Autonauts – Review

Exploratory survival is a genre that has enjoyed enormous success in recent years. Started with Minecraft has undergone further development thanks to the contribution of titles of the caliber of Starbound e No Man Sky.

These extended the basic idea by adding the component of an unknown planet and some management elements. In particular Starbound forced the player to move from planet to planet so as to always collect new resources, useful for themselves and for the management of the spacecraft.

Idea reported later also in No Man Sky and in the following two years extended within the new game expansions.

Not that surprising though Denki wanted to try to propose with Autonauts a formula with a very similar basis, offering the player the exploration of a planet and its colonization. Will they have succeeded in the enterprise? Find out through our review!

A game system very similar to other titles of the genre

Autonatus sees us playing an explorer sent to another planet with the task of making it habitable for humans. Once the title has started, after a short introductory scene we will find ourselves on the planet and we will have to face the first tutorial missions.

These will introduce us to the basic concepts of gathering and crafting, focal points of Autonauts. The protagonist will in fact have to collect the primary resources that will be used to create a table useful for crafting an ax to be used to cut down trees.

Through this it will be possible to subsequently operate on the trunk to obtain wooden boards which, if worked, will release sticks. These three elements together with stones and nuts can be used to create a robot that can be set to speed up various game actions.

In story mode to unlock more craftable items, there completion of various objectives will be required that if completed they will give us a new project useful for the construction of other tools.

The objects are really many, even if the creation process will turn out to be very repetitive and similar, in fact many of these will require the use of resources that are always the same.

The title also features a agriculture system which is only a side dish and will be useful to recover life points when we are damaged or to feed the animals and the inhabitants. From the latter we will then go to extract the various resources or to delegate the management of various tasks.

Finally speaking of biomes, Autonatus it doesn't have much variety offering only one mountain area, and a forest. In addition to the story mode, there will also be a creative mode and a free one where all creation projects will already be unlocked.

Technical sector

On a technical level the title does not shine at all, i commands are rather awkward in particular the camera that can be moved only by using the WASD keys or by pressing the middle mouse button, this makes the exploration system a lot unnerving and rather slow.

This situation could be solved through the possibility of moving the camera through the simple positioning of the pointer at the edge of the screen, a feature unfortunately not present in the title. Autonauts is almost totally absent of animations proposing just a fixed jump movement.

The music is a positive note, in fact even if the game does not offer many, they are very relaxing.

Finally, on a graphic level, it manages to reach just enough.

Concluding

Autonauts tries to resume elements already proposed in many other similar titles, unfortunately it fails in this on almost the whole line, also due to a game design that is quite old and the absence of indispensable commands for any title of the genre.

However, if it is later updated with the right additions it might be interesting to try it again. Unfortunately at the moment it is much inferior to other exponents of its kind.