhere, like when my ship got shot up by some patrolling drones while I was inside a POI, which forced me to build a base and collect resources to build a new ship and get off that stinking rock.

Overall it's a good game if you can look past its flaws. Lots of missions, custom scenarios and RP opportunities to keep you busy.

very buggy and graphics are meuh

WARNING: Constant fishing pop up prevents normal playing without providing personal information through email.

Please optimize. I used to play this game a lot with my friend, his setup is not the best. Recent updates ruined it.

This games bugs are ridiculous, you frequently will lose your stuff, spawn in places that you didnt even leave in, and now my end game save just got erased. Do not buy this game if you want to have fun. Get no mans sky or something instead. Its not worth the mental preassure this game puts on you.

edit: oh and btw all of these bugs I could fix in a day, and thats not me not knowing what im talking about, Im an indie dev that also uses unity. so, do what you will with that info, these devs make mojang look like the most productive devs in the world

Great game. Played it with my son on our own server. Had a lot of fun with it and tried out some mods like reforged eden 2. Reforged eden 2 made the game more enjoyable. Runs fine on linux.

This game splits the difference between Dual universe and Space engineers. I do like and have played both those games quite a bit. Dual Universe has gone off the rails as a playable game. This game is very playable and fun with just enough building to make something unique. Not as deep as either of the other games with destructable enviornments, but has things like neutral pois and prey animals. Numerous types of animals for different enviornments. NPC's all have reputation for you to earn of waste. Over all a very well balanced game with an active modder community on par with 7 days to die.

You want to go into some action ? go do a POI.
You want to farm and be cosy ? Chill around the galaxy or on different planets
You want to build something ? Have fun to build a space station or a planet base (with some defend-your-castle action !)
You want to trade you way to richess, go on you have a multitude of NPC who want to trade wit ya ! with mission and all !
From puzzle solving to creative building, you got everything you want into one game.

There's still no walking on moving ships all these years later. There's janky workarounds but I can't recommend a space game where you get clipped through the walls of a ship if it's moving and you're not sitting in a seat.