From the Depths

This is a fantastic game, but it is not a fantastic game for everyone. If you can get past the VERY steep learning curve, you gain access to a remarkably in depth building game with visually striking combat and a huge variety of available play styles. There are ways to play this game without building your own creations from the ground up, which allows one to play without having to learn all the details and nuances of the games systems, so if you want to just form fleets with the games built in crafts, modify those crafts, and watch cool battles in the campaign or sandbox, that is doable. To get the most out of this game takes a lot of learning, and unfortunately, the games own guidance is often convoluted and not entirely helpful. Youtube tutorials and Reddit threads are essentially part of learning this game. I cannot stress enough that this game is not intuitive, and requires some dedication to really get the hang of. However, once you do get the hang of it, the game is truly impressive. You can build tanks, bunkers, submarines, boats, hovercrafts, airplanes, spaceships, and anything in between. you can then customize the fine details of your creation's propulsion, weapon systems, and AI mainframe behavior. You can even make virtual breadboard circuits to control how all the different parts of your creations interact. If you don't mind (or even enjoy) taking the time to learn the games complex systems, it is remarkably rewarding. the depth of customization and fine tuning are immense, as well as the 'mimic' system to make your creations look exactly how you want. As of writing this, I'm approaching 1,000 hours with this game, and I still have plenty to learn and experiment with.

I love making a boat, realizing it's bad, and then making another boat which is slightly less bad

Love this game, except for three things; The UI. It's as bad as it looks, and it never grows on you. A lot of blocks could be removed with just a "flip block" button. Some components are needlessly directional. They're symmetrical, with no logical reason to be direction-- but break the machine if place backward. This is very deep and impressive game-- I love the mechanical depth-- this game just really deserves some love.

decided to pick this back up and i will be blunt, this game isn't for me. now i'll put myself in the shoes of if i had bought this for 25$ right now. i would have refunded it after seeing the tutorial tabs. to explain, there are around 7 or 8 tabs discussing the various major mechanics of the game with each having anywhere between 20 or 4 either videos, manuals, interactive demos or ingame scenarios to play,read,watch to understand the overall basic and complicated workings of the game and it's varying systems. but i wouldn't pay 25$ for "from the depths for dummies" book. i got through maybe halfway through the third section of the first tab of the "toutorial" and gave up. way too many complex design choices which are great if you knew the game for 3 or 4 years and gives players alot of choice and creative direction, but for me... if i feel like i'm spending my 2 free hours reading a "how to play our game the right way and if you don't learn all this you will not have fun" is just... i'd rather just not play the game. i don't have 3 or 6 hours for the toutorial. gameplay is pretty meh too. you spend, agian, most of your time building units that either have one or two outcomes; either they blow up in the first 5 minutes of the "battle" or they manage to limp to victory. either way your going to spend another 4 hours building a new thing next round so who the hell cares. i just moused over the acihevements and the story based ones have a max of 10% complited which means if you want a challenging achievement hunt i'd recommend this game but it also means people picked this game up, got somewhere and then just dropped this game without even completing the first mission... if they even started it. when i have a few hours to waste maybe on public transport or maybe on the toilet i'll redo the toutorial and the manuals but for now this will probably sit in my libary uninstalled until the next friend finds it and thinks it's a simpler stormworks game OH infact just go buy stormworks! it's way less complicated and throws you into the gameworld much quicker than this ever did and casually experiments and teaches you stuff!

Very good boat game for building and controlling ships, tanks airplanes or whatever you can dream. The only problem is the tutorial is pretty bad and most of your knowledge has to be learned using other sources.

I would really love to love this game. Because conceptually it seems perfect. But... I am surprised I played it for a whole 47 minutes to be honest. I already got the uncanny urge to uninstall the game the second I opened the tutorials tab. There. Is. Such. An. Unbelievable. Amount. Of. Sh!t. To. Go. Through. Like it's actually not even funny just how much you are bombarded with when you open the tutorials tab in game. But you know I had high hopes for the game so I do start the beginner tutorials. Some time during the very first one I now REALLY wanted to uninstall the game. The tutorials are downright unplayable. They are absolutely horrible. And what's worse. The main thing that attracted me to this game - building your own ships... is somehow even worse than the tutorials. The build mode is so so bad. I have genuinely no words to describe to you how bad of an experience it is to build a ship... IN THE TUTORIAL!!! This game has... BY FAR!!! the single worst new player experience of any game I have ever played. I have never seriously played any Dark Souls game and I would rather try to beat one of those games without armor and weapons for my first playthrough than figure out how to work around the horrendous building system in this game. I can honestly not recommend this game to anyone. The thing that's supposed to be the main appeal of this game - the build mode to... well building something - is fundamentally unplayable. It's such a bad experience.

I really wanted to like it, and I can see there is a *really* fun game in there somewhere, but the UI and controls are just so unbelievably bad it gets in the way of actually enjoying it. Will probably refund, but if the UI and controls are eventually polished I will almost certainly repurchase and recommend the game.

I have 200 hours in this game and i have no idea what im doing still but im prty sure this counts as an autism diagnosis

if you want a complex game where you can dedicate a hundred hours to it and still know nothing, this is one of those. it also helps that the gameplay is actually fun, something not many autism projects have going for them. the ui is shit however, and the tutorials read like homework, so if you are one of those types that can watch hours of youtube guides before actually playing a game, do that

This game seems really cool at first glance, but the clunky editor and poor gameplay tutorials make it really difficult to understand. The building system is explained well, but when I tried to play against the AI I found myself struggling to fight back because the basic movement is overly complicated. The campaign/rts aspects are a cool idea, but in practical application you are a sitting duck for the first AI to attack you. Would recommend Stormworks or Space Engineers for a better gameplay experience. 5/10

I love this game, for those who wrote negative reviews, suck a dick its a game learn how to play the damn thing this is one of the greatest ship building game ever made and i would personally suck each of the devs off ;) (wink wink if you are seeing this devs) game gets a bit laggy when you build a massive super fucking dreadnought but its to be expected unless you are a retarded shit who sets their expectations to the fucking moon, i fugging would make babies with this game

tis game is good, can get lost building for hours, trust, its worth it to learn the system and get past those first like, 4hrs, then you can actually have fun, getting someone to tech you how to play is alot better than the ingame tutorials. so if you have discrod, you are in luck cuz theres a fair amount of people in the FTD discord server who would be down to help you

This game is the equivalent of going to college for five years to get an engineering degree then trying to use it and the table explodes... It is a super super fun game but you gotta sit through a few dozen hours of tutorials to get the basics down. Hella fun though, especially with friends!!

This game blurs the line of creativity and naval warfare into an unseen world of down right insane engineering and a player base smarter then your average nasa intern. The ability to create whatever you please with virtually no limits except how much time you have to build your projects in your own lifetime is very refreshing. The only issue with this game is some projects won’t get complete in your own lifetime you will have to grandfather your kids into finishing your visions and works. Otherwise great game

the weapon systems and combat are better than any other 3d building games and only comparable to cosmoteer if you include 2d games.

Very steep learning curve, but once you get past it great game, similar to KSP but peace isn't an option youtube is your best friend when designing half decent ships

steep learning curve but once you get past that, very fun ship/plane/whatever you want to build builder game. Tho expect 80% of your time to be spent in the designer lol

I don't know why the reviews are only "Very positive". If you like building and designing crafts and watch them fight there's probably no other game that has this much diversity with designing. Maybe that has been overwhelming for some people. And I agree with them as the game leaves most of the mechanics unexplained. You will spend maybe 100 hours just testing things how they work and I personally had fun doing so. After 200 hours of playing I built couple "somewhat" effective crafts for campaign only to see them suffer and realized my mistakes. Still it is fun to learn from those mistakes and make new designs. I even studied some math about vectors and dug into bread-boarding (which is a visual coding platform). Bread-board allows you to do complex calculations and use it for controlling what your craft can do. Basically the entire behaviour of your craft can be coded into a bread-board BUT it is only an option, you do not need to use it in any way if you don't like it. Simple bread-board things are easy to do once you understand it a little. "Enemy range under 1000m? Yes or no? Yes? Change behaviour to melee. No? Change to circle the target." Besides bread-board there is also a LUA script block which I've never used. From what I've understood you can write almost anything in it as LUA code. This is also not necessary to use in any situation but if you know how, you can pretty much break the entire balance in the game using it. After all those performance and stability updates the game runs really smoothly (compared to the past) even in disgustingly large battles. Some multiplayer desync issues still persists but you will most likely spend hundreds of hours designing and testing stuff alone and not in a multiplayer session. The desync issues will (hopefully) be fixed in the future. If you don't mind using some spare time to figure stuff out how they work (It is very helpful to check out the in-game "AI" designs) and you like building things, I definitely recommend trying this game.

A complex naval, air, and land combat simulator. Truly one of the best.

Just boat darksouls ig make a funni boat and it blows up :( 10/10 i love feeling the pain of wasting 3 hours

flagship couldn't wrap its head around the idea it was a boat and lost a battle to a ss submarine because it beached itself. great game fix terrain avoidance please

it is very fun but complicated and you are stuck if your storage is destroyed in adventure mode it is very easy to get stuck and lose days of progress with one click

get up to as much nautical nonsense as you want while letting your inner engineer go wild and build some truly silly boats, planes, tanks, or even MORE BOATS. it's pretty fun if you enjoy making things or fighting other boats and planes while also making your own or copying the ones you see in game

awesome game. for 5 years now the devs continue improving and expanding the game without any of the dlc nonsense. Takes a while to learn and i still design the shittiest and most inefficient CRAM cannons but that's the fun of it.

Mart can beat it, and hopefully so can I. And idk much about building boats.

There simply is no game like it. A unique and timeless game that i will always remember fondly.

big learning curve but once you get it this game goes from great to amazingness

This is a very good game. I will warn you its a commitment if your looking at it and not sure if youll like it you need to know that youre gonna have to sink some time into the game to learn how to play properly. I have almost 120 hours on this game and I have just scratched the surface of building teqnique and style. That being said if you just put the two hours in and decide if you like the game from that im gonna tell you you wont. you're gonna have to be brave and put maybe closer to five in to learn how to play and build your own ship that works. It is so worth it though couldnt recomend more.

I've watched gameplay on youtube and it seemed a rather cool game with a unique concept. However, upon purchase I've spent days of learning and improving my knowledge, yet the gameplay is honestly quite horrid. Idk if the updates changed it too much but the balance seems absolutely trash. I would spend hours making a very well-designed craft with angular armor just to have mobs somehow miraculously shred through a modern craft. The enemy AI even on very easy is ridiculously powerful and relentless, the ship mechanics are always inconsistent, I order my craft to someplace and they won't move an inch, the default settings are always awful and it takes hours just to tweak a single model to perfection. This is not a game for working adults

aight bruv play this game if your smart as OH MY GOD it is complex

Almost 200 hours in and I still can't build a boat, please help me receive my navel engineering degree from From The Depths University

Its very fun and cool and im not geting paid for this

By far my favourite game I own and I wish there were more games like this. The only thing that could improve it is better performance beyond how much the game can already somehow handle, if at all possible

lost at sea and the instructions manual. one day i shall terror the seas. ZONE PURIFIED

371 hours in and never touched the campaign but at least my guns finally function 10/10

i came from the depths, and now they are in the depths, and i reign supreme

Spent 4 hours learning half of the basics. Haven't even played the game yet.

half of your entire lifespan in order to learn how to make a subpar gun truly the peak of gaming

once you get over the 100 hour learning curve it is one of the best games you can play.

I have been destined to play this game since birth. 10/10 would play until I die

Still don't know how to build an actually good boat. 10/10

After 300 hours I still don't understand how to play, I love it

i really do not like the ui but apart from that the game seems great

Great game, only if you are strong enough.

would not reccommend this to anyone who doesnt have a PhD in naval architecture

Me love to make big boats with big guns

the factory must grow (MIC with clean energy flavor)

400 Hours in, starting to know how to place blocks. Thanks Brilliant Skies.

Absolute cinema game 10/10 game

robocraft but ship very good i love you