Recent reviews by Perru

peak

(You can read before playing, first-hour spoilers at most) Personally I loved the DLC, and it's somewhat sad to see so many people dislike it because of mismatched expectations. So I thought I'd share some of my thoughts and talk about what I've read.

I VERY STRONGLY recommend starting from scratch on a new save, like I did. Completing the jumping into Cappy mission will only take 2 hours, plus that's time to hunt the subtle changes to anomalies since the last update. New mechanics will force you to downgrade your car if you don't, which is very frustrating. You will avoid some new mechanics (eg. Harmonic energy mechanic) which will leave a sour taste when you will be forced into them, and you'll even miss out on how powerful they can be.

To me, the DLC is more of an invitation for old players than anything. Discovery is a key part of Pacific Drive, but the game is already quite complex. The only way to make players discover again is to replace mechanics (→ Harmonic energy; artifacts which are absolutely amazing imo; gateway races; etc.)

As of now, the DLC (and update altogether) is pretty buggy; though I'd say it's nothing you shouldn't expect from a recent launch. Personally, I did not encounter any issues after removing mods.

I find the "this DLC is confusing" complaint quite funny. All DLC items have a short tooltip right on your mouse pointer that explains to you how they work, unlike the base game where any info (if there is any) is buried in a wall of text written as small as humanly possible at the bottom of the screen.

(Spoilers here) The ending sure can feel underwhelming. Though I'd say the devs already made it clear they were not fans of grandiose endings in the base game (which was 90% walking sim, 10% spinning out).

Attuned resources look lazy at first, but they make sense. Having many, many new resources would just confuse players. WitW is supposed to mimic (as in bring you all the way and past olympium) the base game's progression and what can you make a steel door from other than steel and glass?

Personally I had a blast. The new mechanics brought me back to completely discovering everything like I did at the beginning of the game, an experience I longed for. They will bring you past olympium if you do not just blindly ignore them. Some thing will look a bit lazy (mostly thinking of attuned materials) but they make sense, and it's not worth wasting your experience thinking about it. Do not continue an existing save, or everything will feel like an effort. WitW was balanced for you to start from scratch. As for the rest of criticism, while I do not share these opinions they sound fair. Set your expectations correctly

Edit: The update I'm talking about released (better late than never right?). There's no other way to put it, it's DREADFUL. Because the update took so long to release, players excepted to get a lot of content out of it. So they had to inflate playtime. There are many ways to inflate it and keep things fun, but making the player run in circles for a dozen hours hoping rng is nice to them IS NOT one of them. Have they lost their mind? I wonder. You should consider playing SR1 instead. But SR2 ? You'd have a better time just throwing all your money out of the window.

I usually don't write reviews.. Actually this is the first one I wrote.

This game released in early access over two years ago. What have we got since? An island that pretty much feels like a winter event area, gadgets, weather (which I doubt many cares about), and an egg slime... And what else? What went wrong, that makes developing it so time consuming you need 2 whole years for this?

It's not like it has enough content to justify not working hard on this game, there's 10-15 hours of content on a game that's supposed to be a sandbox... "But 15 hours is pretty fair"- I have close to 120 hours on SR1, over 6 times more hours than on SR2. "But it's in early access"- since almost two years, yet you reach the end so fast and there's no replayability. "Who are you to say that, you haven't played this game is a year and a half"- I read every changelogs when they came out and once again when writing this review. I know what it features as of now.

Seriously, what are they doing? "We prioritize quality over quantity". Sure, and you're right to do so. But maybe not to the point where you don't release anything anymore, come on... What is the team made of, to release so few content? 1 developer and 19 HR employees? "But we do not practice "crunch""- How much do they work to justify so few new features, 4 hours a day 4 days a week? If there's a reason for it taking so long and it's not that they're lazy, why don't you explain the issue to your community and what to expect for the future?

And what are they doing in the recent updates? All these gadgets and decorations, in a game where you're supposed to profit off slimes. What are you trying to do, the sequel of Slime Rancher or House Flipper? Players want all the new exciting content you promised to be coming when it released in EA: new zones and slimes, not pots and flags.

This game and it's team currently features the worst of both indie games and AAA games. In its current state it's a shame to anyone who have their names tied to it.
Just take the money and gaslight players into thinking you're working on it until they forget about it.

Here we are, a few months later with the labyrinth update coming December 12. In less than a month. An update awaited since EA released. That's been in the work for nearly a year. And no trailer? What's about it? They're scared of negative feedback? It's unfinished and buggy as hell? They got lazy? Or just forgot about it? I'm not so sure and the point of this paragraph is not to criticize the dev team, but rather to raise the following question: are they about to decieve the community once again- more than even since this game launched in EA, or are they going to release a proper update worth the wait?