Recent reviews by Prod

Been playing this one off and on for years, figure I'd finally throw in my two cents.

TLDR: Cool game, but if you just want to fly spaceships and shoot things there are better options.
If you want to MAKE spaceships though, this is for you!

There is a bit of a learning curve for building (USE THE 'N-MENU' IN CREATIVE MODE!), but once you get a handle on it then building ships is just so friggen cool, huge variety of shapes and textures. Wish there was a bit more furniture though.

The inventory management has a lot of advantages over other survival games. No clumsy sorting and opening endless boxes just to figure out whether you have a given resource. If you have it, you know it.

The survival elements are passable. But the enemy AI is godawful and their pathing is madness. Waited for years for it to get better and it never really did, so I sort of just learned to live with it, the space battles are where all the fun is anyways. Every now and then I land on a planet and shoot things, but the zig-zagging raptors get old fast.

Honestly the mods are what makes this game truly shine. Reforged Eden takes a cool base/ship-builder and turns it into an awesome game. With TONS of added content that fills the universe with a huge variety of POIs and a bunch of missions to give you directions to run towards in an otherwise (mostly) directionless sandbox.

This has always had the potential to be a great game, but it is too unforgiving of things that aren't even mistakes!
After a difficult and profitable run that was 7-8 tiles away from the city, I was returning to town with all my loot, hell bent on saving before cashing in.
One tile away from town, I encounter four bandits and a dog.
Naturally I choose to flee, leading two of them into town, where my 'friend' Verren attacks them.
I figure 'Hey! I can take them easily with his help! Kinda owe it to him for stepping up like that!'
So I fire off a spell hitting one of the bandits.
I become wanted with 'attack on sight' listed in the description.
I think to myself '****! But ok, that's fine, I'll just use Verren to fast travel to a different town and save there'.
So when the fight ends, I click on Verren to initiate dialogue.
I attack Verran.
Verren chases me.
Verren kills me.
I lose two hours of difficult play time and all of my loot, with no option to say 'Oops my bad dude! Please stop hitting me and take me to jail!'
Sigh.
If it was the first time something like this happened, I could deal. But it happens all the time: two steps forward, three steps back. Even playing without permadeath the game give you NO leeway for error.
So I give up.
The save system was cool when the map was small, but with the map so big you need to make camping easier so that people don't get screwed over by stupid mistakes that cost them hours of game time.

Despite the time I've sunk into this game, I can't recommend paying money for it as is. Servers are supremely sketchy and it takes forever just to find a group running reasonable settings.

Even if you DO find a game that ISN'T running 3x speed for all the kids off their Ritalin, the skill of the other players is a crapshoot. The matches aren't ranked or anything like Dead by Daylight so even IF you are lucky enough to find a stable server with good settings (or at least not bad ones) you could very well find yourself kicked right off the bat just because some noob panicked and shouted out your colour in chat for NO reason at all.

Seriously, I've had so many games now where a meeting will get called before anyone is even DEAD and the crew will STILL vote someone off! I'm forever trying to play this game like Clue, eliminated suspects one by one, but everyone else just wants to play Russian Roulette, even if it means KILLING THAT GUY WHO I JUST TOLD YOU WAS SAFE!!! Sigh.

Oh also people cheat like crazy, they play on voice chat with their friends and then team up if one of them is the imposter, making it all but IMPOSSIBLE for the crew to win.

Also also! Spammers and trolls abound in chat. Asia isn't bad, but the American servers can be, and I have come to assume that Europe is where all the Rust players meet!

Also also ALSO people hack the game to ruin things for everyone! Closing every door at once, setting the kill cooldown to 0 and just mowing through the whole team in seconds, or turning off the lights for everyone INCLUDING the killer. Just to name a few of the hacks I've encountered.

Having given voice to ALL of my grievances: I will say that IF the settings are good and IF you manage to get a smart group going and IF your server doesn't crash or get spoiled by hackers/cheaters/trolls, this game is solid gold. It's just that panning for that ONE golden match can take forever and be extremely frustrating.

Alas! My greatest fear has been realized: Prophesy of Pendor is a better game.
Also they got rid of Sword Sisters, just to piss me off.

TL/DR? It's a turd. Buy it on sale.

First of all, I cannot BELIEVE that this is in early access instead of a full release. I have written 5 full length novels in half the time it has taken for these people to develop this thing.
But I suppose it is worth it if the gameplay is amazing right?
It would be! But this eight-year old clunker is just an unstable and dolled up version of Warband! No joke: it has some decent graphics and an improved UI, but everything else is the same! Including some of the WORST elements of the UI!
Seriously, why have a shortcut to talk to the headman that still makes me enter the village?! Why force me to go through another long-ass loading screen just to buy some grain?!
A loading screen BTW that risks hanging every time you go through it, so yeah. Enjoy watching the little windows 98 looking horsey as your PC crashes.

Okay... but the battles must be sick right?
They sure are! BECAUSE I AM PLAYING WARBAND!
They used the same AI as the original game, with the trickle-charging drones who should be forming up to face my cavalry but instead just mindlessly chase whoever catches their eye.
A near decade long wait and I am left seriously wondering what they did with their time because they sure as heck didn't use it coding.

I am not going to refund it, both because I am over the 2 hour limit and because I know that the modders will likely be working overtime to overcome Bannerlord's many shortcomings.
But my point is this: they shouldn't need to.
Boo. I say boo sir.

This is a free game with better graphics than most any game I've played! FREE I TELL YOU!
And it also runs like butter on my 7-8 year old PC because the devs optimized it by selling the souls of their pets or something. (Who would buy a child's soul? They're terrible! But a golden retriever? Priceless.)
The only negative thing is actually a positive in that there is so much content to get into it is hard for me and my buddy to pick a direction!

This game was entertaining as balls at first.
Despite the near-constant dying, I had oodles of giggling fun running around as a survivor against all the scary pop-culture villains; the tension you get when you have a good game going is weirdly delightful and fun to chat about afterwards with the guy that just killed you on a meat hook as you exchange pleasantries in the post-game lobby. GG sir, GG.
But then I decided to try my hand at playing a killer and the giggling stopped after 5-6 matches, the fun already a distant memory.
It honestly felt like I was playing a different game, with an indifferent and often toxic community.
As a killer it can take 5-10 minutes to find a match. This isn't a problem by itself, but when you do finally get a game going you are lucky if half the players are at your skill level. It is supremely soul-crushing to hook a player only to have his buddies run circles around you and unhook him seconds later as you lumber about feeling like an inept doofus.
I could live with these issues, as chasing people around and whacking them with various murder sticks is still great fun and I had a couple games where I came damn close to killing someone, despite the experience gap. (Still haven't killed anyone btw which is part of the frustration when the daily quest is to do just that)
But all it takes is ONE player with the right (or wrong) mindset to ruin the killers day.
Which brings me to the real nonsense that killed this game for me: pallet looping.
Pallet looping is something that was invented by players hell-bent on ruining the experience for all of the neophyte murderers.
Without using specific killers whose abilities counter it, this 'tactic' is effectively impossible to deal with when employed by even moderately competent players, let alone these evil trolls with way too many hours in the game. (I have 14 at the time of this review).
When faced with a pallet looper, you can forget about the wonderful game of cat and mouse you thought you were playing: instead try to find a way to have fun while running in circles after a shirtless wonder in bright green track pants who t-bags every pallet you destroy in your vain bid to catch the miserable trolling toad. (I might still be salty about that one)
Overall, great game to play with friends or as a survivor, but the long match-making and inability to have fun as a killer leaves half of the game sorely lacking, and since half a game isn’t enough to satisfy me this is a firm ‘do not buy’.

UPDATE:
Another thing to add, as you get into the higher levels more and more people will quit if they are the first person the killer catches, thus screwing over the killer AND the other survivors. Since this keeps happening, I have to assume the devs don't care despite the ability to report people for doing it.
Long match-making + quitters = barf.

Great game, BUT DO NOT BUY IF YOU WANT TO PLAY ONLINE!!

I got it to play with a friend, and it was great, but their multiplayer is spotty and their communication is crap.

First off, you have to mess around with your router/firewall settings which is something a lot of people won't know how to do, so that is a major strike against this game right there, but I host a lot of servers so whatevs. EXCEPT even after setting everything up, the game still might give you the bird. It works one day, we play for hours, then the next, having changed NOTHING, we have poor connectivity and are unable to host.

And the support for this game is usless! Are the servers down? Experienceing issues? Is the building on fire?
Hey devs, stop linking us to the same support page! If this many people have the same problem then the issue must be on your end!

Honestly, if I had the multiplayer issue out of the gate, I would have returned for a refund, but alas, I was like 10 hours in.

10/10 Game, ruined by 0/10 communication

This game is a lot of fun, but it is very much pay-to-win. The repair cost of items, especially the higher level ones, needs to be balanced. I spent 30$ on the game to unlock a bunch of stuff but now I would need to spend at least another 10$-20$ to repair it all after just a couple of battles.

This game is wicked awesome, I want more Octodad!!