Stranded: Alien Dawn .... unplayable on a console IMO

I tend to really enjoy this kind of game as I have played a lot of them on PC in years past when I had a relatively powerful PC. It is one of those builder strategy games and honestly, I can't really say all that much what the game is about because I had to bail on the tutorial even though I was standing to accommodate my poor eyesight and really reading everything very closely.

This game was clearly designed to be played with a mouse and keyboard and I am sure it could be a lot of fun using exactly that, however, with a keyboard it is so damn complicated and convoluted that I gave up before I had even completed the first couple of "gimme" scenarios they present you with.

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The idea of building a colony with materials that you and your initially small crew establish on a planet that you crash landed on is a great concept and one that I would have really enjoyed playing as you have to balance aspects of building, gathering, crop-building, as well as defense and science. In a way it is similar to a lot of other games but Age of Empires is one that comes to mind even though it is obviously very different.

This game has received mostly positive reviews but those reviews are mostly those who played the game on PC and therefore were able to use some of the control aspects such as the mouse wheel that I believe are absolutely essential to being able to play this game at all.

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I got hung up on just trying to build the initial starter shelter in the game because rather than have a wheel on a mouse to zoom in and out on whatever territory you are attempting to build on you have to do a combination of right and left control stick combined with pressing buttons that in my instance were the L2 button being held down while combining it with one of the other main buttons. I kept getting zoomed out far into the distance well away from where the shelter shell was and even slight touching of one of the sticks resulted in the requested placement of a bedroll was ages in the distance rather than under the shelter where it needed to be. While this is likely an important part of the controls later on in the game when one's shelter ends up being absolutely massive, it wasn't helpful at all right at the start of the game.

Simply navigating the main controls is an exercise in frustration whereas on a PC this would be a simple click operation. As is the case with a lot of console simulation games, a mouse pointer is impractical with a controller and while I understand that they di the best they could with this, it just isn't a great interface for console gamers.

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It probably would have been a lot of fun to have progressed to the point where you have a massive custom-made estate like this but navigating something as simple as a straight line fence is very confusing and frustrating on a console. I remember having a similar opinion about the last simulation game that I tried to play on PS4 called Prison Architect which I found immensely frustrating on console, but a lot of fun on PC.

While I am sure there is an army of people out there that always played simulation games on console that believe this sort of control scheme is just par for the course, I am one of those guys that only ever enjoyed these games on PC. It's a bit tragic, because I was quite looking forward to some relaxed building and survival game that functions in some sort of sandbox way if you want it to. I don't even know if this game offers that but it does seem to be quite standard in this sort of game.

Perhaps I gave up too early but honestly, if the game can't help you enough to make it through the damn tutorial I don't really see it becoming a lot more fun later somehow when you have to do things quickly such as when you are under attack by alien pests.

I have already moved on to Tunic and am looking forward to trying that one out thanks to recommendations from other users here.

If you had a different experience playing Stranded on console and want to call me an idiot for not being able to deal with that I believe to be horrible controls that aren't necessarily the fault of the developers, please let me know in the comments!