To experience the fun of Alien Explorer, you must have strong enough patience, or a few friends, and a mentality to have fun on your own.
For many players, Alien Explorer may be a game that accompanies them through high school, college, and even all the way into society. It was first released on the Steam platform in 16 years and tested for five years.
Years of updates have brought about the ups and downs of game quality, the addition and deletion of elements, and the integration and overthrow of gameplay mechanics. After several major content updates, 2022's Alien Explorer has finally ushered in its 1.0 version.
As a hardcore survival game, Alien Explorer is quite different from several recently released similar products, and you can easily distinguish them through the graphics.
Perhaps because of the premature launch, Alien Explorer still maintains a non-realistic art style, which makes the overall atmosphere of the game slightly witty and with a hint of childlike fun.
However, the non-immersive game graphics do not make it inferior to similar products. Alien Explorer, which is deeply rooted in exploration and gameplay mechanics, does not rely on the king's way of picture. The main universe imagination, it does not need to use texture layers to make the game appear real, but this kind of art that is not exquisite enough can reflect the dreamlike fantasy of the universe from the side.
The sense of fantasy is a very important atmosphere creation of Alien Explorer, and the game is committed to satisfying players' various cosmic imaginations. But this is not to refer to those unrealistic things, but to build on the basis of reality and feasibility, so that some impossible become reasonable and self-consistent.
For example, the 3D printer is used to make various parts, and then the parts are combined into tools; or the power supply equipment is connected with neat and beautiful lines, and then the automated production facilities are started. Alien Explorer deconstructs and reorganizes various gameplay details, enriching the interactive presentation of the game by piling up some details that have been discarded by similar games, so as to achieve unexpected gameplay, which will make the player's sense of immersion rise geometrically.
This kind of special interaction is also the selling point and feature of Alien Explorer. While other games have followed the "Xeno-Dimensional Backpack" setting, Alien Explorer has already used embedded slots to implement the carrying function. This undoubtedly appears more realistic in terms of gameplay and richer in detail.
For example, the objects in the game that have large holes often mean that the player can insert resources, and the clearly visible slots represent the player's storage space, which makes the game's resource management out of thin air an extra gameplay dimension. At the same time, in order to make the slot generalized, all the resources in the game also appear in the form of particles and granules, which will be stacked on the slot after being collected into resource blocks.
The fun storage mode shows the unique interaction mechanism of Alien Explorer, which is just the basis of the slot gameplay.
Since you can insert resource blocks, you can naturally embed something else, and these slots are like a docking station, making the gameplay unpredictable. You can completely rely on intuition to assemble different parts arbitrarily, just like Lego to make different props and vehicles, and play an unexpected effect.
Disintegration and integration have also become an important gameplay mechanism of this game. For example, you can piece together a transport truck with a lot of parts, and you can disassemble some parts at any time to do something else. The modular component design makes the presentation of game transportation more diverse, more imaginative, and uses various ways to get through the difficulties in front of them, which is also the core game fun of Alien Explorer.
Since there are slots to provide docking and storage capabilities, the facilities in the game that need to be connected to start naturally need to be manually connected, such as oxygen machines, power supply equipment, production equipment, etc. Through the correct placement, so that these facilities are beautifully displayed, so that the lines are not mixed together, it has become a compulsory course for obsessive-compulsive disorder in Alien Explorer.
The most intentional thing about Alien Explorer is that it does not treat this connection as a simple cumbersome operation, it not only makes you have an extra labor, but uses manual operation to enrich the details of the gameplay and give the player more sense of achievement. It's a bit like the difference between a manual car and an automatic car.
In similar games, the facilities are often placed to operate, which makes many players lose the ability to plan buildings, but if you want to make these facilities move in Alien Explorers, you must plan a reasonable line, from the beginning of power supply to the end of operation, and finally go around a circle back to the original point. This allows the player to inadvertently learn the rational planning of urban construction while conceiving and placing.
Get your hands dirty, get these sleeping devices up and running, and when the lines are connected, all the lights of all the devices are lit, which is far more rewarding than the automation facilities. Alien Explorers shows rich and unique vertical detail through player-made actions, giving the game a magic that no comparable product can have. Unique style, let yourself in the same kind of game difficult to meet the opponent.
This means you'll be hard-pressed to find in the current market a game that offers the same cool spots as Alien Explorer, or even a similar sense of operation.
However, "Alien Explorer" is also in the exploration of modular gameplay, assembly gameplay, gradually showing some shortcomings, players in the experience of this game, the motivation to play will gradually decrease with the increase of the game progress.
Generally speaking, the game should unlock more abilities as it progresses, and more abilities positively boost the player's playing power. As the game moves into its later stages, the game will once put players into the most enthusiastic heyday, but Alien Explorers did not provide enough momentum at this stage.
This is because the core gameplay of the game is based on assembly, and the vertical depth of the assembled parts leads to the design of too many parts in the game, although more facilities can be combined, but the resources provided by many production equipment are rarely available in the later stages of the game.
When the player realizes the automatic production, the game fails to provide the player with the corresponding and interesting consumption content to form a closed loop of gameplay, and the player will gradually lose the direction of play while accumulating resources.
On the other hand, another big play point of the game, although the fun of exploring the content is enough, several galaxies are at your disposal, but there is no clear external threat in the game, which also causes "Alien Explorers" to not need consumables to help consume resources, you can even hang up without moving, and the horizontal depth of the game is inevitably narrow.
At the same time, as the game process progresses, the content that can be explored is also decreasing, and the shortcomings of the vertical depth that are not enough to support the entire game will be exposed, that is, "what do I want to experience here" and "can it give me this experience". And the horizontal gameplay of the game is not wide enough, which makes the novelty of the game gradually decline, and finally it is inevitable to fall into the embarrassing dilemma of having nothing to do.
Perhaps, multiplayer games will solve this problem to some extent, but for lone wolves, Alien Explorer is not as good as imagined.
It can be said that the play points in the later stages of the Alien Explorer game are focused on finding their own work, and the game does not give a reasonable guide or provide more playable content. It is only the basic gameplay of constantly expanding the pastimes such as searching for objects and running, which is inevitably slightly perfunctory. If you don't have a few friends to talk about together, it's hard to endure loneliness.
Fortunately, the game has a decent ending, and you don't have to invest most of your life in it. And the renewal run that belongs to "Alien Explorer" for more than five years has finally got a good start and a good end.
Perhaps it is the reason for the unfortunate death of the main creator Paul Pepera, which caused "Alien Explorer" to lack many core inspirations in the subsequent development, and the game failed to further broaden the original content. This caused its gameplay to stagnate, only enriching the depth of the vertical content, but failing to respond to more expectations in the horizontal selection.
Moreover, due to the lack of beginner tutorials and lack of game guidance, this makes the pit experience of newcomers very inconvenient. I can understand the subtext that developers want players to find fun for themselves, but without guidance in such a five-year-old game, fragmentary game content will only work together with a lack of clarity in the main line to shut out new players.
Alien Explorer is definitely interesting enough and fun enough, it has its own unique selling points, and uses gameplay and mechanics to continuously improve it, but too much focus on a certain part of the content of the resource tilt, but also led to the lack of horizontal gameplay of the game.
To experience the fun of Alien Explorer, you must have strong enough patience, or a few friends, and a mentality to have fun on your own. If you are the part of the player who relies on game guidance and mission distribution, you are likely to waste a lot of time in this game and spend a meaningless game life.