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idk it's pretty good. played it 100% on my phone when i was 14-ish

wildmender is a game about digging trenches and making IEDs to help fight off an invasion.

it's a game about growing gardens and crossbreeding lilies to make different coloured lilies.

the lilies are largely useless inventory clutter shortly after you get them all, save for the naturally spawning types.

Wildmender is about resource scarcity. acorns are the most valuable resource in the game unless you plant a tree and sing to it AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

you are a druid, you do things in ways that may not make sense in most fantasy games. your fundemental power base relies on competent irrigation, and maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

but the ecosystem is mostly dessicated plant life, megafauna skeletons, and sand. at least in the biome which isn't actively trying to kill you.

as far as default game balance, it feels quite nice, dangerous until you find solutions, which can happen in many different ways.
foods, water, etc are all quite reasonable, and after one or two runs into the desert to loot remnants and old cakes, you will eventually be able to set up a vast array of different subtypes of several plants, each with slightly different statistics and needs. the main difficulty of the game comes from surviving in the harsher biomes. both are pretty easily doable even with only basic gear, provided you have enough plants to generate the materials you need

over time you will shape the land. every plant, river, and cliff is yours to decorate with life, and until you do, every night you will be haunted by the remnants of a world that used to be.

the game features coop and crossplay, which is huge for me as i have two friends who only have an xbox, as well as random map generation after starting the game on a pre-package seed. random seeds can be both much harder or much easier

the game is a mess of features all quite well implemented, but suffers from a bunch of bugs, poor UI design, and a general level of jank which would absolutely ruin an inferior game. While wildmender contains combat, but it's incredibly easy on the default difficulty, and it lacks the refinement needed to really make it shine (or worth making harder), but at the end of the day, this is not a game about combat. it's a game about restoring several broken ecosystems across a broken world.

i can actually understand the menus super easily now. still highly technical, but that's gonna be cool to get really deep into

let's see if my first playthrough survives winter.

7 15 40 hours into the game, my main complaints are as follows

1: fall damage: input lag
fall damage is completely trivial and meaningless about 45% of the time and one shots you immediately another 45% of the time. the other 10% is when active landing actually works, which i'd say you have about a 1/10 chance of it activating on any landing.
it appears to not function AT ALL unless you fall at least 2 stories, which makes it impossible to train yourself to get the timings down. look at mirrors edge (first one) where any fall can be broken into a roll, even if it isnt necessary. this meant a player could get into the habit of rolling easily without having to risk 500 night time xp every time they try to drop even a tiny bit

edit: after 40 hours i figured out the roll timing is still decently precise but needs to be presses about a full second before hitting the ground, and if you press it after the window, even if you still are in the air, you will NOT roll.

2: combat, most notably perfect blocks, dodges, ragdolls and knockbacks.
perfect blocks and perfect dodges are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid. they are even less consistent than active landings and several times more necessary, most notably due to the fact weapons seem to have zero stun whatsoever on enemies. personally, if someone hit me with a two handed axe, even a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ broken one, i think i'd probably need at least a second to recover before swinging back. given we have dark souls levels of stamina consumption, just let us have the stunlock. seriously, it would make random people just appearing behind you to try and murder you so much less of a chore.

zombies i can understand as they prolly don't feel pain, or can power through. ragdolls are also mostly gone from combat, especially with kicks and heavier attacks. adding these back would definitely improve the feel of combat, especially given there's not a single ranged weapon yet except throwing knives. (i know bow comes later but i've heard bad things about it so not getting my hopes up)

edit: input lag seems to have made perfect blocks incredibly hard to deal with. again, just start blocking early, but not TOO early

3: movement jank input lag:
crouching doesn't work properly unless you fully stop moving about 50% of the time, and makes running from stuff, or even just moving quickly into a chore.
changing your weapon/item/consumable also forces you to COMPLETELY stop, stand still, and immediately lose ALL momentum, which, again, makes the game feel ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to play, as the entire focus of the game is supposed to be explicitly on movement.

aside from that, all the other movement issues are either minor bugs or inconvienences, or related to this weirdly high level of input lag that i seem to be getting

4 performance
i have a gtx 1070. by no means is it a great card but it can run the majority of modern games at high settings, 1080p, with reasonable FPS. this game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tanks, stutters, and just in general looks incredibly jittery, which kills the visual style. even on medium graphics settings it's stuttering like made. im not sure what the issue is exactly, but it's really making the game feel less fun to play

now, being 40 hours in there are some things i really enjoy about the game.

lore and mechanics coinciding:
The infection timer is a wonderful thing, which helps create a level of suspense while still being easy enough to deal with by just doing a couple random gen nightrunner activities for high tier immunity boosters. there have been MANY time where i opted to risk infection and instead open up a lock, letting the timer tick down to single digits before managing to crack it and take a med to stop it. having health and stamina upgrades throughout the map is also a nice touch

living world:
for the first 20 or so hours there were people everywhere, sitting around campfires, sitting by various resource nodes, getting attacked by bandits, getting arrested by peacekeepers, etc etc.i have noticed that now more often than not those zones appear to just have a corpse and nothing else, which sucks, but that may be due to the fact i basically only go out at night as you get more XP and can go to more activities that way.


overall the game fails to do most things particularly better than the original except have a nicer looking AI and immersion mechanics. most other mechanics either fall short, or fails to improve on the formula we already had. yes i feel like if you enjoy parkour zombie games, it's a worthwhile buy, but if you are coming in expecting it to be decidedly better than the first game, you will be disappointed. if you just want a new map to smash zombies in, have fun!

yes

Bannerlord is a great game and seems like it will become a more than worthy successor to warband, but i severely lacks in one aspect.

Women are treated equally.

Like what the ♥♥♥♥? NO i want to walk to a lord and be laughed off as a helpless inferior being, because otherwise when i personally take the role of headsman after decisively defeating them in combat, it's just that much less satisfying!

You know?

9/10 not enough sexism

11/10 would drink soda again

I don't think any game ever has had such a perfect transition from 2d to 3d.
this game is worth double every penny, cause for the next 2 days you get buy one get one free. if you even somewhat liked the first, this game is for you. a friend of mine who could never get into the original pointed out this game to me knowing i adored the first, and we've played since. having a third dimension makes everything feel far more hectic and adds a whole new direction for your skill to increase

absolute 10/10. everything great about the original, but with a whole new dimension of content

it's a great game i'm just mad about an update that did something which ended up ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ me over

from what i can tell, the game makes coop a masive hassle for anyone, even those who understand the process of hosting servers like myself.

regrdless of that however, my game wont start. it simply launches and if it manages to get to the main menu without crashing, will crash within a few mouseclicks or other such button presses. being unable to even play the game, i simply cannot give it a positive review.

edit: managed to get the game to stop crashing, however multiplayer functionality is absolute garbage. the host functions in the menus DO NOT WORK

console commands to start and host DO NOT WORK

multiplayer options all DO NOT WORK

if you have any desire to play a multiplayer horror game, move along, since this game's multiplayer functionality is worse than... well i don't know... i've never dealt with something this bad. and i've tried using skyrim's online MP mod