My First Impression of Volcanoids

Volcanoids on Steam

My partner got himself Volcanoids. At his suggestion, I'm trying the game out now.

I'm less than an hour in so far and it's not too bad. The game doesn't give you the option to customize your own character but it is an early access game. It's not the most important aspect of it right now so it's an understandable loss.

Having the threat of a volcano going off every so often does put a bit of pressure (and stress) on me to manage my time more effectively. I'm on the fence on how I feel about this. At least the pause menu does pause that countdown so if you have to step away from the game, you have that choice. That's how I'm writing this review right now.

Now that the eruption happened, and the surface is just ash...not too bad. If you have a lot of stuff to do in the "drillship" itself, then it doesn't really make a huge difference. You can gather material like copper, sulfur and coal underground too.

The game gives you the option to follow quests to figure out what you need to do next. This is nice, but the wording/translation definitely needs some work. Right now, all the quests says to "click the menu button on <station name>." More often than not, that usually mean a button in the UI, not a key on the keyboard. Perhaps my experience would be different if I was playing with a controller.

The little cinematic camera feature is kinda neat, getting to see the drill come up or head down.

The Crafting

You can't queue independent tasks in the Refinery, but you can in the Worktable. There's an option to upgrade them as well and I do wonder if that will open up different quality of life features.

Worktable won't keep working if you don't stay at it. So it's manual crafting but you don't have to mash buttons. You just gotta wait.

The UX

Hovering over devices, walls, etc either gives you a small label of what they are in the bottom right corner. I would much rather the text pop up near the center top of the screen. The problem is that's where the countdown to the next eruption is. Too close to the center of the screen could run into the risk of blocking the view. It could still work since the text has no blocking background element. It's just text.

Overall impression

I actually like it. I know there are Steam reviews that don't look on it favourably. I recall one that says most positive reviews don't go over 30 hours. I'm not sure if that's really a bad thing for the game to reach an "end" at 30 hours though.

I was never a huge fan of the steam/dieselpunk aesthetics but I do enjoy the vibe of this game so far. Enough that I actually got my own copy!

I plan on coming back and revisiting this "review" (more like a stream of consciousness).

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