Stellar Overload

game was shit when i played it and the dev thought wayyy to highly of themselves. the game was never ready for EA and because of one persons greed 16 "devs" lost their jobs. They continued to sell this game after development halted for over a year. So glad i saw the "cliff ahead" sign and jumped ship.

fun

I love this game so much, sadly there won't be any updates anymore.
The concept was fantastic, even better than Minecraft.
This was a good time.

it's a shame that this game has been cancelled. It had a potantial for being a great game, maybe being even better than minecraft, in my opinion.

The concept of this game was great but has been abandoned by the developers... There hasn't been an update since Oct 18, 2017 (according to steam) which wasn't much of an update anyway. The last serious update to this game was Sep 13, 2017 which is almost an entire year ago. Steam is doing the community a huge disservice by allowing these developers to profit off of customers under the preconception that it is in development still. The developers didn't manage their time or money correctly and came short of finishing the product. From what I understand they need around a million more in funding to complete it but from what I've seen I wouldn't hold your breath.

The developers haven’t posted an official reason why they aren’t working on it either. Instead you must dig through their forum posts and all you get is a reply from a developer to a customer explaining the issue under the forum post titled, “The game is not dead.” It seems very shady to me. There is also a language barrier which may be part of the problem but that shouldn’t be our concern.

In its current state you may get some enjoyment from what has been completed but many have complained about lag and other issues. Personally the game runs fairly well on my PC so I don’t have any complaints in that area. I played the game for about 18 hours before giving up on it. The hoverbike serves a rather large role in moving around the game world yet exiting the bike oftentimes places it way above the ground sometimes where you can’t even reach it without building a block tower to access it. This shouldn’t take more than a few lines of code to fix yet it’s still an issue. All the game needs is a landing mechanic… It’s also possible to get stranded in space between worlds which is highly annoying.

I simply can’t recommend this game in its current state especially since the store page leads customers to believe they are getting more than what already exists. If the developers updated their store page explaining the current development state of the game and the fact that they are taking a break developing it then I would be happy to change my review but as things currently stand I feel like they are taking advantage of unbeknownst customers.

8 months with no updates or news, most of the previous updates talk about the dev team and new members but don't talk about the game. The actual stories way too short, if you're looking for a fun building game, look into ScrapMechanic.

Let me put it bluntly for now: Despite all the insane beauty, gorgoeus breathtaking artdirection and potential this game provides it SEVERELY needs work on the technical front concerning stability, drawing distance and Framerate.

EDIT: Sadly no improvements so far on the technical front. :-/

I've been wanting to purchase this game for awhile now, but always found an excuse not to. Today I bit the bullet and bought it, along with some other games that were on sale for the holidays.

I jumped into the game to play, blinked and four hours had gone by.

Some of the early quests have you mining and gathering resources. I had amassed a sizeable collection, mining deep into the planet. Then I went to do one of the first "dungeons". I died numerous times in the same spot because I was trying to get my stuff back. I thought it was hopeless. Then I remembered my character's abilities and was able to retrieve all of the backpacks.

There are many elements similar to Minecraft, but these are two different games. Planets are small but big enough to be able to mine and explore for long hours without running out of new things to do. Unlike Minecraft, which is one endless procedural world, you're meant to move on to other planets once you've reached a certain point.

The crafting system is much more enjoyable than Minecraft, in my opinion. New recipes are acquired through gameplay and NPC's and you don't need to use an inventory grid to make something. That was one thing I hated about Minecraft, the crafting system.

This is an early access game, but so far there's been enough to keep me thoroughly engaged. I don't know how many quests there are, but it's well worth the asking price. As it is now, it feels like I'm playing a completed game. I can't wait to see what else they do with it.

When a game sucks you in and doesn't let go for 4 hours, I'd say that's a keeper in my opinion. Your experience may vary, but I can't find anything to complain about.

This is a fun game, actually. It's a story-mode Minecraft more than anything, but still fairly unique, and I think, better.

The mining aspect is definitely downplayed, for better or worse, with fewer instances of things to find underground, so far, and the best strategy is to build and/or mine a tunnel down an existing underground cave, since there are minerals that just appear in the cave systems themselves rather than in the ground.

The blocks are smaller than most block-mining voxel-world games and there are several shapes, and many material/color choices, so the world composed of these blocks is more detailed and beautiful, as are the creations you can make with them. The detail level is high enough that sprites are used less in favor of modeling trees and things almost entirely from the blocks alone.

It does not have a 'true' survival mode, yet, but you can start a creative game, and then switch it to 'survival' mode, which just enables some of the robot enemies pretty much. However, it does not have the same feel of even Minecraft survival in terms of enemies coming for you, or in populating the world with vilages and dungeons. The liveliness of the Story Mode vilages, rebels, and robots is gone. It's basically good for doing work in creative mode and then releasing it as a 'survival' multiplayer world. (A copy of it.)

However, a better survival mode is apparently on the list of things to do, being that it is still in Early Access and under development.

I play with Hard Enemies and Normal Death Penalty.

It runs pretty well with my Nvidia GTX 760 2GB card and only 8GB of RAM. I have had one crash during a several-hours-long session (more than 3 hours, maybe more than 5), but no other issues.

Eye strain.

Eye strain is a very big problem with this game. The brights are excruciatingly bright, and the darks are completely pitch black. Cubical Drift needs to even out their lighting levels and add a brightness slider to the in-game menus.

Other than that, the only complaints I have are the cheesy dialogue, linear progression, and silly crafting. You can think of it as being a 3D Starbound or Terraria.

Otherwise, this has the potential to be everything that Minecraft falls short of. All the mechanics are there. It just lacks... spirit.

If you dont like minecraft like games or incompleate games then I guess this review has worked for you, you can tick the 'found it helpful' box and move on, if you do, then onward ...

The animal and plant life are excelent, the diversity on Istin (the second planet) is breath taking. There are rabits and squirles and boars, and bees, and peacocks and praying manits, and more, a veritable menagary. A pity yoiu cant catch them (or maybe you can and I missed something), or yoiu could create a zoo.

The gravity is quite special, due to a cubic world (planet) each face of the cube has its own gravity (explained in an image on the game website). Digging with the digger tool (secon one) is a breeze and you soon find yourself in a tunnel with perculiar gravity at the bottom (or in the middle).

I shy away from the term minecraft clone, because while it shares an ancestory (or history) with ol'MC it differs from it in several distictive ways, nevertheless it also has some commonalities, mainly in crafting and architecture. WIth a limitless building world the architectural aspects move up the curve with a blocks per meter and block shapes (ramps, corners and such).

There is a multitude of substances, perhaps too many, which quickly fill up storage space.

THe game is early access and as such is not compleate, and probably, quite alot not compleate. There are several usable dungeons built into the main story, which is comming along nicely, and some unusable or cloned dungeons which are clearly just place holders.

All in all an interesting offering with plenty of potential. On the cinema scale I would say good value for money (I paid the price of a cinema ticket, popcorn and a large fizzy pop drink), look at the time I have already played the game, I think I've got value for money, and will dabble in it some more, then, oh, delight, come back in six months time to see what (if anything) the devs have made of this highly promising game.

This is more of an initial impressions than a full review. I picked this game up because the smaller voxel size makes the world gorgeous. There seems to be a decent amount of depth to be had as far as stuff to do, and it looks like they just added a public server. I also really like that I can stick the vehicle "engine" inside any build i want.

My biggest complaint is that the early game digger can only remove one block at a time, now I know this will be upgraded as I progess, but I really feel like the default digger should be able to remove a 2x2 because spam clicking to get through all these walls the game says i need to dig is fuuuuuuuuuuuuckin tedious and is making the early game way more unenjoyable than is even warrented, the devs should just change this.

So yeah, I want to keep playing, but this one block dig means I'm probably just tap away at the early game for now, I see myself playing for more extended periods at a time once I get the dig upgrade.

This title is very addicting, good graphics, nice concepts, controls are easy, doesn't throw you in the deep end straight away. Overall it's a neat little game.

I do have a few problems with it, but only 2 major things stand out for me right now.

1. When speaking to NPCs, the English is so bad in places, im not sure whether they google translated the entire game or they didn't proof read their game. (You'll know what I mean when you speak to a few NPCs.

2. The whole idea of the world rotating when going to a different surface of the planet is... interesting, to say the least, when on the surface, it doesnt throw you off balance or make you feel sick in any way.
BUT....... when digging in caves looking for ores to mine, the game doesnt give you ANY indication when you're on a different side of the planet and so the screen starts rotating like crazy because you keep switching sides underground, but you don't realise you're doing it because the in-game map looks like you are dead centre of any given side. I hope they tweak the map so it gives you more information on your orientation, which side of the planet you're on and when you're about to switch sides underground.

I'm enjoying Stellar Overload so far. In short, they've given me something I try to avoid when it comes to early access games: hope. :)

There are only five quests so far, but they seem to have created a very solid foundation for a really good adventure/crafting/rpg game. Their update tempo seems to be pretty good at a glance.

UPDATE: There have been some changes to the crafting system and a bunch of new quests on another planet added. I intend to flesh out this review a bit when I've had a chance to explore the new content more fully.

"Thumb halfways"

Do not buy it yet.

Why? Because:

- it's too short, 5 quest chains, you only start enjoying it - BAM, there is nothing to do anymore;
- crafting is here purely for nothing, you get everything as ready-made items, there are basically 2-3 moments when you need something to craft, the rest is GIVEN (very wrong decision imho) after completing quest or just by looting;
- gathering again is for nothing, you get resources as loot, I enjoy exploring the caves for the first time, but then I only have to craft once at the end and it was 30 iron blocks for space-ship ... 30 iron blocks ....................
- exploring, only fun for ONE "side" of the cube, then it's all the same, pointless and barely interesting.
- building, for nothing, no idea why someone decide to make electricity while game lack and doesn't required even concept of "base" (home), you do not need to build anything, all craft machines are there..
- balance: combat is primitive, fighting the hardest mobs (bosses) is designed for 5-years old girl, you basically CAN NOT die, and then BAM, dungeon with lazers.. and passing lazers is totally strange skill which you have to master suddenly or you just die.. overall game is too easy, AI is too stupid and such..
- too much hover-biking, go to teleport on the other side of cube, then back, again to teleport, again back, AGAIN to teleport, then back, then you get space-ship and game ends here (no quests, no guide-lines what to do, no need to do anything)..
- I don't like the direction of game development, it's not crafting/building/surviving game, feels more like platformer of some kind (due to lazers, dungeon elements and poor dificulty of game).
- there is no experience or skills, only locked craft until recipe and craft station is found.. there are too few items to actually use as items (2 armors, 4 weapons, 3 tools, food and healing), which lead to very repeated gameplay, too few enemies ~10;
- the concept of square worlds is weird, crossing edges is ugly, gravitation in the middle is tricky..

Game has potential no doubts, it's already polished and of very high quality overall. It's just lack enough of something to hold me any longer, more dungeons? Why? There are no even achievements.. And I hate lazers..

For the past 24 hours, i've made/played with everything this game has to offer. Now, theirs no such thing as 'lack of content' when you're a builder. I am not going to speak on the items/content because I believe that since you're buying an early access game that shouldn't be an issue since it's what you'd expect from a game that isn't fully developed.

PROS: Decent controls,
- good physics, (if you have them turned on),
-comfortable user interface,
- zelda-ish type of music/graphics,
- gorgeous lighting,
- questline, (though brief, fun),
- connective/genius dungeon layout and so on.

CONS: (For reference. I have an Nvidea GTX 1060 4G with a core i6400 450G SSD and 16 of physical RAM)
-Rendering issues,
-Exteme framerate drop even when on lowest settings for everything,
-Buggy doors,
-Buggy vehicles, (they don't despawn when you destroy them, leaving 10,000 'hoverbike' blips on your map.)
-Railmotors are extremely bugged. Expecting them to hopefully get fixed next patch (Roadmap says it's supposed to update mid-2017.)
-Unexpected crashes,
-Losing inventory (backpack) when you die because it doesn't respawn with you.
-Having backpack blip stuck on map because you died but yet your inventory didn't go away.
and so on...

TL'DR: Overall, Stellar Overload is a great building game with interesting planets to explore and a short (for now) but interesting questline with just purely amazing dungeons, but as of right now even though it being early access as mentioned I can not recommend due to the sheer severity of the current bugs and hair-pulled frustration of trying to fly a vehicle without it glitching out leaving you either stranded on a planet or soaring above the land with 10 FPS. Give it until next update to give it a try and im sure you'll love it.

Also if you're a builder at heart and you loved being inspired and creative then this is a game you will definitely love.

Thanks for reading!

This review will change if my experience changes after the first two hours.

Stellar Overdrive has a ton of competition. Empyrion, Space Engineers, Starbound, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, Rodina, even No Man's Sky- Each of them accomplishes its own goals in its own way. Empyrion has survival and crafting, with plenty of aliens. Space Engineers is all about physics and ship building, putting things together in space. Starbound and NMS have their infinite lineup of procedurally generated world's. Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous focus on the realism of quotidien life as a spacefarer. Rodina is a lonely experience, exploring four unique but barren planets, learning about a story

But not one of these has yet given me the range of emotions an hour's play of this game has. The basic gist: Minecraft on cube-shaped planets, with more to craft, people to talk to, storylines, real vehicles, and the voxel variability that Minecraft is missing. But more than that, this game explores something Minecraft never did but the games in my aforementioned list do: Gravity. Each side of the cubic planets has a different time of day. And gravity reorients as you move. Want to dig to China? Go for it. See how the game handles it when you get closer to the core, and then when you go beyond. Want to fly through space to a forest planet, a desert planet with deep canyons, an ocean planet with little islands and trenches that go almost to the core? How about a moon? How about a lava planet? Build a ship...and go there. Each planet has a different ecosystem with different dangers, monsters, fauna, and enemies. It's a closed system, not open or infinite. But the groundwork is there for the story to expand, the variety to multiply, and the game to evolve.

I know this review isn't very detailed. I'll be updating it after the game leaves Early Access. For now, let me close with this:

If you are a fan of Minecraft but wish the world were a bit more sci-fi; if you're a fan of Elite: Dangerous but wish it were more colorful; if you're a fan of No Man's Sky but were turned off by the lackluster release; if you're a fan of Starbound but want a similar experience in 3D; if you're a fan of Space Engineers but want more survival; a fan of Empyrion but want a more thoughtful art design; or a fan of Rodina but want a game that's more polished with more variety...

...you know what to do. ;)

Some good ideas in this game! (I tested only the beginning of story mode)
The atmospheres in the different "zones" are nice and I really enjoy the first "donjon" with its small maze.

Sure it's an early access, there are things that must be improved (AI or perf are the main issue for me atm). I hope that will be the case soon!

I recommend this for two reasons, The game has amazing potential.

The second reason is EVERY TIME I post some feedback or have a question on the steam forums, a developer always responds to me. These guys are in touch with all of their playerbase so if you want to be heard, the devs hear you. That is whats going to make this game great and surpass many of even the bigger titles!

I would buy this game to support such amazing devs!

I'm going to write a review that isn't from a backer of the kick starter.

for the record I enjoy the game (what little there is) by review is based on the current lack of things to do after a period of 2 hours UNLESS YOU HAVE MATES THAT HAVE THE GAME

i will start by explaining that this game has been in development for a couple of years now and i read from kick starters that the updates come in nicely. i did some research on this to find that it was launched March of 2014.
the next update which was a pre-alpha construction prototype, released on 1st September 2014. while those times seem OK , the following updates where 3 hot fixes.

Pre Alpha came out 7th Jan 2015

and Alpha was releases on 27th May 2015.

Patch 0.8.3.2
Alpha 2 multiplayer patch was released on 09th November 2015.

Patch 0.8.4.0
Alpha Blocky Blockade was released on 8th June 2016.

these last two updates where added to the wiki on 17 October 2016, at 19:13. AFTER i wrote this review.

this brings us to October 11th 2016 the release on Steam.

so my point is ... where is the next update? not even the devs know.

today came a bug fix. not content. still cant recommend

So about the story. Its interesting, very very high potential. only on 1 planet which is OK i understand time is needed to get other areas right before release. but what no one mentioned was the story lasts an accomplished fps player up to 2 hours to finish the CURRENT story AND do the observation towers so we can TP to the next planet.. i might add a planet that has NOTHING ON IT ! so after 2 - 3 hours you are left to just explore and fight robots which gets boring very very quick. you can explore the other planet but due to it not being optimised, it runs really bad.

I'm not a hater of early access, its helps indie teams realise the dreams. I'm all for helping by buying a title in good faith. but when we can see a period of over 12 months with NO UPDATE. that's when I start to ask questions.

If you have buddies that have this game then great you can play creative together and have some fun building and shooting etc etc but that's it, in the current state of the game , with the lack of updates I cant honestly say to people BUY THIS TITLE ITS GREAT ! I'm having to say, buy this title its going to be great at some point in time.

that doesn't fill others heads with confidence on the team or the title.

take the case of Osiris:New Dawn. they where 2 men (they have since expanded) but with just 2 guys, they managed to release updates pretty much every other day, with content, bug fixes all of that good stuff. they are also transparent about what they are working, what we can expect in the next update also a rough time of arrival for said update.

none of that here.no steam announcements, no nice welcome thanks for supporting our title.none of that either.... so make of it what you will. this is my review

maybe catch you on a planet other than Merx. or maybe not. we shall see


edit. this review will get ammended as and when new content arises. i will keep you posted. basically its not because i don't like game as to why i cant recommend it, its just the amount of stuff to do. so hold fire. watch this review

Stellar Overload: AKA Gravity is Trying to Murder My Brain.

My first impression of Stellar Overload was that it looked very good, had a great take on the block-based style and would surely be a lot of fun. After more than half an hour of talking and fetch quests though I was beginning to tire and really wanted to just dive into survival a la Minecraft. So far in my misguided quest to save the village I had managed to fill in large amounts of the well with dirt when I got frustrated trying to climb out of it, destroyed all the farms (and much of the surrounding area) whilst trying to harvest carrots and finally ripped down half the wall of a quest giver’s house by tunnelling straight through the berry bush I was harvesting and into their front porch. Compare this mass destruction to the tree punching start I was expecting and it was quite a culture shock.

I don’t know if the grabber has the ability to specify the type of block you are trying to break rather than it’s default WMD setting... but if it does I haven’t found it.

So for the sake of my sanity (and for the good of the villagers) I quit out to look for a survival mode without a story but only found Creative, where I was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer number of block types and items in my inventory and realised I’d likely have to play through the story to understand half of them. At the moment it appears there is no Survival mode and this is sorely lacking since repeating the story over and over is unlikely to be all that enjoyable.

I jumped back into the story and was almost immediately given a jet pack after one quick chat and then I found a hover bike cunningly concealed behind a semi-transparent bush. So much for the usual grinding and saving of resources to build something cool. Apparently I would ‘require’ the jetpack for cave exploration which as explanations go is kind of on a par with ‘I require this armour-piercing-high-explosive ammunition for pest control’.

Texas state law aside, it sounded like after completing the quest to find 20 Moonstone I’d probably get a rifle and armour too. Apparently I needed an upgrade... despite so far having only used my 200 rounds of pistol ammunition pot-shotting peacoc ks for their (assumedly) delicious meat that I have no way of cooking. In fact I had yet to encounter anything more scary than a squirrel who jumped out of a bush and startled me.

It is quite a long way from those early Minecraft days of rationing your torches and being terrified to go outside in the dark because you have no health or food but need three bones from a skeleton in order to make fertilizer... in order not to starve... in order to continue on to actually make a sword rather than trying to fight with a spade.

Needless to say I just wasn’t exactly feeling the sense of survival and achievement that similar games have offered...

Nonetheless I persevered and after crashing the hover bike into one too many squirrels I found a nice big hole in the ground to jump into. Almost instantly I was overwhelmed by dozens of glowing crystals in various colours, none of which were the illusive Moonstone and still I found none by the time I’d reached the bottom of the cave.

So out of frustration I decided to see what would happen if I attempted to tunnel directly through the centre of the Earth.

For the first minute or so I wasn’t really aware that I was actually making any progress on my journey down as my screen was basically solely occupied by a single block which had constant particles coming out of it and then occasionally changed colour. Much like mining obsidian I thought it was simply taking ages to break the blocks. After all there was no way it could be so easy to go so deep, so fast at the start of the game right?

It was only when I looked up into the black abyss that I had apparently created above me that it dawned on me that even blocks way down deep in the planet break instantly and how deep down I could go was basically just equal to how long I held the mouse button down for. It seemed that my suspicion was correct and that like some other games mining was just going to be unchallenging, boring and somewhat of an obligatory requirement tacked on to every block-based resource gathering game.

Then I reached the middle of the planet and proceeded to spend the next half hour in a battle against the laws of physics.

I assumed one of three things would happen when I dug straight down: A. I would die in lava, void, a rock monsters gastrointestinal tract etc. B. I’d hit bedrock and it wouldn’t let me reach the core. Or C. Gravity would get all screwy, it is after all a cubic planet.

C is in fact correct however it is C to the power of ‘Ow my brain hurts’ screwy. I assumed (if I survived) then gravity would simply flip but I had failed to factor in the fact that I was not drilling through the centre of the quadrilateral planet and merely skirting through a layer of the cubic crust, nowhere near the magma and iron cube core.

If there was an audio transcript of my experience it would be something like this:

“Dig, dig, dig, down I go... what the... *incomprehensible screams*... WHERE IS GRAVITY? ...ok I’ll go this way then... *muffled*...what is happening? ...I’m scared. Help me.”

Etc.

I won’t spoil the fun of saying precisely what happened or how I got out of the middle of the planet as the first time you try it it’s like an escape the room puzzle... only where Newton’s first law of motion is plotting to murder you.

However I will dictate the things that went through my head at the time:

“I understand why they gave me a jetpack now.”
“HOW? How do I have thirty seven thousand limestone blocks in my inventory.”
“I hear birdsong. The surface! At last. I wonder what side of the planet I am on? Wait is that my hover bike?”

...

“I still have no Moonstone.”


----------


To give some slightly more helpful feedback and information however...

Currently there isn’t a huge amount of content in the game past the first part of the story. Hence I spent a large amount of time finding ridiculous things to do in creative mode instead...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra9xaRtGjOQ


Resources are so easy to find in huge quantities that there is scarcely a need to bother mining, farming or anything else. Most containers dotted around in the little hamlets, crashed ships, observation posts and the robot fortress contain stacks of hundreds of all the common elements and more medicine, food and ammo than you would need to survive against an entire armada of angry machines. Not that it matters because even if you die you don’t lose anything in your inventory and the only penalty is returning to your clone machine.

If you do decide to mine then you can rack up thousands of coal and ore by just digging straight down for five minutes and jetpacking back out of the hole so you quickly end up with dozens of storage containers filled with stuff you have no use for other than building ten foot high carbon steel statues of yourself everywhere...

I flew to most of the planets in creative mode and was impressed to find they actually exist even if at the moment they are basically just different biome templates with nothing much to do there. It would be great in the future if you could play on large multiplayer servers with people flying back and forth between planets in cobbled together spaceships. At the moment though the only way of getting a craft into space it seems is to build an extremely high pole that reaches space and launch the ship from the top since it wants to just hover ten foot off the ground otherwise. This works but the ship remains fixed to the gravity of the face of the planet you launched from so you are limited to two dimensional movement and can basically only reach planets in line with you.

When the game is more complete and these issues are addressed I can see it being very addictive.