Recent reviews by Gun Tech.

The excellent animations tricked me into buying this.

I bought it, but will never bother finishing it, because it's a too hard and repetitive chore. A complete waste of money for me.

Crashes at launch after successful install. Obviously I run the base game perfectly, as well as the HL2 engine games and other RTX games. 3070 here.

Kind of wondering why there are no bug report forums for DLCs on Steam. Or is it only cos RTX DLC I don't see them from the Store page?

From other reviews, well lower FPS is understood... but there aren't many games using it and you'd think nVidia would want to make it work? These cards have been out for years, and for years it's been a selling point so...

Got it for the fact I didn't know who #3 was. Interesting :) I refunded the pop-up deal on the Retro tables. I think they will not be most Pinball lovers' cup o' tea. I recommend instead the Starter Pack, which includes the Bronze Pack which you need to unlock some decent camera modes. See below.

+ The base game is free and includes 1 pretty good table, and you can try all tables.
+ Some of the main tables (non Retro/Remake/Deluxe) are good.
+ A few of those tables are exciting.
+ In many tables (including many not good ones), the sound effects are immersive, and the artwork is great. :)
+ Good Controller support on Steam with Controller Config, wish you could assign Nudge L/R to LB/RB.
- Most tables have too high chance of instant vaccuum cleaner gutters, and that's just bad table design. It would absolutely enrage everyone if they were put in a Pinball Arcade. I'm talking plunger -> instadeath.
- 5-50 seconds trial is not long enough to get an idea.
- Camera is limited (coverage, angle, fov) with the free version (and even with the Bronze pack, but you can get something half-workable but not the best). Devs: We just want to see the vertical area where the ball can go, so we can time our flips like on a real table.
- Too many Steam achievements. My Completion Score Average dropped from 45+ to 40%. You get lots of them easy, just make sure you're committed if you care about this.

Speaking of, the devs did a great job with the simulation engine! It's just very confusing with the so many options and table versions. I recommend the Discussion pinned and even more the Dutch Video FAQs on YT. They are short and on topic.

I took notes, because I wanted a review like this one for myself to know what tables to buy. These are my findings:
+ Starter Pack is best Value For Money
+ Original tables best tables
+ Space Shuttle, Locomotion most enjoyable so far
+ Like Nautilus, want to explore which is the best version (not Retro)
+ Devil Riders, Magic Castle original version are pretty good

This is as far as my namedrops go 5h in. Obviously I'm looking for suggestions too :)

Base game is excellent, but I can't recommend this pack. Maybe 2 or 3 are barely playable, but most if not all lack the features of the "real" tables, e.g. drop targets, spinners, specials, modes. I just clicked on the pop-up and thought I'd try them out, but... I will buy 1 separate well designed, fun table instead.

DIFFICULT AND UNENJOYABLE

To someone who waited because it didn't look like a Survival game (and absolutely isn't one), it's clear that this was tested on an Alpha crowd who got good at it and they therefore balanced it into pure dung.

Most players will get no enjoyment out of this game, unless they install ALL of the awesome mods by the mod community made to address the terrible state the actual game is in. And that's not an option unless you own a server, an option which is unavailable to most players.

If you get this game, prepare to first spend days watching videos and looking on the Wiki etc to find all the special ways required to tame dinos you need to move 500m inland. Every 10m there's a dangerous dino. While realistic, it sucks absolute butt for game design.

Then you will spend hundreds of hours before you get your first good dino that lets you stop dying over and over. You can stay where you spawned and survive years without issue, but everything you want and everything you want to do is locked behind grind AND unlocks, apart from all the detail knowledge needed. "Lots to do", well f you, we're not going to let you do it.

Even with friends, on an unmodded server you will die over and over and lose stuff you spent 50 hours crafting. Even a level 100 character with a level 250 powerful dino can get stuck and die.

The day to day gameplay is also very boring and unenjoyable, not to mention clunky movement, clunky shooting, clunky riding, and clunky UI.

They had something here. I love dinos and would love to ride them and shoot and tame and breed and travel and have adventures and do all the things in there, but they've made every single one of these things so difficult and unappealing that you can't have any fun at all with this game.

If there's a Dino game just like this with much less masochistic struggle of leveling and hidden-behind-unlocks added to this game over the years, and with information actually inside the game, feel free to recommend it to me. I want the dinos, but without this mountain of dung added on top of it.

It's not enjoyable, it's clearly made to not be enjoyable, and I will play games that I enjoy.

If you take offense to this review, it's probably because you have 3000h in it, and played it during alpha, so you could enjoy it a little before they turned it into dung, and you have learned all the dung gradually. I don't recommend to anyone to pick this up today.

A great homage to The Long Dark in 16 weeks, what an achievement!

It's free, just get it, what are you doing reading a review?? XD

Length: ~2 TLD episodes
Size: ~1 TLD region, like Hushed River Valley
Gameplay: Less than TLD, no predators hunting or fishing, survival means setting up bases and schlepping loot to them until chests are full. No craftable storage.
Modes: Do the story in ~12h, stay and survive in 4 difficulties, or explore all the lore for Steam achievements.

A few issues and unoptimized at launch, but zero crashes on launch day (!) With the responsive devs, I'm sure this will be fixed.

Playable specs are with that in mind and 60 FPS:

SSD *required! (because the open world is streamed in, what are you doing with an ancient HDD??)
GPU *required! (because shadows must be on in this game)
5-6yo good desktop gaming PC or 2-4yo good gaming laptop, or equivalent.
Works perfectly on Win7x64 (despite minimum specs on the Store Page)

Not recommended for multiplayer

+ Many (35+?) official courses, strangely all of them are Easy or Easiest
+ Several tournaments and tours
+ Lots of light-hearted, reactive commentary. Best feature of the game :)
- Strange swing mechanic that doesn't allow controller-in-the-lap relaxation or normal mouse action with relaxed shoulder.
- Single player is solid, but issues in matchmaking and online rounds play.
- Intermittent framerate stuttering even on powerful gaming PCs and even for the stroke meter, which messes up your timing.

Slow XP rewards so get this for the single player and be prepared to spend your hours casually. An 18-hole course takes about 45-50 mins.

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR SINGLE PLAYER
It's grindy and has extremely clunky combat in multiplayer too, so it's not an enjoyable game.

It's one of those you can have on hand to hang out with friends wasting time doing nothing, like the other Minecraft-turned-RPG games that are also dull as dishwater. This is why I got it.

But it's polished, has no game-breaking bugs, is stable, and has lots of (if mostly cosmetic) content to waste hours on. It supports mods from a great mod community and private servers well with again very few issues if any. The game still being played online speaks to those merits!

I also got it for the building. It's not ideal but not the worst, although you may have to buy all the building DLCs to get the look you want. Perfect roofing is possible only if you plan the roof from the foundations up, and most DLCs lack a full set of roof tiles which means you may have to mix and match. Some doorways take no door, foundation height can't be adjusted if attached to another, lamps/torches can't be put anywhere on a wall, some builds can't be put on a perfectly flat foundation at all, and not on an almost perfectly flat piece of ground, which causes players to use tricks with pillars and ceilings.

So building is far from perfect, and objects are mostly fantasy not medieval, but you can go further than in similar games in its genre.

Promising but heavy on the shooting

Very Early Access at time of writing, so understand that it's a little rough around the edges, but zero crashes. It's easy to pick up and play, and a strong showing this early into access.

Did I want another Open World Survival Craft game? I wasn't sure I wanted to learn another set of you know leveling, currencies, crafting stations... with different graphics. But I got it for the driving and building, which is easy and nice. It looks as if there are plans to make this a little more involved and deeper.

You will be doing a lot of shooting though. You can sort of tell because everything that moves is called Enemies. ;) Each day, every day, you will shoot 10-20-30 enemies. If that's not OK, maybe this isn't for you (in its current state).

Currently, the game has mouse acceleration which makes shooting less enjoyable for FPS shooter fans. So I would recommend against getting it for just the shooting until you can turn it off. If you play with controller you probably won't mind, and it has good controller support.

D4S is like Among Trees with more things to do. This includes the same tiny inventory space as Among Trees, and there is a unique inventory system with 8 inventory types which you use to keep slots free to be able to pick up items, and you slowly unlock slots. You can work around this by killing and stealing for money to buy most items instead of looting 24/7.

Currently, the game has 20-60h of content, depending on how speedrun vs 100% you are. I'm sure this will increase as the regions are expanded.

The dev is responsive and if you want to try it for a bit and then come back to it, I wrote a guide with some tips.

Gives the false impression of being a game with synthwave music

A better description is a square barrel with instakill hazards and ambient drone music. Game description is full of carefully written words that are true, but are written to deceive you. Two words are false: you won't focus because what kills you is out of view, and instead of reflexes you will memorize where in space an instakill hazard encountered previously on the level has fallen to, so it doesn't fall unseen onto you and kill you - there's nothing to react to.

Could have been a start of a puzzler if it rotated the world around you, not the axis you were facing at the start of the level.

Now it's free, so you can make up your own mind. I'm being asked if I recommend it, and I don't.