Is It Worth Your Time? A First Look At Ocean Planet

over 3 years ago (Edited)

So today, Hive's newest game finally got released. The release was not without its issues and after the countdown had already moved to -8 hours, I was finally able to log into Ocean Planet and start my journey into its post apocalyptic Water World like reality. I've been pretty excited about the game so far. I just love the setting and from what I had gathered, it's going to be a bit more than just another simple idle game.

To be honest, though, the game is still extremely rough around the edges and only offers a bare minimum of gameplay at that stage. Usually, I'd give it some more time to mature before doing a first article. Several users on both Torum and noise.cash already stated that they were waiting for my article, though, so I decided to do a first impression article anyway and follow up with another one once the dust has settled a bit. So let's get right into it! Is it worth your time?

In case you haven't heard about the game before, I did an article roughly 2 weeks ago that covers what the game is all about so. I won't repeat it here and just advise you to read this article first. Instead, we'll dive right into it. What does Ocean Plant have to offer right now?

For one, your starting town - aptly named The Glory Waters - is already fully accessible and houses a total of 7 different locations. Each location is home to one or several characters that you can already interact with. Most of them only provide a short but witty dialogue and don't seem to be anything else thus far.

The most important location right now seems to be the Market where you can sell all the stuff you collected in the game. Other than that, there are also two characters that sell licences allowing you to travel to different locations for "mining". Said mining is the only activity available in the game right now. To start your mining trip, you bring up the mini map, choose the location you want to travel to and start your trip.

This also highlights the first major issue the game has right now. It takes like 6 minutes to get to one of the mining locations and during that time, you can't do anything but watch your ship go. The thing is, time only passes as long as the browser tab is active so the moment you do something else, time stops passing. This is certainly an oversight and will get fixed eventually, but for now it's rather annoying.

Right now there are 2 locations accessible without a permit, a sunken market and a sunken box ship. There's no indication what to find where and from the few trips I did so far, I didn't see any significant difference in the loot I found.

The mining process is rather straight forward. You click the button in the bottom left corner, there's a short mining animation and after about 5-6 seconds you are presented with the loot screen above. That loot can either be empty or contain several different items that go directly to your inventory. Once all 32 spots in your inventory are filled, you return back to the village and sell your haul.

Notably, right now all actions are done in real time, meaning there's no idle game component to the game right now. If you want to mine, you have to be there, clicking the mining button repeatedly. I like that in theory because I'd love to see some more games that are not idle games on Hive but at the same time without an energy limit or any other regulating factor or decision making, this obviously invites the use of bots.

My first mining trips netted me between 5 and 10 of the game's token which has no name displayed for it so far. I assume it's C24 so that would be about 1-2 Hive per run - not too shabby after all. Payout isn't implemented either, so for now you can only accumulate the money and wait what you can do with it later or unlock different locations on the minimap. These unlocks cost 200 tokens, so you'd need to do some trips before you can unlock a new area. Again, there's no indication given what to expect there.

And that concludes anything you can do in the game right now. Well, then... Is it worth your time? Mhh... To tell the truth, I really love what I've seen so far. The art style is amazing, I love the whole concept, the post apocalyptic world has a very tempting feel to it. That said, I'd really love to at least have some information available. Right now, it feels more like a trip to the cake factory than actually eating the cake. Well, more precisely, it feels like a trip to the place where the cake factory that will bake your cake is going to be built. There's just almost nothing there yet. It has no tooltips, no guidance, no nothing.

This wouldn't be too much of an issue for me if I knew a bit more about what was going on and what to expect next. Although I'm in the game's Discord and follow the game's account, I just don't know anything about that. And honestly, that's just not good enough. I've said it in my recent article on Alien Worlds. This kind of non-information is an issue that plagues many blockchain games and in that regard, Ocean Planet is the worst I've had so far.

So sadly, I can't recommend the game yet. If you want to be with it from day 1, just go ahead and join it. It's free to do so, so chances are you won't regret it. I think it has huge potential and I'm sure I'll love it more and more the longer it goes. But right now, there's just not enough in it to warrant my recommendation. I certainly hope this will change pretty soon and once it does, I'll be right back to you with another article sharing everything I've gathered. Fingers crossed!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!