Recent reviews by absolain

My original review below is intact. Since then, I've been playing on multiplayer, which had a totally different death / respawn mechanic that make the game hit way better. If you can maintain on the front side of the power curve on this game, it's rewarding if a bit laborious (and I keep coming back to that word), but not necessarily in a bad way. The mechanics keep you from just shutting off and hitting trees, if that's what you're looking for, but the exploration combined with building, gathering, hunger and stat management, and hostile threats keeps things pretty lively. It's a good game but definitely won't be everyone's cup of tea.


I see what they're doing here, but the result is just save scumming over and over again, having natives cheap-shot one hit you without warning, and finally, an infection that didn't appear on my arms or legs at all, with no status icon. Neat idea, but the gameplay loop is particularly laborious, and the amount of random deaths and reloads made the experience just not fun. It's a great concept, and the implementation is kinda there, but it's mostly just a frustrating loop of reloads and saving every few seconds to prevent having to do the same tedious tasks over and over again. after a few dozen hours of gameplay, my character is only a few hours old, and not in an enjoyable way.

This is one of the most phenomenally designed games I've played in a long time. The dynamic of restarting from scratch every mission is brilliant, and adds a refreshing dynamic to the survival genre. Early game items are forever useful, and the perk tree requires some special consideration because you'll be starting fresh many times. The devs are clearly big thinkers and have created a game that's super fun, and very re-playable.

Once the login issues are sorted out, which they're working on, the underlying game looks amazing. I haven't heard a single bad thing about the game, but it's gotten review-bombed because of unanticipated issues with the main server. Individual servers seem to have no issue with latency or lag. I'm keeping it.

I was under the impression that this game would be more like classic roguelikes where you could stop moving, and the game would effectively pause, making each step or action strategic. That's not the case. For me, it's just a doom clone with some RPG elements, but the real-time nature ruins it for me.