Starlocked

This is kind of a weird thing, it's a free game, but it's being worked on. It reminds me a bit of Keen Software games, specifically Miner Wars. Those are the Space Engineers guys, they're infatuated with voxels. Except here, the voxels are overt, obvious, li'l chunky cubes. Everything is made of these li'l chunky cubes. Fly your little drone out to an asteroid, use your drill and carefully cut around a lump of ore and fling it back to your drone. Difference is, unlike the other company I mentioned, the performance is pretty good. The gameplay is really basic, the only threats being "don't run out of fuel" and "don't get cheese-gratered by enemy mining drones." Those guys beep when they see you and trundle steadily your way, so you've got ample time to shoot them up a bit. There's an ugrade loop, mine enough mineral 1 to buy access to mineral 2, etc. Some other upgrades improve your general quality of life, and if the game behaves you can more-or-less finish it in two, maybe two-and-a-half hours? I've got four. The game crashed a few times, once wiping out three missions' worth of progress. Since I expect I did about ten to twelve, this was pretty significant. …

[b]TLDR[/b]: a short, relaxing, voxel-based space mining game, but unfortunately bare-bones and (on my computer) crash-prone. The beginning of this game was just frustrating. The tutorial ended before explaining the game’s central mining mechanic. I also couldn't buy upgrades because of an inventory limit (that was not explained anywhere), and emptying the inventory required clicking 100’s of times to sell individual bits of ore because there was no bulk-sell option. But once I got past the poor first impression, Starlocked was an enjoyably chill retro game about carving up asteroids and upgrading a mining rig. And, though the graphics are simple, the asteroid field does look good, and little touches (like shipwrecks) add to the atmosphere. However, outside of the core gameplay (and some of the art design), the game feels bare-bones. Sound design is simple, and the music is a single track looping endlessly. Combat is repetitive because there’s only one type of enemy. And the game crashed 5 times in 6 hours. (Judging by the discussions, this amount of instability is unusual, but I am not the only one having problems.) I know this is a student game, so the makers only had…

I have a craving for space scavenging/mining games and this one scratched an afternoon itch for one. A good value for a free game from a student it looks like. I hope the dev is able/willing to push it further as what is here is a good start and I hope to come back for more content and more challenging space mining. Any feedback I have is mostly just adding more and adding a vsync option as the menu makes my fans try and join the drone in space.

Game quite literally does not work at all for me. Second the window opens it hits me with a "This program is not responding" and immediately asks me if I wanna force close it. I am willing to accept that it could be my PC (if you look at the attached specs you'll see I have a pretty ass PC). Description says it is a student project so hoping they'll end up fixing this up a bit. Kinda weird to release the game fully in the state it is though instead of putting it out as an early access because it very clearly is a very early indev game.

Game is barely functional. Looks like it has some potential, but needs some serious work - even for a free game.

Deeper than I expected for a free item and definitely scratches the digging game itch. A lot of effort has already gone in, showing good dedication. I'm looking forward to whatever game this is the practice for :)