Oxygen Not Included

While there are niggles to the experience, from relatively frequent frame rate drops at the start of each cycle and the AI occasionally getting confused to the game outright crashing (which is naturally quite frustrating), these issues seem like the aftermath of Early Access. With the game having a decent swell of community support and the developers just as keen to keep improving, Oxygen Not Included appears to be going onwards and upwards – or whatever direction you fancy, really.

Quotation forthcoming.

Oxygen Not Included is a challening, complex survival building game for creative tinkerers and fans of automatisation.

A time sink that will keep you hooked right up until your last Duplicant.

Funny, clever, and extremely complex mix of management simulator and survival game that manages to make abject failure almost as entertaining as success.

Most of all, the simulated personalities, habits and appearances of the dupes themselves feel like complete wasted effort.

A bonkers survival sim where watching things fall apart is half the fun.

According to Steam, I have an obscene amount of time put into this game. An absolutely bonkers 20k hours over the course of it's early access and post-release. I consider this an engineering game as the fun part is that you have to figure out how to solve all your problems mostly on your own. I will freely admit that mods build on the game greatly, making it an even better experience. But the best part is Klei itself. They listen. They incorporate good suggestions from users. They put the best of the best mods into the game. It's something I find both rare and refreshing. There's simply no other game quite like it, and I do not regret a second of those 20,000 hours.

The game is fun, but does not run smoothly. My system has 64gb ram, 11gb GPU and running a new intel extreme processor, and the game still has issues the later into the game I get. Around cycle 350 to 500, the game becomes frustrating with taking up to a couple of minutes for the auto save function to perform its task, before the game will continue. It might appear that your game has crashed, but this is just how the game performs. This does not seem to be as reliant as system design as just the bottleneck in game design. The speed up process also become a bad choice with any more than 16 duplicates, as the game takes the same amount of time to go through its checklist to see who performs what task, regardless of speed selected to play. This means that playing accelerated gameplay will result in an increase duplicate idle time ratio comparatively. When racing the clock on anything, always run in the slowest/normal speed, else you can end up wasting time and failing to accomplish tasks by their deadlines. Be careful altering the priority settings, as this can essentially stun lock duplicates, making them do jitters instead of accomplishing anything. For some reason, if two tasks are equal in importance for a duplicate, they will sometimes (and often in later cycles) cycle between the two tasks, doing nothing but a two step shuffle between the first step towards each task, but no further. I found this especially problematic with tidy tasks between gathering ice and anything else. I had to set the resource box for the ice to a lower rating, so it would end up getting those last, which solved most of the two step shuffle issues. The game performs excellent for the first 200 or so cycles, and is very fun, but after that, it because a race to patience versus success. I find that I reset the game often, starting over, just because I am tired of the auto save feature making the game play tedious. I consider this a major game issue, and would rate the game far more favorably if they can fix this. As is, this is a fun game that I recommend, but expect your patience to be tested if you venture through many cycles, instead of rush to the finish line.

Great game, great bug support, but no character generation or design. You can't even choice appearance of crew so it's always looks pretty stupid even considering comic style.

I'm sorry but with all the hours of put in to this game I just found it boring as hell, there's so much repetition in this game , it's just extremely dull and nothing of interest, just like this review, ****.

An hour in the game and I haven't managed to assign any task to anyone. Wherever I click I get a popup with a ton of text to read, but no action button anywhere. Apparently, keyboard shortcuts are mandatory. If that's the case, if the coders or vi or emacs didn't die virgins and had children who wrote software with the same level of interface ****, then I'll rate them a zero as well. If not, if I'm missing something, then it's only the tutorial that I rate at zero. In any case, I don't have time to waste on incompetence. Mind you, the game is text-super-heavy, which was a clue, and there is a UI scaling, which should be a positive, however when scaled up to a comfortable read, the popups don't fit fully on-screen any more; they are useless. Game makers not grasping that they don't need big icons, big permanent elements, they only need big fonts, for the texts that appear temporarily, one by one. Also, not surprisingly, the game does not provide the entertaining ability to save progress during missions. Which means its entertainment value is a big fat ZERO. In fact, this is the case for any game that this company made, so their incompetence is not a case of amateurism but clearly of low intelligence.