Recent reviews by Cujo

It took me about 11 hours to finish every single one of the campaigns on normal, as a rough estimate on time spent. I went at a steady pace, and only failed one or two times total, usually to exceptionally bad luck, such as a tank throwing a car and incapping all three bots at once seconds before a Choker pins me. This estimation excludes the apparently community made campaign, Cold Stream, which is an overly punishing experience I failed 4 times on. Other than those failures that I do not consider to be major faults of my skill, I always was in the sweet spot of challenge where I was on guard and trying all the time, but never seriously anxious of total failure so long as I played well. Hordes could get very tense if I was careless, or be an amazing power fantasy if I was prepared. I can imagine easily playing all the maps again with my new knowledge and having an unchanged level of fun. Cold Stream is the only real exception, but I imagine it would be much better with a team of humans instead of AI to fight back the zombies.

Having played games long enough to at least grasp the basics of level design, I found myself constantly marveling about the exquisite level design present in this game. I would sit back from the game after a while and realize that not once in the last 20 minutes had I actively searched for where to go, but that somehow I was still moving forwards in the level, seemingly without effort. The combination of lights, multiple funneling pathways and zombie spawns stopped me from ever stopping and thinking "Wait...where am I going?" Which would have immediately pulled me out of the game and been annoying. It's hard to fully explain exactly how these factors work, this is an invisible hand that you don't notice until it is not there. It's the bass in music, the white in a painting, the quiet supporting note that enhances your experience by magnitudes. You'll never fully explain it, just that some games have "it" and some games do not.

I don't really think much more needs to be said. It is a fun game. It's kept a steady playerbase for a reason. I have noticed nothing I honestly dislike about the game and had genuine fun while playing. I could make sweeping proclamations about this being a masterpiece, but true power speaks quietly because it will always be heard. This is a good game. You should play it. And you can buy 4 copies of it for 40 bucks, which combined is 20 dollars less than a single copy of Back 4 Blood at time of writing.

They have removed content from my game file in an attempt to sell it back to me.

This game is amazing. Definitely play it. A couple of things I would recommend.
Get a spacebar macro. Breaking your keyboard to open a gate or turn a valve is no fun.
Install Flawless Widescreen and patch the game to fix the aspect ratio, remove the black bars, and increase the FOV to non-dizzying levels.
Add a launch property to uncap the framerate to your computer refresh rate (+R_swapinterval -1)

Once you do these things, and turn off motion blur in the settings, the game looks visually amazing, runs smoothly, and has wonderful gameplay. The story is, of course, dated. It's not immediately clear what's going on, and Sebastian is the classic blank slate character with few character moments, or even much dialogue, but I still love it. The satisfaction of collecting everything and putting together the story is great, and I love the combat. The game does suffer from pacing issues, it can't decide when it wants to be a stealth game and when it wants to be an action game. You'll get whiplash from sudden mood and gameplay changes, but overall I'd recommend playing this game.

I bought this game quite a while ago around the end of Rundown 1, and recently redownloaded to see what has changed since then.

The game itself is a great bare bones concept that succeeds in getting the general things right while failing at specifics. For example:

The stealth hits are satisfying, meaty, and the atmosphere is tense and anxiety inducing. But after a while it becomes annoying, and your crouch button starts crying out for mercy. The red-light green-light monotony is rarely broken up, and after a while you start to look at a room full of sleepers less as a challenge, and more as an annoyance to deal with before you move on. The game shouldn't be making you feel frustrated for doing its main gameplay loop aka kill sleepers, loot, scan, repeat.

The guns are magnificent in design. They truly look and sound amazing. They are appropriate to the situation, and even if no new weapons came out, I would be satisfied with the arsenal already at my fingertips. But the gunplay is terrible, with floaty firing, lightning quick enemy reactions, and strange hitboxes. They really did not put a lot of time into designing fair or even particularly fun gunplay. I believe it is because they want to push players to stealth, which I talked about above.

The maps are handcrafted and really are wonderful. The terminals are great and I'd love to see them expanded upon. The sound design and ambiance, the weight and grit of the world, unlike any other game I've played before. But the small development team has caused them to all feel very much the same. There's very little variation outside of a few "set piece" rooms designed specifically to be different.

The setting is original, scary, and genuinely captures my imagination. Its a great concept to start from. But there's a lack of story. The characters are stand ins with minimal voice lines that you could easily silence and change almost nothing about the game. Why is the Warden sending prisoners down here? What does he want? Obviously you can say that a lot of the questions are meant to be answered at the end, or add to the mystery driving players forwards. But you can't subsist solely on mystery. You have to give us clues, scraps to play with. All we get are 2-3 lines of text mission briefings, which usually only serve to hint at the new "twist" of the current rundown. Rarely do they relate to the story. The only bit of lore we really, solidly have in game is what we can extrapolate from the various tasks we are forced to perform. And with no confirmation, we often feel like we are guessing in the dark. Even just a line telling us something like "You're the vanguard force clearing the facility for reuse," would be enough. That would give us something to roleplay and extrapolate off of in our head, allowing us to build and make our own story. We don't get that.

The fact that old Rundowns are gone for good, or at least until the devs "finish the story" means that I have no way to play Rundown 2 and 3, which I missed due to issues with my internet (downloading multiple gigs at <100 KB/s is not fun). Other than matchmaking (which just came about), I think this probably the most requested feature for the game, as many people feel like they're missing out for neglecting to buy the game from the beginning and play through the whole experience. The paradox of course is that the developers claim they want to tell a story as justification for not leaving up old Rundowns. It's a bit illogical, as this forces them to either "rewrite" the story for each consecutive Rundown, ensuring new players are satisfied and boring old players, or continue on in the story and confuse and discourage new players.

There is also no progression currently in the game, which is something both lauded and reviled by the community. It seems like a very devisive issue, with many people glad that for once, a game doesn't have a battle pass or golden cosmetics, or upgrade trees and skillpoints. Other people find the same issue I had: the lack of engagement with the game due to a lack of purpose. There isn't even currently achievements to look for. If I'm going to play a game, I need a central thing to fixate around, be it progression or story. The lack of progression alone absolutely does not kill the game for me. The lack of tangible story also does not kill the game for me. The lack of both does. Either one or the other needs to happen, and both would be fine by me as well.

Now, I understand this is a small developer team, and the game is in Early Access. Many of these things will get better. This isn't a hit piece about me trying to bring down the developers. They have a lot of interaction with the community and seem like genuinely good people. I hope this game succeeds beyond their wildest expectations. I hope this game improves in every possible way and becomes a game I play regularly and with passion. It's got its own niche that I would love to see filled.

However, I do think 35 dollars is a lot to ask for a currently unfinished game. That's half a triple A title, and more than many other finished games with more content ask for. If I had the choice to buy this game again, I would probably be willing to spend 15-20 dollars on it, perhaps 25 in good faith to developers improving the game. Not 35. Because of that, I can't currently recommend it, though I will certainly be watching the game from afar, ready to amend my rating when it becomes clear it is a 35 dollar game.
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It holds a special place in my heart. Don't let my hours confuse you, I owned a disk copy back in the day and must have played hundreds of hours. I only bought it on steam because the game broke under my playtime.

Yes, it is a buggy mess. Yes, I love it anyway.
And once you get your fill of vodka soaked Pripyat, you can mod it into an unrecognizable game for an entirely new experience.

While I enjoyed this game in Alpha, I can no longer recommend this game due to 3 points.

1: The skill cap for players is very, very, very high. Once you sink 800 hours into this game, you can have the equivalent of speed hacks. The zombies have almost no chance to catch you, and you can literally solo the map from start to finish by flying through the air, restarting the train over and over while remaining untouched.

2: The playerbase is small. Like, really small. There's at most 50-60 players online, and that's a good day. You're more likely to see 20-30 people at any one time. It started off strong, at 800 players, it was looking good, but sadly intrest waned. What does this mean for matches? Well, you're always going to get a match, it's just going to be with the same 15 people over, and over, and over again. And if those 15 are the ones at the top of the leaderboard, which is extremely likely, good luck catching ANYONE. Basically this means there's little room to gain experience in game. You have to watch videos and struggle through the tutorial over and over because actually playing a match will give you little to no practical experience as you'll get repeatedly facemashed very quickly.

3: The discussion board is currently in the grip of some very gestapo-ish moderators. You're not allowed to talk ill about the game or criticize any aspect of it, especially the obvious problems in skill difference. One person had his posts repeatedly deleted with only one warning at the first one, and no future warnings. When he tried to talk about it: the moderator claimed he was "making up lies" and that's why they felt good removing his posts. When I and a few others chimed in and agreed with the OP, the mod locked the thread to prevent further discussion. I would complain to the developers about this, but I've been banned from the discord for the same reasons, on two accounts. They don't want to hear criticism, they want bootlickers.

So for now, steer clear of this game. It's not worth the hassle, the power hungry mods, and the godlike skill gap between the new and the elite. Let them have their 15 man matches with the same people over, and over, and over again, all you'd be doing is giving them some cannon fodder.

Very fun horde shooter. As with Skyrim, the most fun is had in modding the game into an undistingishable mess completely separate from the game itself. I recommend at least downloading Full Speed Swarm, as it will improve the cops performance to a very noticeable degree.
As for the base game, I would pay at most 30 dollars for this game. I got it for 13.99 on a steam sale, so I consider myself satisfied with my purchase.

The massive problem with this game is the lack of competition. The developers have absolutely no incentive to change anything in this game, as it is currently the only one that fits the same niche. White Noise 2 has no playerbase, same with Friday the 13th. Last Year: The Nightmare is currently a discord exclusive, on top of the fact that you have to deal with survivors being vastly more powerful than the killer. Soul at Stake has no US playerbase so all games you join are either laggy as hell or nearly empty. Hide or Die isn't being released until later this year, and until then you can see there are no choices.

The developers, then, are some of the most dishonest, lazy, and absolutely baffling people I've ever interacted with. They disingenuously list nerfs and buffs as "bug fixes" or "fixed an issue" because those go in a different section of patch notes that nobody reads through as carefully. They have done this multiple times, and every time it was discovered, they've reverted the change within a week. The changes they make to this game are counterintuitive to the extreme. "Wow, an entire half or more of the community wants this perk removed. Let's keep it in the game for months, then when we do nerf it, release a perk at the same power level one week later!" Or "You know who needs completely overt nerfs to her gameplay? A solidly low tier killer that you almost never see in games!"

The first time they "fixed bugs", they completely broke the game. Killers could not play because survivors could escape literally any time they got picked up. After their numbers started tanking into the ground, even though it was during an event, they "reverted the bug fix," refusing to even own up to the fact that they had so dishonestly tried to slip something past us. When their game breaks, they ban people for it. Recently there was a problem wherein one killer could use certain equipment to lock survivors in an animation for upwards of 10 minutes or more. Instead of disabling these addons or fixing the problem, they put up a warning stating that they would ban anyone caught using these addons. They took a week or two to fix the problem, banning people as they went. Meanwhile, people are still getting disconnected from games, the game crashes regularly, and the infinite loading screen bug will trap you in a game with no way to interact to end it, short of closing the entire program with Task manager.

They refuse to address any serious problems in the game. The two strongest things in this game are looping and communication. Through exploitation of hitboxes, survivors can take a smaller loop around obstacles than killers. This allows them to almost equal the faster killer speed, drawing out chases to ridiculous lengths. The majority of the game is running around the same pile of garbage 3 times, then the survivor goes to a different pile of garbage and repeats as much as they can. This game is not fun nor interactive. There is no true counterplay for most killer choices, which leads to nothing but Nurse at high ranks, stagnating the meta.

Communication is another story. The community really does care about the game, and tried to show the devs that. Marth88 was a twitch streamer who played as a survivor with a group of his friends. They brought no equipment into a game, only communicated over discord. They escaped 88 out of their 100 matches played. Then they did a later experiment wherein they used equpiment as well as communication. They aborted the experiment after 70 games because they won every single game completely. They presented these stats to the developers, trying to show them how unbalanced communication made the game. The only official response we got was from a design developer on stream, who said "who cares? we know (communication) is broken." And that's it. They played hundreds of games to get told by the developers "so what?"

Meanwhile, they constantly release new cosmetics at every opportunity and patch. New licensed killers come out more frequently than actual balance patches, and the shard system is ripped straight from games like League of Legends, where you CAN eventually get things with your earnings, but it's obviously made for wallet warriors. I have to admit, I've patronised this game over the 20 dollar price tag. And I didn't mind in the early stages, when the game was still fun and fresh. But it's become commercialised and lost something. The devs are looking for ways to cash out now, which is why there's even talk of a battle pass and mobile version floating around now.

The community is irrevocably split between Survivor and Killer mains, and the amount of toxicity could kill a horse. You will get told to kill yourself regularly. People will wait 20 minutes after they died in the game just to tell you your family should get cancer. The streamers are encouraged to bully killers without getting banned for that. The one streamer banned was banned for exploiting, then ban evansion. Not for making other people's lives hell long after the game was over.

I have played this game from almost the beginning. I purchased about 1 week before they made the legacy skins from the beta exclusive to give you an idea. I can tell you with utmost certaintly, do not buy this game. It is most definitely a drug. I am trapped in a toxic relationship with this game, and you don't need that in your life. It is not fun. Do not buy it. No, not even because you want to play as Freddy or Myers. You will hate them by the end of your games almost as much as you hate yourself for playing the game. Do not buy.
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EDIT:
Well here we are again, 500 hours later.
A lot hasn't changed, and many of my criticisms still hold true. I don't think I'll change my recommendation quite yet.
However, there's a lot in the pipeline that gives me hope for this game. The new patch that is coming out soon represents quite a massive shift in how the devs work.
So, we'll see if they can manage to make good on the promises they made.

This was a very good game, but the highlights made the game less of a "game" and more of a interactive story. There's really only one path to follow till the very, very end, and once that choice is made, the game is over plays one of I presume 4 endings.

The story is amazing and deep, but actual gameplay is non existant. If you like stories, get this game. If you don't, I wouldn't buy this game looking to actually play something.