Hydroneer
Worth it · Strategy · 2020
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $14.99.
- Length
- 22.9h
- Value
- $0.65/hr
- Reviews
- 86% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 78% over the last 30 days against 86% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, 1 GB DirectX 11 dedicated video card, 10 GB of storage. Windows only.
Hydroneer is a mining and base building sandbox. Dig for gold and other resources to turn a profit and enhance your mining operation. Build a base of operations, forge weapons, go fishing, and dig deep!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $4.49. That was May 2026. Its cuts run 30 percent off as a rule. There have been 52 in the 6 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 3 percent on value. It is pricier than 82 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 89 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Factorio ($35.00, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Stationeers ($34.99, scores 65).
Players rate it 86 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 78 percent. Something recent has soured the room. 19 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written January 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 41 percent of the 1,976 reviews written there were positive, against 86 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
22.9 hours to finish it, 55 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.4 times the campaign.
The drop-off
59% start to <1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
374 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This game was once great and still is good but with the amount of bugs ive had in the few days is more than i get in ARK: Evo/Asc, List of worth noting bugs 1. All my seeds 50 packets of 10, 1000 weight of cut food all just gone/disappeared no idea why, Im mid game so this hurts for progress 2. Vehicles falling thru the ground on dig sites. 3. Half of one of my bases lost water to only half of it so it started...
I wanted to give this game a chance, but... ZERO QoL features. Literally zero. You can hold only ONE thing at a time. You can NOT craft any building parts, machines, conveyor belts, blocks, pipes etc. You can ONLY buy them and some stores will be quite far from your base. The "drop" mechanic is so badly done. You have to line up the shadow of thing you are holding with the container in order to drop it inside. Also...
they should really REALLY make a hydroneer 2 with firstly, obviously, multiplayer, obviously. then fix all the mind boggling lack of quality of life (im literally looking at the a steam promo pic where the guy has 2 hands). lastly make the 'logic" make sense, call it what it is, electricity, and make it so i dont need to spend actual hours on google trying to figure out how to automate an electric smelter spending...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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Hydroneer scores 71/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1106840/hydroneerThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.