Steam Link: Phoning Home
Phoning Home belongs to the quite popular in recent years open-world survival&exploration game genres.
The twist here, however, is that our main character is a robot, belonging to a mechanical race of space explorators.
The game starts from a crash landing on a very aberrant planet, where materials normally requiring artificial synthesis, or lab environment to even exist, are abundant and ever-present.
Not minding that weird coincidence much, our robot explores around, gathers resources, and searches for ways to reach out and, as per what title suggests, phone home to call for help...
Or at least that's the gist of how things stand.
Gameplay itself isn't that much different from what is described above, but definitely worth noting is the fact that those few things one does in the game are terribly disproportioned.
Most of the actual play time is spent on resource gathering, crafting some semi-helpful items from a very limited list of craftables and traveling between plot-enforced checkpoints. Which, without a minimap and a proper quest/task list in place, is oftentimes nothing short of a chore.
It is worth noting that without going through some very specific checkpoints proceeding with the game becomes impossible.
But at least we have a very useless side-kick, with kinda witty commentaries, to take care of and make sure it doesn't die/get lost somewhere.
Plot-wise, the game sucks. While we do have representatives of a mechanical race of space explorers, an aberrant world where laws of physics seem to work differently, and a very ominous ruins of a long past civilization, no effort from developers is made to actually explore or expand on either of those highly interesting subjects and the linearity of plot leaves a lot to wish for.
Controls are quite tacky and not very user-friendly. Takes some getting used to them, especially since the mechanics make it so our robot is easily damaged and loses fuel quickly. Not being careful with the jetpack will kill you in no time!
Actually, not being careful in general makes you damaged/killed fast as most everything can cause damage and some even from a distance!
Overall, the game is okay, and that's the best I can say about it due to how much possible potential its developers have squandered.
Numerically speaking, I would give it a general rating of 4.5, maybe 5 out of 10.
That 5 due to how varied the environments can sometimes be.
If you enjoy those kinds of games, it mii~ight just be a game for you. There are better games than this one out there, though.