Recent reviews by Bucketsmith

No longer works on modern systems.
Tried the beta patch, tried the overhaul mod.
The contents are great, the overhaul makes the game play like a proper Carmageddon game again, but it is really unstable.
There's massive graphical glitches on modern AMD GPUs. There is a fix for that, but that fix also lowers the FPS tremendously, especially with vehicle reflections.
Even with all that, the game still keeps crashing. That beta branch is just incredibly unstable.
Sadly, it will not be fixed by devs so do not buy at this point!

I promised a review when the guy posted on a social media site with giving away keys to people that are tight on money.
So I appreciate that, and he said he was a man of his word, and so I want to return that favour, because I respect that stance.

I really like the puzzle aspect of this game, it's a different way of solving puzzles than your generic puzzles.
But the one thing that makes it hard for me to keep going is that there isn't anything to teach me how to think the way the game wants me to think.
I keep getting stuck not having enough parts for the solutions I can think of, and I get the feeling it wants me to conceptualize deep multiple levels of 'factoring' before laying anything down and with ADD that's just too hard.

I get the idea, but I can't get over how janky everything is.
There's no 'smoothness' to anything. Like jumpcuts in a film, things just jump from one state to another.

Very good playable experience for a FP action adventure game in line of the Fallout reboots.
I wouldn't go so far to call it a cRPG, it certainly has RPG elements and they work okay.
Sometimes dialogue doesn't do what you expect it to do, and you have no idea you needed to buff of prior to the talks, so you end up reloading a lot.
Combat is alright, though it's definitely a game where a lot of people will end up going for the stealth archer approach.
I tried hand guns at the start, but found long guns (hunting rifles) to just be way more efficient.
Not that combat AI is anywhere interesting. Enemies just charge at you, or get line of sight and then shoot straight at you, ad infinitum. So the stealth way is the only way to get a real challenge.
Sadly, there's no takedowns. So a stealth melee build was not worth it to me. You ended up with a ton more risk and it didn't reward you extra, compared to long range gun stealth build.

Storywriting is entertaining though! It's not as great as I've experienced from some other games, but it's good!

In short: Currently would NOT recommend.
Co-op progression is not actively shared.
Key elements do not progress at all, other elements you gain resources but have to annoyingly go into your own game to unlock.
Some progression even requires you to replay in your own game, just to progress/unlock it.

I'm a long time fan of the lorebuilding in the Endless Universe games. I absolutely loved that about every previous game.
I was saddened when they came out with the civilization clone Humankind, to be honest. I didn't want yet another 'alternative human history' game, I wanted more Endless Universe to explore.

I pre-ordered this game very early on, because I had trust in this developer given my experience with their prior games.
After the release of this game, and the way they are glaringly and tactically ignoring complaints on their forum, I now feel the opposite. I feel like they are letting us down big time.

When you're not the host, your progress on your hero quests is halted.
You're basically playing instead of a bot, for the host's progression, not your own.
I don't get how they could ever think that that would be an enjoyable experience.

You gain resources to unlock certain things, but quests are not progressed. Even if you have the hero unlocked yourself.
After a long coop session, you need to go in to your own solo/hosted game to spend your resources.
Thing is, nothing of what you select in terms of upgrades will be active in someone elses hosted lobby.
So now the host needs to spend their resources not on just the hero they are maining, but also the hero their coop partners are maining.
So those resources become even more of a grind. It makes no sense to me.
Everyone mains their own hero with their preferred weapons as a playstyle, so they will invest in those things with priority over others.
But when you join a friend to play with, you are at the mercy of whatever they have unlocked and activated.

The closed betas did not clearly laid this out for us, and it did not give us a clear way to give feedback on it, either.
It simply was never the focus, and instead we kept being told "meta progression is still wildly in concept phase and can change".

I made a simply thread talking about some issues I ran in to when playing coop, giving ample space for the devs to respond to let us know certain things are bugs (if they were), and that other things are working as designed but are being re-evaluated.
Instead, we get toxic fanboys white-knighting it. We get a copy-paste FAQ listing with ambiguous wording over what is and what is not shared progression. We get zero response from the devs on these things, they don't acknowledge whether or not hero quests nor progressing is a bug or not. Even though they are very clearly reading and replying in threads, they chose to completely avoid the biggest issues some of their consumerbase is suffering from.
What does that tell you? Do they not think about how that makes them look?

This game needs good storywriting, questwriting and dialoguewriting.
It's just go-fetch quests and grinding ad infinitum.
I didn't like it.

It's just the same 5 minutes over and over. Every quest is a go-fetch quest.

It's been an awful grind from the beginning. You will never get real progress to unlocking and upgrading vehicles. You will almost always be matched with higher ranked vehicles and players.

Chapter 1 sets an alright tone. Not good, not bad.
Warhammer 40k is not my thing, but boomershooters are.
I didn't feel the 40k bullshittery and ridiculous aesthetics are bothersome in this game at all, which is rare for a 40k game, so this is good!
The level design suits 40k. Most always, levels revolve around arenas to fight waves of enemies in.
I don't like this level design at all, I think it is cheap and sloppy.
Chapter 2 adds a few new guns, but that's it. Chapter 2 and 3 just feel like a long job of samey samey.
It would have been better if they picked a different faction for the player, as well as different factions for enemies, with each chapter.
Do something meaningful with the guns over the chapters.
I wouldn't get this game unless you like grind, cause that is what it will end up feeling like.
Which is a shame because chapter 1 was a fun challenge.
Played it on Extermisomething, the hardest difficulty.

I remember how janky it was when it released in EA. It didn't seem like it had potential, to be honest.
I saw it went 2.0 recently so I came back to check.
Apparently there's quite some history with it going free to play and then paid, and now they trick you.
You see, unless you bought the game previously, you can only explore the very tiny started island.
Everything else is locked behind the DLC as a gateway key.

Also, I went to the first story island, build a box there because inventory management is ATROCIOUS.
I come back to the game to play again and the chest is just gone.
No warnings when I placed it. All my items GONE.

Everything feels sluggish, if you ask me. I am not a fan.