Recent reviews by >|KoR|<Frisqy.ViruS (ZdrytchX)

I hate extraction shooters. But the fantasy combat got me hooked in this game. I repeat, I hate extraction shooters. But I'm hooked enough to spend $45 to unlock character slots, making this the second most expensive game I've spent on this year in one purchase (after IL-2:GB - Boddenplatte, but all flight sims are expensive in general)

This game's RPG elements doesn't scale as much compared to traditional RPGs, making PVP more fair, and there's gear-based matchmaking, so you don't get absolutely donked on by people with legendary gear as a newbie.

The bad: The game actually does kinda get repetitive quick. There's only 3 regular dungeon locations and there's no open world exploring. The dungeons are actually quite small but everything including you walks approprioately slow enough to make it feel bigger than it actually is. There doesn't seem to be procedural generation of the levels unfortunately so I think you can literally just memorise the very few variations of each level and I think that's really overpowering since you can just straight up decide not to engage an ice troll trapped elevator if you don't want to for example.

Some recommendations for newbies:
Fitting yourself with a gear score of around 100-200 and playing in solos or duos is probably the easiest way to play and learn the PVE part of the game because there's not many people queueing with their gear score around this region, and PVP in solo seems to be rare at lower gear ratings.

Find/locate the exit as your priority, don't just loot everything you see. There are limited exits available, meaninig that PVP is increasingly inevitable towards the end of the 14 minute time limited dungeon runs, and you take constant damage in the last minute meaning you really only have about 13 minutes to play each run.

Avoid red stairs if you want to keep your loot, it's a high risk environment and stock equipment does pitiful amounts of damage vs the enemies there and it's really only possible to go through if you exploit the AI behaviour such as standing on tables, and you may get stuck in certain spots as there may not be a way out.

I actually don't recommend this game to the majority since it's actually a relatively very boring game, but I do enjoy it somewhat, but it definitely very much is on the expensive side. The game's actually kinda shallow gameplay wise, you basically try to avoid getting eaten, fullfill your diet (evrima main branch, legacy is abandoned) and there's a lot of political drama with the game's development. It lacks coordination, is slow, and a lot of things break with updates, and with how many tools are provided with the unreal engine, they really ought to do better.

When I first bought this game a month ago, it was plagued with a lot of issues regarding the graphics - The game was forced to render at 50% scale with upscaling, resulting in a horribly blurry mess. A patch a week ago fixed that, but it's still undeniably a blurry mess to the point you still can't see flies, which look like a jpeg artifact animation mess since you still can't disable the crappy antialiasing, upscaling (even with 100% render scale) and lumen rendering technologies they enforce on you. It's incredibly difficult to spot chickens as a pteranodon and I literally have a video where I fly in circles for a long time unable to spot it while you hear the chicken's noises as if they were right in front of me.

Animations are also little wonky and unrealistic, weather patterns are excessive (mach 1 clouds, storms literally every second day etc.) eating desyncs can bug out your client, frequent crashes and server disconnects upon reconnecting... yeah this game can also be somewhat frustrating.

If you want a definitive dinosaur roleplay experience, this *could* be the game for you but my best recommnedation is wait another decade since the dev team couldn't even finish the product within one decade despite how many people actually have purchased this game with how expensive it is.

Anyway if you do end up purchasing, first thing you want to do when you download the game is check the [evrima] beta branch, increase render scale to 100% and set manual alt-attacks because they basically disable your normal attack for some strange reason which makes it very difficult to do things like harvest organs from corpses. Google "The Isle Map" because the game doesn't come with one, and press TAB to check your coordinates.

No, humans aren't part of the game (officially) yet. And yes omniraptor is a temporary fictional dinosaur based on jurassic park. Pteranodon is basically a seagull or a swan, Cerato is a trash scavenger, and deinosuchus is basically a huge alligator.

Overall, there's not really a game I've played that comes close to this, The Isle is really just a survival game, not even a sandbox game, just a wildlife survival game.

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Political drama:

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There's also a lot of disputes regarding unofficial server communities regarding admin power abuse, mix-packing (e.g. raptors and ceratos ganging up on steggosaurus) and to a lessor degree, accusation wars regarding IRL drama (don't bring that into the game please) and as a result most players seem to stick to the "rule-less" official servers.

And yes there are a lot of people of wide age groups in this game including girls (probably about 15% of the players if not more), but also do be aware that this game also has its share of controversy as a result - a certain moderator was found to be grooming underaged girls. Please, don't be this kind of person and keep those fantasies to yourself. Even if you do somehow end up being like a certain other player who found their ex-girlfriend through this game - don't bet on it, it's likely just an online friendship and nothing more.

Yes, speedhacks also exist but it's possible to track those players down using the in-game recording function (F2) to identify steam IDs after the fact. So don't do that too.
That being said, cheating doesn't seem to be as common or major of an issue in my opinion as many people claim. I've yet to encounter someone who was blatantly cheating but I've encountered situations where other aggressors were assumed to be cheating.

no official multiplayer, but assuming you aren't on linux or mac, BeamMP is easy to use. I haven't been able to use BeamMP since moving to fedora unfortunately :C

This game lives on the modding community, the actual in-game raw content may seem lacking and career mode is still buggy/wip despite the game being like what, 10 years old now? I took matters into my own hands and started expanding upon the career mode stuff instead.

That aside, the game devs could easily milk more money by allowing modders that want to charge money actually do so through BeamNG's official service rather than through external means like patreon, and BeamNG's mods have a reputation for being rehosted on shady websites as a result. Honestly some of the mods in this game are premium-tier content and should honestly be incorporated into the base game.

Either way apparently the game devs dont need money or something, so you can get this game for like 10 bucks when its on special and it seems to be it's more of a side passion project for them and they are probably limited by the number of staff for all I know with how slow, yet consistent development seems to be. It's worth it if you're into sandbox/moddable games.

Just be aware that if you don't like modding your games, this game is unfortunately probably not for you.

It's a fork of War§ow in a nutshell. Some minor improvements and a few minor new things like infinirace, but basically hte same. Thati ncludes bugs like the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ latency compensation reliability from warsow and the client prediction errors associated with quake 2's engine it seems.

Also the community's kinda dead, so you're better off getting quake live or quake champions if you want to play against actual players.

I just like warsow's vector change mechanic and cel shading art style and weapon models, other than that, it's basically just cpma

So you might not have a steering wheel, but you have a flight stick, and you first take the Quattro after seeing its rediculous performance stats, then realise you can't stop and hit a rock at 270 kph then go flying some 200 metres.

Seeing that it is a little too much for you at you infantile stage, you take the slowest car you can find, drive at like 40 kph on the ice stage, you're doing well until the 15th km in the championship, hit a rock and your car still somehow manages to roll off the bridge and into the ditch. Oh by the way, that ditch is considered a fatal drop, so you've already lost the race.

well, its free? Physics aren't the best, but there is some basic level guess work.

it mucks you

A number of issues may arise but if you can ignore the occasional imersion breaking bugs, it's quite an immersive first person RPG. There's no equivalent medievel simcade like this.
Hardcore Henry mode with all full debuffs isn't that much harder than normal mode, so I suggest giving it a shot after you have a feel for the game. Imagine having to learn to navigate on foot heh

EDIT2 (post review bomb): Gaijin has realised the stance they had on the community that they thought they could just keep going in the downward spiral with the economy's power play fantasy wasn't the best decision. It's not perfect, but they do have a plan of action and are actually going through with it. There are a lot of things that war thunder does wrong, and a lot of things they can get away with due to lack of competition, but there are a lot of things they do better than even the best flight sims out there, and it's time I changed it back to an upvote.

As a sim main, I still feel neglected and the gameplay does get stale and there are a lot of terrible things going wrong, but at the end of the day this is the game I've stayed loyal to for the past 10 years. What kept me here is the community and my laziness to upgrade to better hardware afterall. Who knows maybe it's time I finally buy myself a head tracker, get my new PC built and move onto DCS.
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EDIT (review bombing campaign): Changing to a downvote because gaijin still hasn't learnt their lesson and in all truthfullness, I've never recommended WT to anyone who has something called a life because of the grind. The review bombing is well deserved. Also FYI it says 0 hours recently played because I log in through the dedicated launcher since the launcher interferes with steam's cloud sync, but you can check my youtube ( https://youtube.com/zdrytchx ) as proof that I do regularly play this game.
Read on for the old review when it was upvoted:
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I can only recommend this game because I enjoy it and I'm still playing after 7 years (started 2013). Keep in mind that this is a very sh*t game by my standards when it comes to a lot of stuff, but a lot of other stuff does make up for it. There isn't an equivalent game to War Thunder when it comes to casual simcade (flight simulator-arcadey) experience. There is a lot of neglect from the team when it comes to balancing and decisions to spend effort to explore new ideas or to even just play their own game to experience the game problem themselves, but nevertheless the game is fun to play.

I will only consider playing this game if you:

* have a crapload of time on your hands or you're willing to invest a lot of time into the game (The grind is worse than any MMO-style economy I've played to get the top vehicles - HOWEVER you keep your vehicles permanently which is nice if you want to revisit lower ranks)

* are here to play a game with a unique gameplay style (AB/RB) or are willing to just try out a simcade (simplified flight arcade simulator). Gaijin Ent. has a patent on the mouse aim system so you won't find anything of this quality anywhere else. Afaik they've legally lent over some of it to il-2 sturmovik: great battles through a contract but in that game it's not done very well and nobody plays on mouse aim servers in that game anyway.

* Have patience. If you don't have patience it will take you more than a year to grind to get to the early jets rank if you spend an average of about 15-20 hours a week especially through simulator battles. Even as a veteran who hardly spends money online, the only alternative is that you spend a few hundred dollars every few years to make up for the uber sh*t grind but if you think about this way, spending ~100 AUD per year for a game you play a lot is a fair deal. Unfortunately the game doesn't live up to AAA game standards. The engine has a lot of potential for better graphics and sound environment but the developers didn't really make the most out of it.

* Are willing to tolerate mixed unhistorical lineups and political issues (The new chinese faction has both taiwanese vehicles and people's china vehicles, and taiwanese flags were removed from the game but were subtitute with WW2 joint forces flags for even the latest modern vehicles)

* Are able to tolerate power creep issues. This might not be much of a thing anymore soon with tank battles since they've already reached the M1A2 and the Leopard 2A5, but it is a major problem in the recent years.

* Are willing to take a bit of salt: Do not expect most particular wishes for balancing and fixes to come true due to neglect and poor developer decisions from time to time, or as I shall quote a moderator: "The only feeling you can trust is pain." There are many years of issues in the simulator game mode that haven't been fixed and this mode has the most neglect to it (There's only one developer working for this mode and he's not even doing it part time) with the excuse that it is "just an extra mode at the request of the community" even though WT claims to be a flight simulator. Sure the physics are better than FSX but the ruleset behind the physics are so simple you can literally drive a plane sideways irrespective of the tires, land at mach 0.4 on a ww2 small carrier and mow down trees if you really wanted to.

* Russian bias is a thing at low to mid ranks tanks, German bias is a thing in RB air, American bias is a major thing in simulator battles at higher tanks due to their massive payload and well, freeaboo spam. Actually american spam is so great you can queue everyone including americans against americans and the american-only team will still win due to a room select bug if you joined using the room list instead of the matchmaker.

There's a lot more to complain and to praise about the game but overall I still enjoy it. To put it simple,War Thunder is a very inefficiently developed game whose realism sits between wargaming's world of XYZ series and a simulator like IL-2: Sturmovik.

Comes with basic 2-dimensional fluid dynamics. My main issue with the game is that the lander ship doesn't rotate quick enough. It could use a bit of angular momentum and stuff to turn up the realism a notch.

Oh yeah and you probably need a gpu or a really good cpu for this. There's a lot of particles being drawn, but there are options to turn them down, some of which effect the physics and some don't