Recent reviews by Kherr

This game is absolutely amazing and has everything one could want in a survival horror game. Action, thrills, environment, story, suspense, darkness, and more! If you haven't yet played this game, I highly recommend that you pick this up and give it a go - you won't be disappointed and you have nothing to lose because it's entirely free of charge! What more could you ask for? Stop reading this review and go play it, go now! <3

What are you still doing reading this? Oh fine, fine. I'll give a real review of the game, darn you.

So, in Indigo Park: Chapter 1 we learn about an abandoned theme park named "Indigo Park". The main goal of the game is to explore and survive in the abandoned theme park. You'll notice I said "survive" - there are threats present that I won't spoil for you (though you probably already know based on the genre of game this is). It is in this adventure that we get our first taste of Rambley the Raccoon. He's an AI park guide, popping in and out on monitors around the park as you explore and try to uncover what's going on with this abandoned theme park. He has such a great personality and is very well voice acted, he'll definitely worm his way into your heart for sure, but be sure not to lose yourself with this adorable mascot - darker themes may be lying in wait under the surface.

There isn't much else that can be said about this game without ruining it for you, so now that you've read this, what're you gonna do? Gonna go give it a try?

Please?

Specs:

RTX 3090 - 1440p @ 165 Hz
32 GB DDR4-3400 RAM
2 TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe
Ryzen 7 5800X @ 4.2 GHz (8 cores / 16 threads, liquid cooled)

Said all that to say this - even with these specs the game runs like hot garbage. Constantly getting south of 80 FPS on average even with the settings all the way down, GPU should be able to push north of 150 FPS constant no matter the settings. Constant stuttering, freezing, disconnects, etc. Essentially makes the game unplayable.

I wouldn't get this at this time. Wait a few months and see if things have improved, all I can say about that.

The short of it is I feel as though the game is entirely too difficult... or maybe I just suck. Going into this I really wanted to enjoy a good tactical shooter... but either way it really fell flat for me. I honestly can't recommend this game to anyone. Don't let this be the deciding factor on whether or not you pick this up, however. If you really enjoy absurdly difficult challenges, then this is probably your jam.

Pros:

- Really immersive, the environment absolutely feels like a warzone (for obvious reasons)
- Great gun play, reloading takes a moment instead of happening in an instant
- You really feel as though you have all that gear on your body with how clunky and slow the movement is
- Makes you think tactically, if you just rush in without thinking things through you won't last long
- Requires a functional team in multiplayer with good communication, lack of communication spells the end very quickly
- Enemies will flank you requiring you to have high spacial awareness, keep that head on a swivel

Cons:

- Enemies have too much health
- Enemies seem to know where you are at all times regardless of how quiet you're being (especially if you haven't fired a shot in a moment, etc)
- Lack of friendly AI to assist in missions
- Lack of a choice of class-based loadouts prior to the start of a mission
-- Not a lot of content for the price associated, this would be more at home as a $15/$20 USD game instead

Personal Gripes:

- Enemies seem to know the moment you start to reload regardless if they can see or hear you
- Sound cues seem to be an afterthought and simply don't help at all, especially in your immediate area
- Respawning enemies? I'm not certain, but it seems like they come at you from all directions endlessly
- Death comes way too quickly... I know it's supposed to be hard and realistic, but it's not fun having to restart from scratch countless times. This could be counterbalanced with mission objective checkpoints, honestly.
- Building interiors are entirely too dark during the daytime, almost as if one is stepping into the void, especially in rooms with windows
- Enemy tactics don't seem complex beyond flanking, often times just rushing you without any self preservation in mind

Honestly, I only started playing this because of Jameskii's "VRChat In a Nutshell ##" videos on YouTube. Thanks to this game, I've had almost 400 hours of fun times just hanging out with friends and playing stupid little minigames, exploring worlds, and just killing time.

Thanks to VRChat, I was finally pushed into doing something I've always wanted to but never had the drive to - work on 3D Modeling. Thanks to being able to upload your own Avatars in VRChat, I now know how to work with both Blender and Unity and I'm learning more and more by the day. I seriously can't get enough of this game and in turn developing models and working on models, etc.

This game is a ton of fun, but it doesn't come without bugs or issues... namely the people running around with Avatars that can crash your game without notice. You'll be happily screwing around in the Pug (one of the worlds that's basically a virtual tavern/bar/inn) and in comes an idiot with nothing better to do than to look at you and cause your client to crash. These people are really annoying but hey, what can you do.

Up until now I've only played the game in Desktop Mode because I don't have a VR headset or controllers, but honestly it's still worth it. I've heard VR absolutely makes this game 10x more interesting and fun, but until then I can't review that part of this game.

All in all, whether you're in VR or in Desktop Mode, I'd highly recommend this game. Check it out if you enjoy just hanging out with people and relaxing.

Full disclosure - I was given a free copy of this game prior to early access so the Steam version does not reflect the total amount of hours I have played in Wrack: Exoverse.

Wrack: Exoverse plays like an old-school FPS game with a modern twist. You play as one of the four main characters (that you have to unlock beyond the initial character, Kain) to defend your beacon that will be targeted and attacked wave after wave by relentless bad d00ds. It's up to you to stop them via placing an arsenal to defend said beacon... and contributing to the defense yourself directly. Playing like the arcade titles of old you have to hack, slash, and blast your way through each wave all while protecting your beacon so you can advance to the next level.

The controls feel satisfyingly sharp and tight while being incredibly simple. Each weapon has pros and cons and you have to manage your arsenal both on your person and in your defenses that you build to best suit your play style. Speaking of defenses, you'll be spending some time thinking about how you're going to place them in order to best defend your beacon, and you'll have to manage your money to afford those defenses along the way. How do you make money? Simple - kill the bad guys as fast as you can. You have a combo meter that starts after you kill a couple of enemies in rapid succession, and when that combo meter runs out you cash out. The more you kill as fast as possible, the more you make.

The music in this game is phenomenal, and I hope they relese a soundtrack to it sometime in the future, I'd gladly pick that up. You get so pumped when playing this game thanks to the soundtrack it's ridiculous.

There are leaderboards you can climb to show how crazy you are at defending your beacon, though I'll leave how you climb said leaderboards a mystery for you to figure out, because they aren't tracking what you might think... I don't wanna ruin that for you!

This game is a blast, pure and simple, and I'd highly recommend it.

So I'm going to go ahead and throw my two cents in here regarding this game and it's recent... update...

As you can see I have plenty of hours in this game (at the time of writing this, 511.0 hours to be precise). While I love the way the game plays and I do honestly enjoy the new map and to some extent some of the stronghold system, I'm not enjoying this latest update completely... So let's break this down, yea?


Z1 is the name the original map is commonly referred to. It had everything - wilderness, cities, construction sites, housing development, etc. There was a decent spread of content to wander around, looting, and exploring, etc. One day the developers decided that we were getting a new map called Badwater Canyon (BWC for short) and told us about it on reddit -
https://www.reddit.com/r/h1z1/ - that we were getting a new map because of limitations regarding the old one and that it would just be easier to make a new map altogether. Ok, as far as I'm concerned that's fine and no big deal, just as long as it has all the stuff that Z1 has (cities, wilderness, dam, construction/housing projects, etc) - however many other people didn't agree or think that way and voiced their displeasure at this direction/change. They were ignored.

The day before we were to get the new map available for play in the test servers we were updated that it was actually only going to be 1/4 of the new map's total size and we were getting the emptiest region first. Say what? When I saw that I was honestly extremely angry and so were a lot of other people.

After some time playing around on the new map on the test servers I decided that I liked what I saw of the new map, but I wasn't too thrilled about the fact that there were less than a small amount of points of interest scattered around this quadrant of the map. At this time there are less than 15 PoIs available for you to explore and loot, etc. I'm not including multiple of the same PoI as separate PoIs, and only a couple of these PoIs are larger than a building or two on their own in the middle of nowhere. These PoIs are super tiny. There are no cities in this quadrant of the map as it was said, by the developers, to be the camping/wilderness section of the map. How convenient.

Once you finish exploring it the first time around, you'll notice it's very empty and becomes very boring in this quadrant of the map. This is what was pushed to the live servers in leu of the original Z1 map. Badwater Canyon is unfinished and should have never been pushed to live in this state, full stop.


This is the part that has everyone up in arms and I'd have to say I finally agree with them at this time. Basically, in Z1 - you could build almost anywhere you wanted without worry. Now, in BWC, you can ONLY build in pre-determined locations with pre-determined land sizes (1x, 2x, 3x, and 4x) on plots of land called 'Strongholds' that you have to purchase with 'eagle coins' that you can only get by selling items to the NPC vendor located in the new Military Base spawn-point that you can't loot. The brand-new building system is the ONLY good part about strongholds as it's super modular and allows you to build almost anything you want... within your pre-determined land size.

You should be able to build anywhere you want to. Being limited to a pre-determined location is bad - If the server's very limited amount of stronghold plots that are available are consumed, then we get no new players unless they happen to know someone with one of those plots that they can team up with.

In Z1 you used to be able to build a shack in the woods if you didn't want to build a base, but now the ONLY way you can securely store your stuff without a stronghold is in a loot stash that holds a maximum of 7500 bulk. With guns like the AR-15, Shotgun, and Sniper Rifle taking up 1500 bulk apiece and sidearms taking up 300 bulk apiece (yes, that 1911 or M9 takes up the same bulk as A CAR BATTERY) - good luck storing anything worthwhile in that stash.


I don't understand why EVERY SINGLE ZOMBIE APOC game cannot get this right. Back in Z1, you could find wrenches everywhere, though very rarely later on. These allowed you to REPAIR your vehicles in-game. Of course, some people took this to an extreme and would simply get all the vehicles on the map and store them in their mega-base, hoarding them. Naturally this upset a lot of people, myself included, because you cannot hurt vehicles in PvE via shooting them or whatever, no. The only way to hurt a vehcile in PvE is to drive into something or over something - like a zombie. Running a zombie over causes 1% condition damage. So if someone was hoarding all the vehicles there wasn't a thing you could do about it.

In their first response to the amassing complaints regarding vehicle hoarders, the developers decided it would be a wonderful idea to make it so that vehicles take 1% condition damage every 30 minutes no matter what, make wrenches super rare, and make it so that they could not be repaired like you used to be able to (all prior to BWC). That's right, after 24 hours of sitting in your base your vehicle would be down 48% condition, and at 19% condition they caught fire and exploded... how wonderful. They made a few other horrible attempts at combatting vehicle hoarders in PvE, but finally, they decided with this update to REMOVE WRENCHES ENTIRELY FROM PvE. That's right, you can no longer repair your vehicles, and they still take 1% damage every 30 minutes. What a wonderful solution, right? /s


For a long time now (even back in Z1) all resources you need to survive (food, water, ammo, etc) are entirely way too plentiful. This makes the survival element of the game non-existent. There is no real way to struggle for survival except when you're a new player with nothing but your shirt on your back and your map in your hand. Don't even think for a second that this is an actual survival title.


So, how about the zombies? They're good, right...? Nope - Zombies, wolves, and bears (the only threats in the game in PvE) are all horrible at pathing - they get close to you and start circling you while attacking before stopping in a spot like they should have when they reached you, and let's not forget that they are capable of phasing through trees and rocks while running up to you, so yea. Oh, and unless you get surrounded by a horde of zombies - they're not a threat at all. The bears and wolves pose slightly more risk, but not that much more.


All in all I'd avoid this game for now, unless Daybreak Games gets their act together this is going to fall to the wayside to titles like Dead Matter.

Bethesda: I don't think anyone could screw up as badly as we did with our modding community for Skyrim...

Take Two Interactive: Hold my beer.

So. Definitely had a ton of fun with this one. A little short, but well worth the $9.99 because you can play it again and some things change, but not a whole lot. If there were extra missions or DLC, I'd get that in a heartbeat. Just... get this game. You won't be disappointed.

Also... 11/10 would get hacked by an NPC again...

Installed a tougher dragons mod and got facerolled while pissing my greaves and getting called Shirley by the guards who for some inexplicable reason all have had some form of kneecap surgery and always cringe when I walk around from a distance with a bow.

11/10 - would get called Shirley by more guards again.

While this game does not scare me at all (besides the obligatory jump scares that happen) the gameplay is unnerving and actually quite fun. I would recommend this game to anyone, except those easily scared.

8/10