Planet Nomads Early-Access Review

June 11, 2017

Planet Nomads is a sci-fi sandbox game with elements of survival on alien planets. The game is an early-access title for the moment and we are lucky enough to publish a preview about the game.

After No Man’s Sky, we are having a hard time satisfying our inner explorer when it comes to alien planets, ulterior stars and space itself. It is understandable since we were so hyped and heart-broken afterwards. But, No Man’s Sky still was a huge step in gaming history and cleared the way for its followers, like Planet Nomads. Planet nomads offers two mods: Survival and Creative. Creative will give you a chill building experience but we are there to survive!

Planet Nomads doesn’t exactly offer us space exploration but planet exploration. The game starts with us crashing our spaceship into a planet. Right after that, the exploration begins. The main features of Planet Nomads are exploration, building and surviving.

Huge planets to explore with rock-throwing alien creatures!

The planet we landed offers multiple biomes for us to explore. When you get out of your ship, a very well designed environment welcomes you. Even though it looks welcoming with bright colors, and alien fauna and alien creatures, with your first step you may get hit by a rock. Some alien creatures are not friendly and throw rocks at you. This is where you understand that you also need to protect yourself from the creatures of this planet.

With a flame of exploration burning inside you, you will walk far and far away from your crash land. But also, you unfortunately will discover that the environment doesn’t really change. It will change a bit, yet the main features will stay the same. After these walks or rides, you may encounter one or two different alien creatures but for me, it was not a noticeable change. I find this lack of change disturbing, yet the environment and creature design was satisfying enough.

Give your inner architect a chance!

The survival part of Planet Nomads, on the other hand, makes the gameplay more enjoyable. In order to survive on this alien planet, we must drink, sleep, eat and build. Some of these necessities are quite easy to find. You can find food and water around and some alien creatures are simple to kill. You can harvest resources from here and there in order to survive. You always need to check your hunger, thirst and stamina levels since when they hit zero, it means you hit the ground. When you begin the game, you will have just enough resources to stay alive, but in time you will need resources to build a generator, a 3D printer, filtration for water, a stasis pod and such.

While playing Planet Nomads, you will have one thing more important than any other thing. Your XJB-600 particle-manipulating Multi-Tool. After all, you are an engineer. With this tool, you can cut down trees, mine and weld.

Finding food or water is something, but staying healthy on this planet is totally another thing. There is always a chance you being poisoned, getting exposed to radiation, freezing or getting injured. Building a base and crafting will help you keep out of trouble. You can also craft antidotes and med-kits. Crafting a base when you have the resources is pretty simple, yet replacing the parts is a real challenge since they keep refusing the place where they actually belong to. You can also craft vehicles in order to explore the planet faster and you will look cool riding it. Like said before, you will spend most of your time building while playing Planet Nomads and it is a fun part of the game.

When it comes to this beautifully created environment, you may notice that there is something missing here and there. These missing things are actually part of lands, which will load when you come closer and even then, it will take a while.

Here I admit that I died a lot while playing Planet Nomads but if there was anything I did more than dying, it is with no doubt falling into the gaps on the ground. With your gun, you can disintegrate the land and make your way out, but it is a tiring way to save yourself and whatever I did, I kept falling and falling into the ground. The ground swallowed me every time.

Surviving on Planet Nomads is hard and FPS drops will make it even harder. Planet Nomads suffer from optimization issues, yet knowing that the game is still under development is a relief. The only thing we can do is sit tight and hope for some more development before the game launches.

Planet Nomads promises a lot when it comes to planet exploration with survival elements. Yet, the game suffers from optimization issues and a little problematic for an early-access title. I recommend you to sit tight and wait Planet Nomads to launch to give it a try.

Positive

Beautifully crafted atmospheric environment
Improved crafting system
User-friendly menu
Charming fanua and flora
Realistic survival elements
Relaxing soundtrack

Negative

Optimization issues
You may find yourself in a repetitive environment and gameplay after you finish crafting base and vehicle
Building is a hard piece of work since parts refuse to fit together.
A lot of texture pop ins.

Summary

Planet Nomads was reviewed using a Steam key provided by the publisher.