Hostile Planet: Survival

Hostile Planet: Survival strands players on an unexplored, hostile world with a simple, familiar pitch: gather resources, craft gear, build a shelter, and survive both the local wildlife and the night. A small team crediting itself as Aliens Developers released the game in May 2022 after a brief Early Access run, and its roughly 97 reviews since have settled at a Mixed rating — a score that, on closer reading, reflects a real split between a promising start and a thin, unfinished whole.

An opening hour that actually delivers

The clearest, most consistent praise in this game's reviews concerns its first impression. Reviewers repeatedly single out how satisfying the weapons feel to use, and more than one describes being genuinely struck by the world's visual variety and atmosphere in the opening stretch. One detailed review compares the feel favourably to established survival titles like Rust, and another frames the early hours as a legitimately strong pitch for the low asking price alone — before, almost without exception, the same reviewers go on to describe that impression fading.

A quest that ends almost as soon as it starts

The most specific structural complaint concerns length. One detailed review describes finishing the entire main questline in roughly 11 hours, receiving an abrupt "thanks for playing" message after looting a final item, and being left in an unexplained valley full of hostile creatures with no narrative closure whatsoever — despite base-upgrade systems that suggested a much longer game was coming. That's a meaningfully different problem than simple shortness: it's a game whose own systems imply scope its actual content doesn't deliver on.

Bugs that go beyond typical jank

Beyond pacing, reviewers report a specific, recurring set of technical problems. More than one describes loot that doesn't register in the inventory despite a pickup animation playing, and another reports losing all carried ammunition on death, then being forced to fight off enemies with only a knife. A third recounts falling over dead with no apparent cause. Individually these read as ordinary early-access jank; together, and given the developer's apparent lack of ongoing patches (more on that below), they read as unresolved and likely permanent.

A serious, unverifiable allegation

One of this game's more critical reviews makes a specific, pointed claim: that Hostile Planet: Survival is "99% a copy" of an earlier survival game called Nibiru: Uncharted Planet, released months earlier on the Epic Games Store by a different developer, and that Steam should remove it on those grounds. This review searched Steam's own store directly for that title and found no listing, which is unsurprising if it's genuinely an Epic-exclusive release, but it also means this review has no independent way to confirm or refute the underlying similarity claim through the tools available to it. It's included here because more than one reviewer raises variations of the same concern, but readers should treat it as an allegation, not an established fact.

A patch history that stops before the game even fully released

This review pulled the developer's public Steam patch history directly, and it's a short, telling list: two logged updates, the most recent dated February 2022 — three full months before the game exited Early Access into its current "released" state that May, and nothing logged since. That timeline lines up precisely with reviewer complaints describing the game as effectively stuck, including one blunt prediction that it would remain "in early access forever," even though it has technically since exited that status on paper. A game whose last visible development activity predates its own full release by months is a strong, specific signal that whatever roadmap once existed didn't survive to see it through.

Fair praise, without excusing the rest

It would be unfair to characterise every account of this game as purely negative. Several reviewers who clearly enjoyed their time describe the monster variety, crafting systems, and shelter-building loop as more accomplished than the game's rough, small-team presentation might suggest, and more than one frames the roughly NZ$12 asking price as a reasonable trade even while flagging real shortcomings elsewhere in the same review. That combination — real, specific enjoyment alongside real, specific criticism, often from the same reviewer — is a useful signal that the underlying concept has genuine merit, even where its execution and follow-through clearly fall short.

A no-frills, budget-hardware pitch

One reviewer's account is worth flagging for a different reason: running the game on a genuinely old graphics card, they reported the game running at a rough 40fps at reduced resolution, contrasted directly against modern releases like Cyberpunk 2077 running acceptably on the same hardware. That's a fair, specific data point about optimisation rather than a vague complaint, and it lines up with the broader pattern of reviewers praising the game's visual ambition while flagging that its technical execution hasn't caught up to match it — a common tension for small teams building open-world survival games without a larger studio's engineering resources behind them.

No achievements, no DLC, no roadmap signals

It's worth noting plainly what this review found absent from the store page itself: no Steam achievements are configured at all, and no DLC has ever been listed for the game. Neither is unusual on its own for a small-team release, but combined with the patch history stopping in February 2022, they reinforce the same picture — a game that reached its current, final-seeming state and then simply stopped receiving developer attention, rather than one still being actively shaped by ongoing feedback.

Where it lands

Hostile Planet: Survival opens with real promise: satisfying weapons, an attractive alien world, and a crafting loop with genuine early appeal. But a main quest that ends abruptly after a handful of hours, persistent unresolved bugs, a development record that appears to have stopped before the game's own full release, and a serious, unverified clone allegation hanging over the whole package are real, specific problems that go well beyond ordinary small-team roughness. A 4 credits a cheap, occasionally fun opening stretch while being honest that almost nothing beyond it currently holds up to scrutiny.