Recent reviews by Cregg

This game IS NOT DEAD ANYMORE. ANY REVIEWS SAYING ITS DEAD ARE OLD.

It got a renewed playerbase, and its great. give it a try its less than a dollar man. Rainbow 6 but low poly and funner and less toxic fanbase.

EDIT: As of writing this edit, many of these bugs AND THE MAJOR ISSUE OF SAVING PLAYER PROGRESSION HAS BEEN FIXED. I will leave the rest of the review below as a testament to show that progress is being made, and especially what i said at the end: I had faith the developers would be listening and fix the issues people are talking about. I recommend it even more now, you should purchase this game.

First and foremost let me get this out of the way. Half of what I am about to say you can easily guess, based on any of the reviews below me, but I hope to provide some advice regarding the games development, and if you should purchase it.

If you enjoyed the escapist (the first one) OR you dont care about coop/versus mode, that means you are probably ok with the singleplayer experience (as the original was a singleplayer game) and if that's the case then great, this is definitely a game you will enjoy and you should certainly purchase. I havent run into any singleplayer bugs and most peoples complaints stem from the multiplayer systems. The animations are crisp, the sounds are fun, the gameplay is enjoyable as always, the dialogue and banter is cute and witty at times (or at the very least not awful) and things like the combat are completely fine. So buy it.

Now regarding the multiplayer aspects...
I feel like I am beating a dead horse here but theres two glaring issues.

- Firstly is the decision to make it so that players characters do not save in that prison save file. What I mean is this, when a player leaves (or a crash happens but more on that in a minute) and tries to rejoin, regardless of which character of theirs they choose all their items and stats will be reset.
This to me seems like a terrible idea for a couple of reasons, the most obvious being that it turns the game into a grind fest for stats. Now yes the stats can easily all be maxed out in 10 minutes of min maxing (which by the way I dont like but honestly it seems intentional if you wanted fast paced drop in and drop out gameplay where players arent saved to a world I guess its better to have 10 minutes of grinding to recover where you were vs an hour) and yes the players drop "swag bags" of their inventory when they leave, but this isn't a satisfactory way to handle this, and the reviews here show that's the response.
The best example I can give of this "drop in drop out" system working optimally is Starbound, players have a character that they create in that world. Any player who isn't the host can drop in and out of the hosts world and have their own inventories, ships etc, which in my eyes is the most elegant way to solve this. In fact I thought this was partially why there was multiple amounts of characters you can save in the menu, I assumed that when my friend 'Joe' joins which his character 'JoeShcmo' that THAT character would be saved to the prison we were in. So if 'Joe' joins with character 'Joey' thats a new character, his stats arent the same, hes a new inmate but the same player. I know you could argue that this maybe leads to weird exploits in some ways that maybe I cant think of, or maybe the issue of the cells being taken up is a problem, but I think that everyone would probably be ok with the cells resetting as long as the characters inventories and stats didnt at the VERY least. Maybe even not allow a user to join a prison, unless its with the same character they joined initially with to avoid that issue. In this example the people who joined can still drop in and drop out, heck they can still drop swag bags but as long as their characters cell and stats arent reset.
But look, Im guessing that the game was made to be quick to play. But some people will take longer than others, and some prisons and some breakouts will take time, and even if its mostly quick stuff, it feels really awful to effectively punish players (especially when its a crash causing this grief) for playing the game at their pace.
I've provided a few minor variations on how to fix this at this point, and I'm sure that team17 know their game and audience a lot better than I do, as well as any technical limitations so in fear of rambling on I'll summize what I said here with this;

tl;dr Make sure that players arent punished for leaving or crashing (which is where we move to point 2..)

- Secondly and more importantly is the bugs and crashes. Now the bugs I've run into are mostly minor. Sometimes players get slightly de-scyned, sometimes I cant click on things and have to fidget with the controls to gain back the ability to press E or space on any objects, occasionally the non-host-players only see food trays as white squares, and occasionally when a player leaves their swag bag says "nobodies" and you cannot loot it. But these are all minor in comparison to the crashes. The crashes in multiplayer are KILLER for gameplay (literally) because you always lose some amount of progress. This can be from the autosaves, so you lose a small amount of progress in the day which is almost always barely important, but more importantly this is awful for coop games especially those that are 3 or 4 players. In my experience the game crashed 3 times in coop within a 1 hour time period, I was streaming at the time and assumed that it must be the stream causing it. Stopped streaming and it happened once afterwords, and for the record this was only with 2 people, myself and another user. Its crashed afterwords once for me in a bigger game. Having 3 dissapointed players, that now are forced to grind for 4-10 minutes to get their stats back is obnoxious, even if it seems like a short time sync. Them losing items and progress in their cells is awful, and the fix of "swag bags" doesnt occur here (when they do work) when the host crashes because the game didnt save with those swag bags on the map. It creates a really frustrating experience where essentially all the players in the world are punished for a bug that was out of their control.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that these crashes and bugs will be fixed in the upcoming weeks, I have nothing but respect and excitement for the team and what is to come of the escapist 2. I (being the cynical ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I am) assumed and expected there would be bugs or gameplay issues regarding multiplayer, because

1.) Multiplayer is hard and
2.) The previous game didnt have it.

So I get it, which is why I am recommending the game. I am putting my faith in the devs that they will tackle these glaring issues, gameplay and balance wise, as well as the technical issues. I hope in a month I can rewrite this review to include that all these issues were fixed OR are at the very least being acknowledged as in the pipeline of development to be fixed.