Recent reviews by Chashmodai

Spent like 30 minutes getting a piece of salvage from on top of a spire at the bottom of the ocean up on land. I can see it getting sucked up into the salvage collector, about to unlock the part from it. Salvage reset. It reset my salvage as it was literally getting sucked into the salvage collector.

♥♥♥♥ this game.

I'm having issues with this game. With vsync turned off, the game runs completely smooth; with severe screen tearing, of course. I can enable vsync but it requires hardware acceleration. Screen tearing disappears but CPU usage increases by 4x and GPU usage goes from pretty much 0% to over 20%. It also stutters constantly.

Unplayable for me as it is right now. Looking through various forums I can tell this is a relatively common issue.

This game is a buggy mess. I want to like it but the frustration of having to deal with bugs so often leaves me unable to.

Playing a cavalier is at the moment impossible. There's a bug that dismounts you after every single enemy encounter. This bug has been reported since early November last year as far as I can tell, and the lazy devs have not lifted a finger to fix it in the time since then.

2014 game with no support for resolutions higher than 1080p. Kekw

Uninstalled.

I played up to and including part 4 of the base game main story about one and a half years ago. Part 5 wasn't finished back then and I figured I would come back a bit later. Still, to this day, no part 5. The DLC got its fifth part already though. It's clear what the devs are focusing on and it isn't the original supporters of the game - leaving us in the dark for years without the conclusion to the main story while focusing on new paid DLC.

EDIT December 2024
Jesus Christ. They announced a sequel. BEFORE THE STORY IS EVEN FINISHED FOR THE FIRST GAME.
Seriously, what's going on with these devs? This is baffling.

Optimization seem to be pretty much non-existent. The game runs way worse than it has any right to do given the graphic fidelity. I have decided to refund the game, although I will keep an eye on it to see if any optimization is done at some point.

EDIT: Wow. The semi-recent performance update did wonders for this game. It is now playing much better than it did back when I played it the first time. Changing to a positive review and might update with more opinions as I play more of the game.

This game is all about prepping. Prepping for the apocalypse. An apocalypse you, as the player, will never get to experience. The game ends just as the bombs drop. The bunker you've spent all your time and resources on is effectively useless and only there to make way for the rocket. Instead of using the perfectly good nuclear shelter under your house, the protagonist figures that it is a better idea to launch into certain death in a rocket than stay inside their underground shelter when the apocalypse happens.

I just don't get it. You have a game where the main focus is building a bunker, yet you don't have an apocalypse. The point of building a nuclear shelter is to use it as shelter when the bombs drop. Not to build a silly rocket that'll most certainly kill you anyway.

Skipping over that, the game is just bad in general. The graphics are decent, if only the game had come out about 8 years ago, but the artstyle is the real crime here. It is god-awful. This game is not a looker, that's for sure.
The game is also repetitive and gets boring incredibly fast. I wouldn't blame you if you quit before even finishing the tutorial.

I've played about 13 hours and I'm far from impressed as of right now. Massive disappointment.

The game pretends to be a sandbox simulation game where you can do whatever you want, and it is true to some degree, but it has far too little freedom to be enjoyable. You are forced to play through the chapters, because your build limit(the limit on how many buildings your village can contain) can only be increased by following the main story line. Excuse me, did I say story line? My mistake, there is no story to be had here. You get a list of things to complete, like a very, very long-winded tutorial. Hunt 10 deers, craft a bow, craft an axe, etc. etc. You don't get these tasks from NPCs, but they just appear in your journal as soon as you're done with the last one.

Remember - these tasks are mandatory. You cannot skip them unless you want to be restricted to just one or a few buildings.

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The game is also incredibly clunky to play. The devs made an absolutely genius decision with the camera. This game is played in a first-person perspective, but the devs just strapped a camera on the face of your character model. This sentence may not make sense at first, but here's the deal: any slight movement of the head of your character will also move the camera. When you stand perfectly still, your character will move slightly back and forth - and the camera with it. If you tap left or right movement keys, the camera will first move to whichever direction you want it to but then immediately snap back to wherever you were previously. There are tons of annoyances like this that is the result of the first-person camera. Have you ever played GTA V in first-person? Yeah, Rockstar did the same as the devs in this game - which makes sense since it is first-and-foremost a third-person game.

To make matters worse, a lot of actions require you to hold E. To pick up berries, you hold E. To pick up bushes to get sticks, you hold E. This is fine in most games, but when the camera moves on its own with no input from the player, it can get incredibly frustrating. Imagine you're trying to interact with a berry bush. You stand close enough to the bush to where you can reach it when your character(and your camera) is leaning towards the bush. You hold E to collect the berries. Now your character(and, thus, camera) leans back and you can suddenly not reach your berries. Your action is canceled and you need to start over again.

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And then we have the god-awful persuasion system. If you want to hire new villagers to your village, you need to raise their approval. Approval starts at 50% on all recruitable villagers. You need to reach 70% in order to recruit them. So how do you raise approval? You talk to your recruit, and are given two dialogue options. Each dialogue option gives a different amount of approval - some positive, some negative. You, the player, has absolutely no idea which one gives which. The same dialogue gives(or subtracts) different amount of approval depending on who you speak to, and you have no idea of knowing beforehand. Oh, and you only have a few tries before the person refuses to speak to you again. Having bad luck? Well, walk all the way home and come back tomorrow. Oh, and it is purely luck. No skill is involved at all.

So, how do you actually increase approval enough to recruit someone? Well, first of all, you make a manual save. Then, you talk to the villager. Play their stupid game. Did you raise his approval enough for recruitment? Congratulations. Did you fail? Load your earlier save. Try again. And again. And again. And again.

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All in all, not a good game so far. The clunkiness is probably its greatest fault. It is not an enjoyable game to play, sadly. It is a shame too, because the village system is pretty decent, if you can look over the faults. I will probably keep playing this game for a while longer, just to see if it gets better. I have my doubts, but maybe in the future it will - with a lot of patches. Maybe. If that happens, I will be more than happy to edit this review to a positive one.

Some African warlord recommended this game to me. I'm glad he did, because the game is absolutely amazing. A relatively hidden gem.

It's a great game, but sadly it is near unplayable. A lot of people seem to have issues with stuttering while moving the cursor in-game - pretty much the exact same issue as M&B Warband. The devs added advertisements for Warlords but they couldn't be bothered to fix the mouse stuttering issue. Clearly I cannot recommend this game.