astronomer may be a survival game, but it’s always had more of a sandbox feel thanks to the less pressure of its “survival” elements. In adventure mode, if you run out of oxygen, you’ll die – a gauge on your backpack shows the remaining supply – but oxygen is readily available through buildings, vehicles, or craft ropes that connect players to an oxygen line.
That did astronomer ideal for players who enjoy crafting and base management, but prefer to pursue these goals in a low-pressure environment. The game drops an astronaut onto a procedurally generated planet where players harvest resources, build their base, and explore the far nooks and crannies of space. The new port for Switch, releasing on January 13th, offers much the same fun experience but in a more portable environment, giving the game an edge for casual, creative gaming sessions. But if you’re looking for a more intense base build, astronomer is still a better title on Windows PCs, benefiting from more precise controls and greater processing power.
For the most part, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed astronomer
With these tools, the potential for exploration in astronomer feels almost infinite. You can drill deep into caves for mineral resources. You can terraform strange cliffs and throw yourself off them. You can literally dig into the core of the planet and keep going until you emerge on the other side. not how Walheim, another game that removed the survival grind from exploration and base building, there are no bosses softly navigating regions.
Switch controls are decently intuitive: the right trigger is either a cursor or the player camera, depending on whether the ray gun is switched. When it’s a cursor, players can pick up items such as seeds, resources, or base items, as well as plug in power cords and move the placement of a tether. When the ray gun is toggled, the right trigger will highlight the area where the cannon is terraforming. Switching between these modes is a breeze. Pulling the right trigger to get the ray gun going is also extremely satisfying brrbrr, sucks up the environment around you in a whirlwind.
Despite the kinetic satisfaction of exploring and terraforming, I seriously struggled with building bases. It’s much harder to maneuver a joystick precisely over an object’s capture window, which is annoying when you’re trying to grab tiny materials from your backpack and tape them to different printers for crafting purposes. (I imagine Joy-Con drift would make this even more frustrating.) It’s disappointing for that reason is
I originally played astronomer on PC in 2019. I was more focused on goals like building a shuttle and launching into space. I didn’t really terraform or explore just for fun with the environment – I used terraforming tools to create long slopes for my astronaut to “snowboard” down and tweaked paths to valuable resources. Eventually I got lazy and just started sticking dirt bins into the soil centrifuge which extracted basic resources for me. While I haven’t personally experienced it, I do know that framerate on Xbox suffered during the initial launch of the game, especially for players who built a larger base. I didn’t build a large enough base in my Switch playthrough to notice the same issues, but given the console’s lower processing power I could see that later on.
Playing on Switch hasn’t diminished the fun of just exploring the game. If anything, it’s made me want to explore more – there’s something about using a controller to traverse that will always feel more natural to me as a person who grew up playing Nintendo games. Additionally, Switch portability means I’ll reach out more often for chill-play sessions in Creativity Mode, where I can really lean into the game’s sandbox nature and use terraforming less for gathering resources and more for straight-line shenanigans. In my current save file I’ve built very little – but I’ve hollowed out the core of a mountain.
As a die-hard fan of simulation and base building games, I’m happy to have two places to play astronomer, each giving me a different focus – PC for building bases and Switch for running around doing stupid things. While I wish the Switch was a sharper platform for actual base management, the portable option gives me more opportunities to mess around in the game’s world. With astronomerThe sprawling and highly variable map of is still an embarrassment of riches.
astronomer Coming to Nintendo Switch on January 13th. It is also available for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. These impressions are based on a final “retail” Switch download code provided by System Era Softworks. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.