Recent reviews by Dr. Vroom

What can I say? It's Dwarf fortress, it is awesome.

***HOWEVER***
You should wait. I know you've waited 20+ years already, but give it some more time. The interface is a step in the right direction, but still a little clunky. The biggest annoyance I have about it is that while some of the original keybinds work, a lot of them are gone, so productivity will undoubtedly be significantly slower for players who are already used to the game.

Adventure mode is currently missing, which is a shame because being able to explore these worlds that you built is a huge part of the game, and DF adventure mode is probably one of the best roguelike games ever. While Legends mode works, adventure mode really lets you actually get into the world and understand the incredible power of the generation system at hand.

Lastly, the bugs. Oh the bugs. At the time of this review I have made 5 different fortresses on 5 different world, all of them quickly get to a point where I just cant do almost anything anymore or else the game will crash. once you have around 10 dwarves things start breaking. Yes, 10. Most people will have 10 dwarves within the first 15 minutes of building their fortress. For example- I can't assign dwarves to workshops anymore, as soon as I click to assign workers- the game crashes. This means that I can no longer do any new work. I can't cook, brew, make crafts, weapons, armor, or mechanisms. literally all I can do is keep digging, and making beds, doors, and cabinets. So now I have to hope I can make enough high value cabinets to sell to get enough food and drink from traders just to survive, not to mention weapons and armor for a military to defend myself. Some other things are broken in weird ways- I had a male cat get pregnant from another male cat, a dwarf got attached to a cat's corpse- yep, it didn't care about the cat at all, but a season after the cat died and rotted in the dump away from the fortress- they threw a tantrum over the cat. And I had multiple dwarves jump down a 3 z high pit to collect crap, usually resulting in broken legs and bleeding. None of these were issues in the old 2014 build.

Can't recommend this build just yet, but hopefully in a month or two they sort these issues out and it all works nicely. Until then, go download DF2014, throw on a texture pack, and deal with the odd interface.

Get game when alpha first comes out, it looks like crap, runs like crap, is buggier than the mod and has less features. Put 10 hours into it, but it was pretty much unplayable.

A year later, try again. A little better, the map is larger- which noone really asked for, they expanded the medical system, but never fixed any of the issues with core gameplay. Game still ran terrible, was a buggy mess. Put another 10 or so hours into it.

Another year goes by, Try again. Game is really no different. Maybe runs a bit better, though its probably due to me upgrading my PC, core gameplay is no better. Added a larger variety of items, still a buggy mess. Another 15-20 hours.

2 Years go by, decide to give it a go again. Game runs better, core gameplay is still bad. Looting is all weird and inconsistent. Buggy zombies. If you get a really great, lucky spawn- the game is bearable, otherwise its just a waste of time. Put another 20 hours in, trying hard to like it.

Almost a year later, Figure it's gotta be decent now. Log in.
Find a can opener and some other survival gear.
You are starving.
Find a can of beans! Perfect! Imma eat that up!
10 in game minutes later.
You are starving.
Your stomach violently grumbles.
You are dying of thirst.
You are dead.

The game really isnt any better. The zombies are less buggy, but the survival and looting is just bad. 30 minutes in game and you are starving and thirsty, going to die, even after filling yourself. Players are mostly just there to attack you, they rarely interact in any sort of positive way, this is probably because theres nearly no incentive for them to. Looking at the pace in which they have been improving the game, I'd say it should be good to go in another 3 or 4 years. I may come back then, probably not though. The developers have shown they really arent interested in creating the sort of game that was advertised. It's a shame. It feels like theres a team of 2, maybe 3 people working on the game tops, I'm assuming it is mostly adandoned by Bohemia at this point, that or their project manager just has no idea how to direct the work.

In the time since this game became alpha:
Bohemia has releaed 10 full-feature DLCs for ArmA3
Bohemia has released 3 FULL games and one short story game all with far more polish than DayZ currently has.
This game has yet to leave alpha.
Realisticly, Bohemia knows everyone who is going to buy DayZ has bought it by now. It's nearly a 5 year old game (yes, I know its just alpha, but you and they know damn well everyone rush bought it because of hype). So what incentive is there to really drop a lot of development resources into a game that won't make them more money?

I'm not saying the game is totally dead, but I am saying I'd be suprised if it were every to be "released" as something that is fully featured and anything more than a slow, frustrating deathmatch. It's a "persistant" battle royale with a map that is 10x larger with 1/10 the loot.

This game has a lot of fun gameplay, and there is a really great immersive atmosphere to it that really gives it an overall good "feel" If you are looking for an RPG-ish game that will have a crazy amount content and a huge potential for gameplay hours- this is certainly the game for you!

Now, having said that- this game as far as quality control goes- is utter garbage. Plain and simple. Let me explain:

Stability: 3/10- As of writing this review, I have roughly 20 hours in this game as per steam. However, I have only made roughly 8 hours of progess into the game. The prevailance of bugs that will either soft lock you or crash the game are so numerous that I havent gone two hours straight without having to close the game out and restart it. This wouldnt be such a huge issue, except the game is designed around saving very infrequently. In order to save, you either have to sleep (and save) at a bed you have rented or "own", or you need to use one of your very limited "savious schnapps" items that are extremely expensive. The game focuses on you taking a methodical approach to everything, encouraging you to go slow, save infrequently and limit risk. This is a really great idea, but because of the crashes and bugs, it is just plain inexcusably poorly executed. In one session I lost 3 consecutive hours of gameplay- in which I had slept/rested multiple times as part of the story- yet no saves triggered at all. Wonderful.

Controls: 4/10- The controls have a lot of ambition! I love the directional attacking with your weapons, and it is a refreshing approach to combat that keeps things interesting and encourages you to not mindlessly button mash. At least, in theory. In execution, the controls outside of combat are fine. Nothin spectactular, very much so par for the course- it is when you get into combat when things start to fall apart. First, the directional attacking mechanism has an artificial "lag" to it. You move your mouse to the right- about half a second later the little indicator highlights that you are "considering" attacking from that direction. You them hold down the left mouse button to pull back, about a half second later- your character starts to lift their weapon in that direction. When the opportunity arises and you decide to attack- you release the mouse button to unlease hell upon your enemy! And another half second later you actually start to swing. That is about a second and a half of artificial waiting added into the attack sequence- despite the game encouraging you to think fast, and be on your feet to adjust to what the enemy is doing- it forcefully slows down your every action. On top of this- there is a "bullet time" effect almost every single time an enemy attack you, slowing down things even more. These things combined make one-on-one combat an absolute boring, uninsiring chore.
Additionally- Early on the game teaches you to "always move" during combat and to keep stepping to the side. However, the games built in "lock on" mechanism that is designed to help aind in the directional; combat is actually completely incapable with keeping up with sidestepping maneuvers in fast paced combat, on top of this- the lock actually stays forced to the target despite not even keeping up. This leads to one of three things-
1: You practically stand still in combat, making it boring and not engaging.
2: You stay locked on but can not hit your opponent- or just get stuck playing a game of ring around the rosie
3: You are CONSTANTLY toggling on/off the lock on mechanism every 10 seconds in combat.
Another oddity is that if you are on a relatively steep slope and you jump- for some reason you jump away from the slope- like if you are kicking off a wall or something.
Sometimes You have to reposition yourself a half dozen times or more before the game thinks you are in an acceptible spot to open a door or pick an object up.

Story: 6/10- Some really epic moments- with entirely way too much filler. It is hard to stay engaged with the story at times, because part of the story will be something as broad as "figure out what to do next" with little to no guidance at all.

Sound: 8/10- Pretty good sounds, nothing absolutely spectacular, but definitely solid. Sounds are clear and balanced with a decent enough variety that none of the sounds stand out in a bad way.

Graphics: 8/10- Really solid graphics, beautiful landscapes, dense brush, dark woods, rain effects, mud, lighting... This game has got it down.

Performance: 4/10- Probably partially because of the graphics, but a high-tier rig is likely to be getting 30-40 FPS on high settings at 1080p, usually with spikes during times of action down into the 20s. Just plain awful. You can tone the graphics down a lot to bring the averages up to 60fps, but you will still get bad drops into the 30s. This certainly feels like a console port with little optimizing.

Progression system: 5/10- Bland, uninspired RPG elements are par for the course. You get perks for various skills and stats as you level them, it feels fine most of the time, but nothing great. Additionally, the game throws tons of "unbeatable" fights at you at the start of the game without telling you they are supposed to be unbeatable. VERY soon after they are done throwing all these unbeatable fights at you you learn a couple extremely basic skills that you for some reason just were incapable of doing before- which makes even the strogest of opponants in the game laughably un-threatening. There isn't really progression- there is a switch that gets flipped that turns you into a combat God, and throws easy fights at you for hours until you meet up with one of those "unbeatable" people from before to try to trick you into thinking "You've come such a long way! ohhh so impressive!"