Oh man...so I put this game down for a few months, you know, to let the content updates pile up.
I've just put in about 8 hours in a new Survival mode game and daaayummm, they made this game much harder! Excellent! I thought it was a bit easy before, having put together a Cyclops in just under two hours. This time, it took me the full 8 hours of focusing hard on getting towards the fragments for the cyclops.
It is also a lot more dangerous...sand sharks and bone sharks are spotted heading into the shallows after just a few hours of play. Your life-boat is no longer the safe haven it used to be. I first thought that having a Medkit maker built into the life-boat was a cheap "easy-button" add-on but it is entirely necessary. Grabbing resources in certain places is almost a certain setup for a shark attack or getting one of those scary blood suckers on your arm.
After building my Seamoth I headed for the Koosh zone and quickly ran into the reaper leviathan...fortunately I found a little cubby hole to hide in while it tried to get at me...my heart pounding, it couldn't quite grab me but it did thrash me into the wall (or I kept accelerating into it out of terror) brought me down to about 10% hull but it then lost interest...phew.
Still having some trouble getting my base going, a lot more components require you to find blueprints from various crash sites. Also, you need to maintain power for oxygen, so my base is just a daytime base for now until I can get the bioreactor going to replace my solar panels. At least we have battery and power cell charging stations...found enough of each at the Aurora to never need to build them. Also, the Cyclops now has controllable interior lights and CCTV so you can see around you.
Also, the emergency beacon in the life-boat has messages incoming from other possible survivors...found a picture of what appears to be a female character but so far each life-boat has either been empty or compromised. One of them had a hole punched in the side and was surrounded by sand sharks...poor fella. It is definitely looking like everyone else is dead but I did see a message from the Sunbeam, a trade ship in the area that will be coming to rescue any survivors. Hopefully I can last long enough before the radiation from the Aurora attracts some yet unseen monster.
The game still needs optimization as pop-in is still pretty bad but it is looking good otherwise, can't wait for the full release this winter!
Also, don't forget, this game is available on Xbox One!
[video=youtube_share;xGESBs6lmA0]https://youtu.be/xGESBs6lmA0[/video]