Hydroneer

Most mining sandboxes give you a backpack and let you forget about logistics. Hydroneer takes the backpack away entirely. You can hold exactly one object — one ore chunk, one gold nugget, one plank — at a time, and everything from selling loot to stocking a forge means physically carrying it there yourself, or building a machine that does the carrying for you. It's a small design decision that reshapes the whole game around it, and it's the single thing nearly every review, positive or negative, ends up discussing first.

One object, and the machines built to end that

The hook works. Early hours of Hydroneer are about digging into voxel terrain with a pan and shovel, hauling what you find to a smelter or a sluice by hand, and slowly realizing that every trip you're making is a trip a hydro-powered conveyor, pipe network or automated miner could make instead. Building that automation is genuinely satisfying physical-logic puzzle work — pressure, pipe routing and machine placement all matter in a way that a menu-driven factory game doesn't quite replicate. Several of the most detailed positive reviews describe exactly this arc: skeptical of the no-inventory gimmick for the first hour, converted by hour three once the first automated line comes online.

That same mechanic is also the game's most consistently cited flaw. A wide, genuinely even split runs through the review sample: for every player who calls the one-object rule the game's best idea, another calls it tedious busywork, particularly once trading requires walking coins to one vendor and goods to another across the map. Both camps are describing the same design choice accurately — it's not a case of one side being wrong, just a divisive mechanic that rewards patience some players don't have and others actively enjoy.

What automation actually buys you

The harder problem shows up after automation is built, and it's corroborated across a large number of independent reviews rather than resting on one loud complaint: once ore, gem and craft chains are running themselves, there simply isn't much left. Reviewers count a handful of ore types, a handful of gems, a couple of jewellery recipes and a short list of craftable goods, and several describe reaching that ceiling within 15 to 30 hours before finding themselves staring at a pile of coins with nothing to spend them on. Global Steam achievement data backs this up at scale: early crafting and smelting goals sit around 50-60% completion across the whole playerbase, while late-game achievements fall under 1%. That's consistent with most owners stopping well before the deeper systems, whether from boredom, a sense of completion, or the specific progression complaints below — the achievement curve can't distinguish which, but the shape matches what reviewers describe either way.

Progression itself draws a specific, repeated complaint: multiple non-exchangeable currencies gate advancement behind delivery-style fetch tasks that require driving across the map to find buyers, rather than a single economy the player can reason about. It's the kind of friction that reads as intentional pacing to some players and as padding to others, but enough reviewers single out the exact same mechanic that it's worth treating as a real design weakness rather than an isolated gripe.

Co-op that isn't quite co-op, and a save bug that finally got fixed

Two more specific, checkable complaints recur often enough to call out directly. First, Hydroneer's own storefront categories list Co-op and Shared/Split Screen Co-op alongside Remote Play Together, but do not list an independent networked online co-op category — and that absence lines up exactly with what several reviewers report firsthand: playing together means Steam Remote Play Together or local split-screen, with only one person able to use keyboard and mouse at a time, not each player running their own independent session. Anyone buying specifically for a real online co-op experience with friends should treat this as confirmed rather than assumed.

Second, a long-running save-corruption bug shows up across multiple reviews spanning what one detailed account describes as over two years of reports, including a Discord channel dedicated to sharing backup save files as an informal workaround. This wasn't a bug the developer ignored indefinitely: Foulball Hangover's own update history includes a dedicated "Save corruption fix!" patch (version 3.0.9) years into the game's life. That's a genuinely better outcome than the review that raised it initially expected, though it's fair context that the bug went unresolved long enough to burn real trust and real save files first.

A small studio that kept showing up

Whatever else is true about content depth, Foulball Hangover has not walked away from this game. The update history runs in an almost unbroken line from launch through a major 2.0 multiplayer overhaul, a paid Journey to Volcalidus expansion in April 2024 that drew its own mixed reception, a "one million players" milestone post in 2025, and optimisation and console-port announcements as recently as 2026 — six years of a tiny team actually finishing what it started, even where the finished product still draws real content complaints. That consistency matters for anyone weighing whether a small-studio sandbox is worth the risk of early abandonment; here, it plainly isn't.

Verdict

Hydroneer nails a genuinely original physical hook for the mining-sandbox genre and backs it with six years of real, sustained support from a tiny team — that's rarer than it should be in this space. What holds it to a mid-range score is that the loop it builds runs dry faster than its premise promises, its multiplayer undersells what "Co-op" usually means on Steam, and a serious save-corruption bug took years longer to fix than it should have. Buy it on sale for a satisfying 15-to-30-hour automation puzzle, not for a long-term base-building home.