Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions

In 2019, System Era Softworks shipped Astroneer, a pastel-colored survival sandbox where you terraformed planets, built bases, and got pleasantly lost deforming dirt with a vacuum gun. It was the rare space game that felt warm instead of cold, more about curiosity than killing. Seven years later they hand us Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, an early access co-op spinoff published by Devolver Digital, where up to four players board the ESS Starseeker, drop onto the wetland planet Tephra, and chip away at hundreds of shared missions together. The pitch is camaraderie in space, cross-platform and cross-progression, thirty bucks, no microtransactions, no premium currency, content updates promised for at least a year. On paper this is the anti-live-service live service, and that alone deserves a slow clap.

When the servers behave, the loop is exactly the gentle drug Astroneer fans were hoping for. Tephra is gorgeous and weird, all sprawling jungles, flooded ruins, and the scattered wreckage of some doomed EXO Dynamics voyage you slowly piece together. Exploration is the reward, not a chore between objectives, and the cooperative play actually encourages camaraderie instead of selfish loot grabbing, because Landing Sites unlock through collective effort rather than one player hoarding everything. Critics caught it too: that irresistible one more mission feeling that erases two hours before you notice. System Era kept the soul, the soft palette, the sense that the universe is a place to wander rather than a checklist to conquer, and then politely refused to bolt a battle pass onto any of it.

Now the asterisk, and it is a big one: this is early access, and on launch day that meant the cozy space adventure spent a worrying amount of time staring at connection errors. Steam reviews cratered to roughly 37 percent positive across the first wave, a chunk of it server rage that looked a lot like the Helldivers 2 opening weekend, where a genuinely good game got buried under players who could not log into it. Some of that is review bombing, some of it is fair, and a co-op game that cannot reliably do the co-op part on day one is a real problem, not a vibe. The honest read is that this is not Astroneer 2, it is a different, more structured, more social thing wearing the brand, and a portion of the backlash is grief from people who wanted the sequel they imagined. The bright side is real and unusually solid: the foundation is charming, the monetization is consumer friendly to the point of being almost suspicious, and System Era has actually shipped a year of updates before for the original, so the runway here is earned, not promised on a slide.