Not always to colonize a planet there is a need for wars and terraforming weapons, sometimes commitment, sweetness and lots of robots are enough just like in Autonauts, the new title developed by Denki.
My first automated colony
The game opens with our arrival on a planet identical to Earth on which, however, there seems to be no trace of civilization, it will therefore be our task to create a colony where life can flourish.
To do this we will have to extract resources, build structures and advance our technologies, but how do you colonize a planet completely by yourself? But with an army of programmable robots of course! In fact, the purpose of Autonauts is to make our colony more and more automated in order to have to do the fewest possible actions.
Programming our bots will be one of the strong points of this game and to do so a really simple and intuitive system is offered to the player: Each Bot can literally record our every action which will be translated into a real customizable programming language, once the robot will perfectly imitate what it was shown in a cycle that we will set ourselves. Although our metal friends will do the dirty work for us, our hand will often be needed, especially in the initial stages, to recharge them or to select new technologies to research. Accompanying us on our journey will be a series of missions and objectives that will guide us to discover new projects.
Not all processes are so automatic
Although there is a lot of talk about automation, some steps, especially in the tutorial, are not so automatic. Autonauts arises in a very basic way by replacing many of the texts with images, almost like a children's book, but letting us navigate a series of square figures of objects such as tools, structures and resources. With some explanation in the tutorial removed, the game leaves us to find out how to complete the different objectives and how to obtain the various resources, ending up spending hours trying to figure out how to do it while we will still have to look after our colony thus creating some loops from which we can also get out. A few hours later. Fortunately, the gameplay is really simple by entrusting the camera (which unfortunately cannot rotate) and the mouse to the main collection and release actions to WASD. Programming bots, as simplistic as it is, can sometimes run into some mistakes causing robots to crash and forcing us to reprogram them even if the sequence was correct.
In conclusion:
At first glance Autonauts may seem like a mix between Minecraft and Factorio, and a little bit it is, but the colorful design and management mechanics manage to make it have an identity of its own. The basic idea develops quietly without too many pretensions, in fact once you enter the mechanism it reveals a satisfying gameplay that will keep you glued for a long time almost like a mobile game. The programming mechanics are certainly one of the best aspects of the game, allowing us to become familiar with real notions of coding that can be used by everyone. Although the game does not stand out due to some graphic assets and some technical gaps, it is certainly an excellent alternative for the little ones if you want to bring them closer to something creative and at the same time organizational to introduce them to some management mechanics in the company of adorable robots, but above all to show that very often you don't need fights and violence to conquer the world but a little commitment and a few friends are enough to help you.
