Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions is a cosy planet explorer that I want to grow into something more

Right from the fun-filled cartoon trailers, you can tell that Starseeker has a different style and tone to Astroneer. This spin-off does still have plenty of common ground and ideas, but with a time limit and distinct trips down to the planet, it’s a different feeling and structure to play this game.

Starseeker’s pitch is immediately more co-op centric, collaborative and connected. Once you load into the space station you’ll find it kitted out with enough stash, crafting and mission terminals to support what feels like hundreds of players, and while I suspect the actual supported player count is probably more like a dozen, it’s nice to see everyone running around and grabbing their next tasks. And then, once you head down to the planet, you’ll see other players landing around you, heading out to go and complete those tasks, pinging where they’re going to next, and just getting up to their own shenanigans.

It’s rarely massively busy on the planet, though. Sometimes you’ll end up all on your lonesome, or there will just be another player on the other end of the game’s first landmass and you’ll never see them. In those cases, maybe you’d rather bring a friend or two of your own? You can play this game in co-op, grouping up with friends across platforms and helping each other out with the tasks you’re looking to complete.

Each expedition down to the surface gives you a 30 minute timer before you run out of air, which combines with the size of your 12-slot inventory and the limit to the number of missions you can hold and things you can track at any one time to have you heading back to a landing pad and calling for your rocket before too long. As soon as that 10 minute timer pings, chances are you’ll already be thinking to wrap up what you’re doing and head for home. You don’t have to have completed a goal in a single trip, so you can bounce up to the station, drop of resources, chat to quest givers and head back down a few minutes later.

There’s three main characters dishing out missions for you and they each have a particular focus. Captain Jupiter starts to have you explore a crashed space ship within this first region, Science Officer Jessandra is more about investigating and analysing the world and its life, and the robot JAM-BX is all about gathering resources. Those three tend to give you multi-part goals, but there’s also terminals that hand out more by-the-numbers missions in those categories, to collect this resource, scan that item, subdue this animal, trigger that reaction. It means that, as you’re going through the tasks, you can easily end up doing very similar things over and over again.

There is a fair bit of busywork to this too, and the resource gathering, for my tastes, is a bit of a drag. You’ll need Resin, Clay, Compound, Bauxite and more, and can find rich veins of them in the ground, using the handy world-deforming Dig feature to simultaneously excavate and suck up what you need. It’s a really nice effect to deform the chunky and polygonal world, but spending three minutes of waving your mouse or analogue stick around and ending up with maybe 20 units of a resource doesn’t feel especially rewarding to me. Or perhaps it’s hunting down the specific plantlife and harvesting its seeds, which gives even fewer resource per action.

Truth be told, it’s probably not that bad a time sink to gather what’s needed to craft a new water squirting nozzle for the EXO tool, for example, though you do need to gather Bauxite and convert to Aluminium at a ratio of 3:1. I think it’s more instances where you need 5 Resin to craft a medkit, once you get it back to base, and some of the to-ing and fro-ing around other tasks. One task to craft 5 Rubber had me take three trips just because it required me to get enough Organic, then convert it to Carbon and then use that as an ingredient for Rubber. Sure, I was also checking off other tasks and missions at the same time, but it was a touch annoying.

There are also world events to indulge in when down on the surface, such as taking a sensor up to the highest point on the map you can reach, and then back down again, or subduing as many animals within an area as possible. They’re intended as multiplayer challenges, and they’re nice ideas, but it’s easy to end up doing one solo, or for people across the map to trigger and complete something that you wanted to try and do. There’s some way to go for these to have the same impact as world events in Destiny or an MMO.

Right now, Starseeker just feels a bit too light in what it wants you to do, and after half a dozen hours, I’m still not really feeling the pull towards unlocks and new tools to expand my gameplay horizons. There are things like the hang glider I’ve yet to unlock, and a story is coming on the roadmap, but it’s a shame that I don’t feel more of its beginnings in the game right now.

However, I really do appreciate the game’s approach to co-op. Your whole party is focussing on their own missions and tasks, but everyone is combining to input to everyone’s tasks, whether it’s finding and scanning resources, void bubbles, subduing creatures, it’s all pooled together.

The sandbox that has been created is also rather lovely. It’s got a chunky polygonal art style that isn’t the most attractive gaming world, but does blend well once you start to deform it and carve tunnels through it. It’s a large island with some landmark like the crashed ship, and with a subterranean cave system that is filled with more creatures and greater stashes of resources. The landmass is handcrafted instead of generated, but there is some randomisation for where resources and items are placed around it.

And the creatures really are a delight. The Carrotlings are quirky little guys that like to follow you around, the Bog Hounds leap after and hunt you, the trading Grabcrabs will swap and hold items on their backs, and the angry hulk Brutoliths. It feels exceptionally mean to need to apply various status effects and scan them for missions – I mean, seeing how they react to water isn’t so horrible, but setting Carrotlings on fire is very mean.

I do like Starseeker, its happy-go-lucky vibes and approach to an extraction game, and it is a nice time dipping in for one or two expeditions and then logging back out. Clearly this is just the first step with its Early Access release – and there was a scramble over the past week to get the Switch 2 version in sync with the others for multiplayer – but I hope it grows and evolves sooner than later.

Tags: Astroneer, Starseeker