What a fantastic, unexpected gem of a game! I don't know how it's been out this long without catching my eye, but I'm very glad it finally did. 110% recommended.

Beyond Contact is a great mix of combat, exploration, unlocks, crafts, base building, and tower defense. Colourful and fun. Interesting story. Characters are cute and loveable, but not excessively cutesy. Art style strikes just the right balance between realism and fantastical. The music is REALLY good, fits the theme perfectly, and there are enough tracks that I never find myself humming the theme, or getting annoyed and switching it off.

My only complaint is that I wish you could turn off a couple of the graphic overlays, like when your character is freezing or burning. The overlays are a little too intense and give me eye strain. Or maybe that's just because I've been playing for too many hours without a break. lol.

On the off chance that the devs see this, I have a couple of small bits of feedback:
1. It would be super handy if we could control-click to automatically deposit whatever is in your inventory into the storage facility, like you do in most games. Having to drag and drop is kinda annoying.
2. Fertilizers are a pain to apply. Please add the ability to activate a stack and then just click once on the plants you want to fertilize, like you do when you're planting seedlings. Dragging and dropping is, again, kind of a pain.
3. A verbal warning when power runs out at your base would be super helpful. Alas, my food has all rotted again because I forgot to top up my 'shroom generators!
4. Please allow larger stacks to be deposited into generators. Refilling generators is boring, and distracts you from the fun parts of the game.
5. Please add the ability to remove small rocks and debris, or add the ability to build base floors over top of them.
6. There's a small glitch in the menu where occasionally an item will get 'stuck' and not allow you to grab it or use lt. It can be fixed by dragging another item on top of it, so not a huge deal, but still a bug. Not sure if it effects items at random. The only one I noticed it on was the gas vine healing item.

There are a lot of cool concepts here, it kind of has a Crashlands vibe but with a bit more depth. The problem is that the combat is terrible. Its just a tedious game of hit and run with no strategy and you die in 10 hits or less. The level of grind overall appears to be significant as well. I think I got this for $3.99 so I won't be refunding it as it's worth that but anything more and it would probably not be worth the cost. Its a shame too theres some good bones here.