Recent reviews by Cat What Stalks Cheese

Why haven't I recommended this yet?

I dunno.

It real good! And it's been that way since it went into early access.

Now with 1.0 you get better tutorials, an 'endgame', and even more polish.

It REAL good.

The only caveat: Please understand that you're going to build a series of settlements that extend your reach and let you buy from the roguelite tree. You will NOT build a single monolithic settlement like in many games of the genre.

If you played Starcom: Nexus, you know what you're getting. More of the good stuff!

Cottagecore viking survival simulator!

Great attention to detail (smoke! chimneys!)

You can't starve, but food makes you stronger.

It's all balanced for PvE so none of the complicated grind or anti-griefing mechanics of games like RUST, ARK, or Conan Exiles; it's just fun, exploration, hunting and gathering alone or with your friends.

The worst thing that can happen if you play with others is people helping TOO much, and that's a pretty good place to be!

You're viewing this review on Steam and the review is only for the PC version - the devs released garbage for last-gen consoles.

But on the PC? On MY PC, a Ryzen 3900x with a GeForce 3070 and an NVMe drive for fast reloads when the game bugged out... The game is a beautiful mess.

I beat it at about 80 hours and loved most of the time I was in - but I was looking past the bugs, or enjoying them as 'quirks' and working around them. Fast NVMe storage meant I could save/load to reset broken game states, or quit entirely and come back in to deal with things. And I had to do it a lot!

But Night City is pretty awesome, the parkour is pretty awesome, and it's buggy as all hell but they're already showing some responsibility and addressing critical bugs as fast as they can.

For example, my prior review talked about how my save was a ticking time bomb because of save file size limits and slow but sure file growth from crafting and exploring. 3 days after the issue was brought to public notice, CDPR increased save file sizes on the PC in patch 1.06.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE SO LUCKY. You might have performance issues! The bugs might drive you crazy!

Game is unfinished, broken, you are playing a content-complete beta test at best.

But it's already getting better. And it -is- playable. And they're not going to abandon it; it's going to keep getting the TLC it should have gotten before release.

So: If you don't have time to waste on bugs? WAIT! But if you are prepared to deal with them? Eh, buy it. Play it. Then come back in 6 months when they've ironed out the worst bugs and play it again, even better.

Immersive AF experience in VR.

This game was eerily peaceful without being boring, and contains nostalgic echoes of starflight and other explorey-space-combat games.

But it also has a powerfully fun modular ship-building system that made my occasional defeats at the hands of enemies (because i explored into dangerous space, YAY for freedom!) only contribute to the eventual SUBLIME PLEASURE of coming back later with a BIG HONKIN' MISSILE CRUISER and CRUSHING MY ENEMIES.

Super recommend, and I can't wait for more content.

(Played in early access up to the cutoff of content at time of writing.)

Smooth like a baby's butt, and with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥' soundtrack.

Don't play on public servers. Run your own, or get invited to a moderated community.

But holy hell, once you get rid of the griefing, it's so fun to tame dinosaurs and build your dino army! Explore the ARK, compete with others if you like that, raise dinobabies, farm, flex your ridiculous watermelon-smashing biceps because you messed with the body sliders... oh and yeah, fly around on a giant death pigeon.

Adorable.

Relentless updates.

They're doing it right!

I enjoyed this a lot, though the balance and pacing felt a little off in my Early Access play - that's expected since they hadn't implemented the full campaign yet!

There may be 'optimal' play but you can also go at your own pace - you can stay in and tech up, turtle up, if you feel like you're not ready to handle new challenges, but you'll have to go out and explore and gather to finish the game.

My only complaint is that the super-sniper demon units render most fortifications useless - you need a curtain wall to block line of sight to coax them in, but the interplay of AI and line of sight means that a scary monster will always single out the first sniper it can reach and duel with them, 1 on 1- which demons usually win. Defensive bases become restricted to certain geometries to be effective, and I found this kind of frustrating. A guy with a hunting rifle in a sniper tower should not be the first one to die. But hey, maybe I just need to get good!