Recent reviews by Friend

You fish on the web. It's wicked.

Story gave me secondhand embarrassment listening to the anime stereotypes talk non-stop.
Gameplay is shallow and I mean SHALLOW. Weapons sound pathetic and variety is extremely limited.

Served a purpose existing before Armored Core 6 hit the scene to scratch that itch as about effective as smoking dregs out of desperation. Now, comparatively, since they're both similarly priced, you would be completely brain-dead stupid to ever buy this game over Armored Core 6.

If you're really that interested, just go on Youtube and watch a 'no commentary' longplay of it, just be prepared to hit the right arrow key through every cutscene (which will eliminate about 70% of the game's runtime).

Don't have to make a PSN account. Players who owned the game in regions unsupported by PSN can play. Cool. If you have Steam in those regions and plan on buying Helldivers 2? You cannot. Uncool.

If you got in before the ordeal you can play, if not, sucks to suck? Review stays negative.

What an oddball driving game. It's fantastic.

The story is very interesting surrounding this insane unstable patch land separated by a set of three imposing walls that gets pretty dangerous the further in you breach. The landscapes are a breath of fresh air as far as scenery goes. Dramatic, dense pine forests that can be very very pretty in broad daylight due to the nicely stylized visuals and absolutely stressful in "unusual darkness" and rain. The environments are all thematic and feel like some forgotten little town or sporadic rural communities long abandoned among some other sprawling places. Each section of the zone is very visually different and requires you to play differently, so reaching new areas like the mid-zone feels great as you take in all the new things you've not seen before. I really love the visual storytelling in specific story locations as well as simple things like graffiti, warning signs, and temporary military/scientific buildings. It all snowballs into a fantastic experience that's both weird and compelling!

The car itself is obviously the star of the show with all the doodads and whatchamacallits you can slap onto it. I kinda wish there was a more in-depth vehicle building bit but that would probably be a nightmare for repairs and figuring quirks out which can already be a bit of a crapshoot but I'll get to that later. THE CAR. When you first get it the thing is barely able to get around, commanding you to upkeep and upgrade it so it can protect you through more and more wildly dangerous areas which plays perfectly into a portion the story about the car possibly being a type of anomaly that compels people to become obsessed with the object. It's interior once you get your fancy map looks great! It's like being inside some scientifically incredible machine where someone doesn't know how to manage wires and there's little gizmos that give you approximate readings of stuff out in the world. Nothing gives you like a direct timer, which only adds to the tension as you make sense of why the little white ball in the glass tube is going up and down really fast. You can paint all parts of the car, give them decals that change colors with different paints, and really make your car your own as you kit it out just how you want it. Just enough complexity where everything has an actual use without being so expansive that there is a ton of redundant features or direct upgrades which make features you unlocked previously completely worthless. It forces you to choose according to where you are going and really can be a struggle if you don't plan for the big warning for an area telling you you are going to get zapped to kingdom come.

The real spectacle of the game though is the zones themselves. While some of them can be pretty calm given the right time of day and whatever freakazoidal THINGS are going bump in the night... it really ramps up when you activate a gateway to escape back to the garage. The complete tonal shift when you select a gateway is incredible. Every time. Not many take the time to look up at the sky (if they can even see it) but the menacing way it changes really helps give you a lead foot as you haul your probably busted up car into a searingly bright pillar of light while the storm from Fortnite's crack-addled uncle closes in to belt you and your car in the face with intense radiation. The storm isn't something you can overcome and if you get caught in the red you will seriously just melt so you have to plan accordingly before you flip the switch. If you flick the radio on to any one of the games fantastically chosen music (my personal favorite being Elliott Brood - Cadillac Dust) and start driving... you just smile! At least until something scary happens... or you just plow into a tree like I do all the time.

There are loads of features to keep the game from being a streamlined rogue-like sorta deal. Back at the garage you have a plethora of things to do, I spend easily 60% of my overall time in the garage, mostly figuring out quirks. Quirks themselves are an interesting topic. Open your hood and the radio comes on, turn the key and all your doors fall off. It's really in-depth with so many different quirks you could possibly have that it's always different. However, some quirks can be incredibly detrimental and very very difficult to phrase properly in the little machine, sometimes leaving you with no option but to go for another run because you couldn't figure out why your gas tank leaks 6% at random intervals. You get a number of guesses, but you can quickly use those up trying the same thing in different phrasing. If your car has something really really specific like the quirk acts when your car is in a stationary position, you'll never figure it out without upgrades to the machine to help you figure it out which can be pretty far into the game if you don't burn all your stable energy on quirk machine upgrades. This means some people will start the game and their first quirk will gimp their save and be a huge annoyance for awhile if they can't figure it out either. Some of them can be really good though! My car jolts forward without even needing gas whenever I toggle my wipers. Incredible speeds if you can just whip that little stick back and forth fast enough, which really adds to the fun! This is all controlled however by random chance, which can make progressing in the game either a fun experience because suddenly you have free battery juice forever or frustratingly difficult with the in-between being "haha car horn honk when trunk close". A friend of mine's gas gauge will sweep left and right like the wipers when they are turned on. It doesn't really... do anything but it's fun and adds personality to the car. I just wish he had an experience like mine because he still has a quirk neither of us can figure out and it's so time consuming to sit in the garage and figure it out.

It's certainly replayable and for half the price of a bungled AAA title with tacked on micro-transactions; you get an experience that's outside the norm of gameplay and kinda throws a lot in your face when your wheels hit the irradiated ground, but you certainly will not be bored! Unless you are spending an hour trying to figure out why your one door falls off but only sometimes and you can never replicate the process to be sure it's this one action and not another. All the elements of the game play on each other very well, the story makes you want to go further into the zone, the music is expertly chosen, the driving handles very well despite not having steering wheel support (yet, maybe who knows), and the art style of the game enhances the experience with its variety of sights, sounds, and scares! It really makes you FEEL like a lone, car-obsessed jerk who steals garbage and drives directly into a tree in critical moments. If this is the kind of game Ironwood studios debuts with, I'm eager to see what sorts of things they learn and expand on for their next title. Homerun on this one for the weirdos! Bring your flares and say your prayers :D

This game would be incredibly fun if you weren't playing against level 700+ with Legendary items across the board. +50 health, decreased weapon bloom, reload speed, boosters you can buy and have 5 of at one time that increase your potential further.
If you've not been in the beta and slogged away at the game, you're donezo unless you are skittering around the fringes of the map looking for trinkets to barely make in-game minimum wage (little question marks that are never told to you that they are trinkets). By the way, the game is not smooth at all. Movement is okay, lots of fun parkour crap but when you get into a close to long range fight, it's better ping wins (plus the above buffs). The stuff is so expensive to upgrade as well, which will just further and further separate the playerbase between the haves and the have-nots.

The three artifacts and two tools you can bring can be upgraded ~4 times, each getting more and more expensive. When I say it'll take you a long time to get just one fully upgraded item, I mean you will toil away skimming trinkets and avoiding the demigods that already have everything kitted just to eventually get on their level only to lose to the completely laughable gunplay. It's fun with friends when you get a pop-off and come out with 13 little doodads, but they're a drop in the bucket towards anything meaningful for your survival. Incredibly terrible game design for a concept that is actually quite fun and rewarding even if you get knocked out. If you extract your trinkets you still make a little bit of money. It's too bad that the upgrades and buffs are the way that they are.

Go play any other extraction shooter Fortnite whatever. At least in those you're not gonna get eviscerated by someone who starts the game with 200 shields, 150 HP, full grenades/healing items, and two tools that surpass anything you have in the grey, green, or blue tier. My.GAMES just wants your money for their fugly battlepass store garbage. Tons of pretty items in a game that runs like dogwater and plays like sticking a fork in an electrical socket.

**EDIT 12/23/2023**
Since some update has come out, I wasn't even able to get into the game at all. "Press E to Start" at the main menu meets me with an Error 3003; server connectivity issue. Moreover, now I can no longer launch the game. It will start, turn my name green on Steam, bring up a small window saying it is launching, disappear, my name goes blue again, then it goes green and attempts to launch the game over and over again. I put a support ticket in, however I've tried a couple of avenues for fixing the Error 3003 issue, only to now be met with this repeating launching problem. Beyond frustrating. I participated in the beta, crossplay beta, and now this version which worked for a time. Now, it's gotten to the point where I'm just going to let it stew in my library because I'm not putting any more of my own effort to try and fix what could possibly be wrong on my end when any other online multiplayer game I have works on first try. It's not a "me" thing, it's a HAWKED thing.

Promising!

Currently, it's a no for me. Early Access v0.346
I will update this as more content becomes available. I do enjoy the game, mostly out of a love of car building.

This game has a real problem with progression. Fertilizer to make plants grow faster than the glacial pace they're set to? Locked behind a 5299.99 dollar purchase of the cottage. You think that's not much right? Well, you can only sell 60 pieces of firewood (your only income to start) to your brother a day for 480 max if you're using only maple and not on Sunday. Okay, so what other ways can you make money then? Fries from potatoes sell at 200 a bag, ca-ching! NOPE! You need max friendship with your mom (by calling her once every day for a single point), so you're looking at 25+ days to start making money that way. Maple syrup? Go to Hell. Replanting cuttings (which take two weeks to cut more off the same tree) of maple trees near the shack after you build it takes forever unless you've got 50+ maple trees fully grown (remember, no fertilizer) and requires quite a hefty sum in order to get running at a pace that isn't, again, glacial. By the way did I mention it's possible to soft-lock your game by cutting down all the trees without first buying a pair of pruning loppers and replanting cuttings from every tree before you cut them down to propagate your firewood hustle? Don't forget that or you can completely screw yourself because the maple syrup machine requires firewood to function!

What about weed? That's gotta be an easy buck. Wrong again, jerk. You can't even grow the stuff unless you figure out (Wiki) that you get the starting seeds on top of one of the turbines at the wind farm. Even then, the characters you can sell small packs to don't want small packs, sometimes they want one of the big ones which requires a hilarious ton of pot plants. Those transactions are 65 for the small packs and 500 for the big... so on the same level as firewood. The real money comes only from huge packs being sold to the potheads in the barn waaaaay far North and only after you've sold them 12 big packs for a reduced sum of 370 each. Good luck keeping the stuff in the truck on the way there because the entire road leading there is so jaggedly bumpy and the physics are unforgiving. Even the little pizza delivery gig doesn't even pay more than 75 a day which you will spend maybe a quarter of on the gas you used to do it.

The game looks and feels like a Roblox tycoon game. Terrain is beyond acceptable. Many roads qualify as sheer cliffs on either side that form such angular V-shapes perfect for wedging a vehicle in with no hope but to eat 99.99 in towing fees from the gas station (the hoist pullers in most vehicles are a real problem to use effectively). Time-gated progression to make slow things go faster for more money quicker. Why does your mom give you the fryer basket at max friendship? Who knows! She says she is cleaning out your old room, maybe it'd be nice if she sent you some seeds for plants, decorations, old books from your room that act as manuals for some of the in-game content to better help a player out because as it stands; the wiki was the only way I could start to figure out all of this without a frustrating amount of trial and error. This is a massive negative on the player experience. The to-do lists in the shed are of no help, they just say "do this thing".

Lots of really helpful items are very very expensive for some reason, given firewood is probably your most consistent source of income before you can very very slowly get other sources running. Some friendships don't do anything currently but are tracked. You can gift maple syrup cans to characters for more friendship... only problem is the can sealer is 2599.99 plus the cans plus the lids (which you don't get back empty). Any other fun things to do in the game? Yeah, you can waste a lot of money on a dog which serves the same purpose as playing the free viddy games on the handheld console or PC (anxiety reduction), or, if you're really insane, you can max your friendship with Normand at the gas station (50 days) and then pay him 70,000 to have the really fun speedway reopened alongside the slew of actually fun events that occur there. Even pulling radios from the junkyard is a slog and after the initial haul, they respawn in a trickle pace! 21ish days (can't gain friendship on days when the gas station is closed which is where Jacques and Normand are both permanently affixed) to get access to the scrapyard by befriending Jacques... and those pay a pittance of 110 bucks each. You've got lots of ways to make money and none of them are much fun currently due to these heavy restrictions and limited payout. They're controlled tightly by time and unless you dump an ungodly amount of time into this game (or use the in-game cheats), you're gonna be standing around a lot because there simply isn't any way to get around a lot of the gates to other sources of income. Even a tool to screw bolts on faster is tied to a max friendship with your brother, so you won't see that until you are deep in depression from being hindered left and right. Oh, the same tool comes with the cost of the speedway but that'd take even longer!

This leaves the main objective, building the cars. I haven't even given a crap to do anything other than completely take apart the one you start with and blow 49.99 a pop on rust repair kits and 72.99 on a dent repair kit to make the base body look nice so I have a place to start. Every cent you spend on car stuff eats into your funds to buy tools to make more than a minimum wage income per day. The Konig (and second Konig and other less in-depth vehicles) might be the main objective, but you're rake-stepping if you buy anything relating to it until you've gotten your sources of income secured rather than something you chip away at while managing upkeep for plants and maple syrup and all that fun stuff. 28,998 too by the way to not run off generator power that drinks fuel like it belongs in some fuel-related AA program.

I went in wanting a My Summer Car experience with more than one fun car to work on which is a very alluring aspect of the game but it's not worth it as it stands. Progression needs to be tweaked heavily, better explanations of the content (like I said, maybe your mom sends you manuals from your old room she keeps saying she's cleaning out so you're not stuck looking at unhelpful to-do lists in the shed), and if they're going to keep the slow grind, have more activities to do. Make the dog more than just the PC and handheld console except that it costs a ton of money (maybe let him sniff out seeds for plants, find little decoration items, anything) and for the sake of my sanity fix the physics. Let me secure loads in vehicles with a ratchet strap the same way you can lock decorations on your land.

If you are looking between this game and My Summer Car, just get the latter. It's more in-depth, rewarding, money really is no problem whatsoever unless you're a careless over-spender, and new parts and content isn't so expensive that you look at it and figure out it'll be an in-game half a month before you can buy just that one thing without cheats. I love these car building life sim games that have been popping up, but this one is very disrespectful towards your time not skill; which is so sad considering how much fun this game can be when you're not broke with no way to elevate your income except through waiting and increasing friendships until you can actually play the feature of the game, building and modifying more than one hunk of junk car. Mine and your time is worth more than having to be forced into min-maxxing from day 1 in an effort to not be quickly brought to the cheat menu.

This game is completely worthless as it stands. It is riddled with so many bugs that crash the game instantly. If you aren't saving every time you do/complete anything, you will lose that progress. The only way this game functions is with a mod called the "Gentlemen of the Row", which will never be implemented officially into this game now that Volition is being canned due to the incompetence of those who own them.

It's so stupid and so tragically sad that such a fantastic game is left to rot like this. Saints Row 2 deserves much better than this. I'll take a red ringed Xbox 360 just to play this game in a functional state... and now that I think about it, then I'd have access to all the DLC as well which for some reason are all cut from the PC port. This is such a great game but seeing it on Steam in the current state that it is in is a complete and total scam of your money. Pay money to fix a broken game yourself with the mod work of an underappreciated superhero with brain cancer.

Could be good.

I like it!

One of those rough looking games that has a great deal of charm and fits a niche I didn't know I wanted to experience. It's worth it even if you sit on the game until some big massive update or whatever comes along, because as it stands it could really use a lot of content to maximize its potential.

Right now it's missing things like more intricate car maintenance, maybe tools like My Summer Car to bolt parts on and tune them. The game desperately needs some soft body physics/breaking of items/parts. Some more variety in parts and effects would be nice as well; different tire treads other than just white walls, rims of varying sizes, wiring harnesses in the chassis, roof racks... You get the idea.

I'd love for this game to turn out like some sort of amalgam of concepts from My Summer Car blended into the unique premise this game sets up. I'd love to play online driving around some mid-western roads on some endless road trip. Replacing parts, fixing things that break, having friends pull over to help me fix something so I don't have to push my car. More things so I can just enjoy driving on a road in a car, possibly with friends.

Everybody I've ever talked to has at one point in time said something about some grand plan to take a big fun road trip. So why not just have this game become that since no one goes through with their plans anyways? Adventure, fun little odds and ends to bring along and collect, fix up your car, sounds like a good time. Excited to see what else gets added to this game in the future. Updates are frequent and content is rapidly being both added and improved.