A Review by SenorYones
Take a dash of Viscera Cleanup, add a little Satisfactory and finish with some physics inspired by Half-Life set in a world heavily influenced by the classic film Water World and you get a unique gaming experience. One where you are not a human, not even a biological creature. Instead you are the last robotic Caretaker that has one mission, to save humanity, one rocket launch at a time.
Gameplay Overview
Players use a (t)rusty boat (which acts as the home base), to sail around to different landmarks to scrap resources and fight off cyborg enemies using powerful guns and grenades. Turn found scrap into usable materials with the satisfying Recycler and have the Fabricator automatically make the components, tools and weapons needed for resource production lines to survive and explore.
Even though this game was release into Early Access at the beginning of November 2025, it already has a lot of content and places to explore. A long quest-line walks players from their first steps to their first launch and beyond without restricting players as they are free to go which ever direction they like.
I’ve got the power, literally
Mentioned above, players play as a robot which means players aren’t maintaining hunger/thirst in this survival game, but rather power. The same power that is used for the machines and the boat. This gives a unique take on the survival genre and allows the player to “feel” like the character they are in the game, giving more immersion. Player can also give power to machines depleting themselves to fix issues in an emergency. If the player’s power reserve is lost, they start to slowly take damage over time until death (or “offline state”?)
But the robotic style game-play doesn’t end there. The save system uses a “backup” or checkpoint where the player connects to a Backup Terminal and creates a save. The Backup Terminals are on the player’s boat and on almost all POIs, giving plenty of opportunities to save their progress. There is also an auto save function for those who may forget to use the Backup Terminal which can be configured from 5-30mins intervals.
The elephant in the room, performance
This is the main issue for the game at the time of this review. Almost all negative reviews left on Steam mention performance issues and/or bugs/crashes. Mainly drops in FPS on the boat or in certain POIs in the late game, with some crashes to desktop or the “my boat flipped or sunk” issue. Hopefully Channel37 Ltd will continue to improve upon this in future updates, but they do provide players with super detailed FPS counter and also a benchmark so players can fine tune the game to their needs.
In our experience of playing the game, we had zero crashes and a couple of minor bugs. The boat got stuck once at a dock and some power systems on a POI acted off when on. Reloading the game helped to clear these bugs, but something players would rather not run into.
Also, performance wasn’t a huge issue for us as we had smooth 60FPS with the help of Upscaling and Frame Gen. The game looked amazing with both a mid tier GPU: AMD RX 6700XT and a mid-high end GPU: AMD RX 9070XT. The game seems to be quite CPU heavy as well but we had no issue with our AMD Ryzen 7800X3D.
The Last Thoughts 8/10
It’s an early access game, it has its issues, but there is a game here to be enjoyed. It has a lot of potential and we could tell it has been made with intention and care. The demo gives players a really good taste of the game with up to 5-10 hours of gameplay.
