Recent reviews by Dackis

Missed a spot.
I love power washing, spent all summer doing it. It feels very satisfying IRL. Unfortunately like most menial labor (unsurprisingly), it doesn't translate well into digital entertainment, where it feels like just another meaningless chore. Like the type of repetitive and time consuming side activites you hate doing in other games, a grind, pure and simple.
Frustrating, not fun.
I won't blame the developers though, the simple concept of the game is great in theory. I guess this type of game appeals to a certain kind of personality, but it's not for me.

I really wanted to like this game, I enjoyed SnowRunner a lot and spent a lot of time in that game, just driving around in a scout vehicle exploring the map and finding new routes was the best part of that game for me, so a game focused on these parts would be perfect for me. The concept of this game is really great, but it underperforms and fails to deliver on almost every level.

Positives:
+ The core terrain driving feature (carried over from SnowRunner) is well realized, although the physics behave wonky from time to time (your car feels light and bounces around like it's weightless). The water physics when fording rivers stand out especially so certain features are really well made
+ The maps are quite big, quite many and quite detailed. The forest maps are much better by far, more beautiful and more mechanically interesing with small trees and branches to run down or get stuck on which is satisfying. The desert maps on the other hand are barren, empty and filled with rock. Overall it looks better when zoomed out, there are some nice vistas. A lot of the time you will be very zoomed in up close to the terrain and the quality level isn't quite up to scratch at this scale. Overall it's a nice game world but there's not anything interesting to do in it, except just drive around from A to B completing pointless objectives.
+ Vehicle models (carried over from SnowRunner) are not that many but well made, Your choice of vehicle feels quite insignificant though, when you've unlocked the Khan 39 Marshall you don't really need to choose anything else, it's a bit like driving a monster truck/the Halo Warthog in comparison to some of the other snail-like vehicles.
+ New items like the anchor are useful and fun and gives you lots of new traversal options.
+ Some cool new customization options like carrying extra fuel canisters and repair points on your vehicle are also a step up from the SnowRunner experience.

Negatives:
- Staying true to this series franchise there is virtually no context/story which places you in the game world and gives you a reason to exist there. Just having some overarching objective or intro or characters or voice over would do something towards giving you a goal to drive towards, instead of just driving for the sake of it. Except for clearing some rubble and placing some temporary bridges you can't really interact with the game world in any meaningful way. There is some form of underlying theme of helping nature/science (?) but it's incredibly thin and seems like a poorly written excuse to knock down trees and spew out diesel fumes in sensitive wetlands. The game does a poor effort of onboarding new players, being familiar with the shortcomings of SnowRunner helps in this regard.
- UI design is very poor and littered with bugs, some more or less game-breaking: like a 20 second waiting time every time you bring up the map when following side quests (never did any side quests, not that they seemed fun anyway, just more meaningless chores), also an broken objective marker hindering your progression. A major issue when spawning in to a map is not knowing where your objectives are, which means your vehicles will spawn on the wrong side of the map. Just switching between two different vehicles is unnecessarily complicated and slow. It runs well for the most part performance-wise and is far from unplayable, but this level of bugs, serious design flaws and half-baked/undercooked features suggests it's rushed and far from a polished product.
- Mission design, the mission objectives are complete nonsense (”feed the wild animals who are starving after the afterquake”). I can't stress enough how meaningless and utterly pointless most of these objectives are. Worst of all, how to accomplish them isn't properly explained, they just don't make any sense at all. There's no variation, just drive to point A, B, C… etc. ad nauseam. The worst one is ”Explore the area”, which just means flying the slow drone in a big circle, accomplishing nothing except wasting your time. The scanning and photography minigames are absolutely atrocious and some of the worst features I've seen in any game (like a really bad QTE), but at least the developers had the good sense to realize this, making it so that you can skip them, which you will. I'm convinced this game would be more fun without silly minigames or inane objectives like driving to the top of a mountain to take pictures of a tree.
- One of the better features of SnowRunner was the open world feeling of picking up and completing missions on the go at your leisure, something which would make even more sense in this setting. Instead the game forces you to reset back to your base for every new main mission which just sucks the air out of driving half way across the map since it means you will be doing a lot of backtracking, going back on forth on familiar routes. This artificially makes the game longer by forcing you to spend more time doing the same thing over and over, completing even more stupid objectives only to get sent back to base to do it all over again. This seriously degrades the nice open environments they've created and is boring and repetitive.
- Progression is unbearably slow, this game will severely test your patience and perseverance. There is not a single road in this game, only wild country so be prepared chugging along at an average speed of 2 km/h. Were you to pick up a little speed at the some point the game will promptly punish you by dishing out some random damage to your suspension and undercarriage, ensuring you obey the speed limit set by the developers and maintaining a completely thrill-free experience.
- Controls in general are sluggish and unresponsive
-Drone is by far one of the worst features, extremely slow and unsteady with an abysmal turning rate, which sucks because you really need to spend a lot of time in it. The game's ”no fly zones” make the drone experience even more frustrating.
- Camera has a life of it's own, and not in a good way. Also you can't invert both x- and y-axis individually which causes significant discrepancy between first- and third person cameras.
- The new vehicle add-ons might look a bit cool and are interesting on paper, but in practice they're just useless and add nothing like so many other features in this game.
- There is a day/night-cycle but the night is basically meaningless since you can just skip time back to day to see your surroundings more clearly. By default the vehicles don't really have working headlights either (just a faint glow), another wierd design choice. Night could've been an atmospheric change, but I found it better to just skip it.

Bottomline:
It's not fun to play. There are a few faint glimpses of greatness occasionally but most of the time it's just a slow, long-winded slog and a complete struggle to get through to go anywhere and do anything with the game's systems destined to mess with you at every turn and in every corner. Playing it feels like busywork, and it's difficult for the sake of being difficult.

Repetitive gameplay and weak story.

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Didn't care much for Just Cause 3, which was a let-down for me. This I loved from the very beginning, definitely Avalanche's most accomplished and beautiful sandbox yet!

This game is like chess - it is simple, clear and intuitive to grasp while at the same time boasts admirable strategic depth.

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