Recent reviews by JM

Regrettably I paid for this game years ago when it came out. It was buggier then than it is now, yet extremely little interesting has happened in all the years since the standalone has come to steam. Essentially nothing has been added to this game that mods couldn't do, and I don't even think mods make this experience better. Nothing has been added which fosters more engaging or complex social interaction, and the survival mechanics themselves haven't gotten any deeper either.


You'll never establish a settlement or create interesting structures, the building seems like some kind of bootleg Rust. Although modular, it's all boring and cubic. You'll never build complex structures with usable appliances or infrastructure. The open-ended nature of the game and the scarcity of the resources encourages a fundamental mistrust of others, but there's no hope of overcoming that to create a community with more complex social interactions. You may run into cool people, although you more likely will be playing the slowest paced battle royale on Earth. Mods will put community safe trading zones in, which turns out to be the most boring way to address how impossible it is to create settlements of your own. Not only does that entirely eliminate the tense social element that makes this game unique, those same mods also tend to make high tech equipment readily available. The consequence of that being scarcity is largely eliminated, and DayZ becomes a dull medium for clan warfare and sniping.

Resource scarcity can be compelling in a survival game, but probably also overdone in this game. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if you couldn't starve to death within a single day. Starvation inexplicably hits you so quickly as a fresh spawn, and you won't readily find the equipment you need to subsist on the animals you can hunt in-game. It's not impossible to get started, but it'll probably take a few tries, and those kinds of failures are an incredibly boring waste of time. On the topic of time wasting, very few potentially viable vehicles spawn. I'm not talking about fully working ones, but even fixable ones are quite rare. This means not only do you have limited storage space (what you can carry), but it also decreases your stamina, further decreasing your movement speed. To add to that, running everywhere also contributes to the starvation problem.

DayZ was a good idea, but it hasn't evolved meaningfully. You will be a loner subsisting on loot or hunted animals. You will run around for a long time before you have an interesting engagement. Even if you have friends, you will have no goals except to get higher tier equipment to protect yourself from people doing the exact same thing. You will not build anything long-term, meaningful, or interesting. In the end you will not survive, and it will seem like one of the most boring ways you've ever wasted your time.


Oh, and it's shockingly overpriced. Never under any circumstances pay the full price for this game. Even at 50% discount, $30 CAD is a steep charge for something like this. It's actually insulting they released a DLC on top of that. Their idea of a major update is adding a weapon and updating some map areas a tad. My disappointment in this project veers towards disgust. There's no ambition or vision. The flaws in the Arma 2 mod were forgivable being that it was a new, free project with potential. Nowadays modders add more content, more efficiently than the devs do, and it's still not any better for it. Nothing added to this game has increased the depth or possibility of social interactions, which was always where this project had its potential. If you've never played DayZ, forget about it. My best times in the game are distant memories. None of those memories were formed in the standalone anyway.

Named my daughter Satan and sent her to receive education from the pope once. Worth every penny.

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