REVIEW

Autonauts Review

by Jake Stewart, November 11th, 2019

Ever since I was a wee lad, the concept of coding has been fascinating to me. The prospect of speaking in a way that a machine can understand, teaching it to perform tasks in certain patterns, only inhibited by your own logical view of the system. Of course, like most I think coding is incredibly difficult and hold much respect to those that are capable of creating lines upon lines with ease. For someone like me, Autonauts offers a very prospective niche that happens to scratch a long-forgotten itch like nothing else has.

Autonauts presents the cute-block player with a procedurally generated world, not unlike what one might expect when loading up a world in Minecraft. The tutorials presented to you begin to guide you in the creation of tools, mining, chopping wood, building structures, etc. It’s not long before you start to realize that these tasks take quite a lot of time, and it’s a big world out there, begging to be filled with your creations. This is where the unique nature of Autonauts comes to play.

Using the random basic materials in the world around you, you can build your first bot. Using a “record” feature, when you complete actions, the bot will set these in it’s memory similar to lines of code. To use this in an example, the initial tutorial tasks the player with creating a self-sustaining lumber operation of sorts. After the first hour, I had given each of my many bots a unique task to complete in this grand scheme. One bot was tasked with chopping down trees, another was tasked with gathering the wood and storing it away, another with digging holes where the tree once was, and a final bot for planting a seed in the freshly dug hole.

The bots are able to complete any sort of task that the player is, with a little extra explanation and guidance needed. As you further down the line of automation, more and more options are opened up such as cooking, home-building, etc. The desolate world that you had joined slowly becomes more civilized and colonists will move in to the towns that you create, filling it with bustling life. There is truthfully no real end-game, as there often isn’t in these creative types of titles, but there is plenty of satisfaction to be found in creating an entire, self-sustaining colony filled with your own automatons.

With a somewhat complicated concept, it helps that there is a fairly in-depth tutorial, in the beginning, to wrap your mind around how exactly “coding” your bots work, and how to get all of these bots working together to create a system. As you progress down the line into bigger projects, the tutorial, unfortunately, becomes a little less clear and in-depth as it was in the beginning, but it does force the player to jump in and use their own logic to create, but a little extra help on the game’s behalf would be appreciated.

There are certainly spells where you are waiting for something to happen, either for the progression of the game to continue to unlock new blueprints, for the game to decide to throw another tutorial at you, etc. The game somewhat drip-feeds you these bits of progression as time goes on, but there is the occasional 15-20 spell of wondering what to do next before the game offers you the next goal.

The package overall is rather charming, presenting a minimalistic blocky style, reminiscent to a child between Minecraft and Roblox. The textures can sometimes feel a little flat personally, and I’d like a bit more variety in the world that I’m building. However, the blankness of the world provides a satisfying contrast as it is filled with your buildings and walkways. Additionally, I found that the music was a bit tiring after my hours with the game. It’s child-like and fitting for the game, but if there was more than one track, I couldn’t really tell the difference.

There is definitely a type of player for this sort of game, and there are certain players who do not fit that mold. If the idea of a fully automated Minecraft/Stardew Valley experience sounds interesting to you while considering the machine logic necessary to make it happen. The concept is absolutely fascinating, but I do expect a point where my self-motivation will be lost and the lack of any major goal other than “make bigger towns” will wear on me. However, for the time being, Autonauts is an incredibly unique game, and worth a shot for the low price.

Autonauts is a strange concept that is fitting for a very particular type of player. Taking inspiration from the genre sparked by Minecraft, the machine learning and automation of tasks is a unique take on the crowded genre, but may not be quite as mindless and relaxing as some may prefer.