Recent reviews by IceBoyo

Awesome!

Don't look anything up, just play, die repeatedly, and discover how things work on your own. A lot of games like this are a mile wide and an inch deep, but I am constantly surprised at how involved this game is. It is truly a sandbox game like no other.

This is a really tough review. I love ASE, and I will likely continue playing ASA because they have made a pretty tremendous game. However, the state of this game is pretty atrocious. In addition to the poor optimizations, I feel like they were pretty deceptive when talking about how they were re-creating the game and fixing a lot of the original issues. I have not seen this to be true; bugs and issues that have existed from the very beginning of ASE that the community has known and been complaining about for years are still not fixed. This is on top of a whole new set of bugs and issues.

There are some QOL improvements, but its hard to feel good about that when the game is crashing every 10 minutes or so (on a pretty decent build). On single player, due to how it periodically saves, this means you can have tons of progress just wiped out unless you're saving every few minutes.

There are definitely positives. The graphics update is gorgeous: the weather and skybox, foliage, and of course water are all absolutely beautiful (if your GPU can handle it). The building system is better, but certainly not perfect, and the addition of wild baby dinos is a nice one.

Overall, I feel like this was a missed opportunity to regain some of the community's good will. My impressions prior to launch was that they were seriously overhauling the game and taking the time to not only give us a huge graphic update, but also fix some serious issues and bugs that have long plagued ASE, but that's definitely not the case. Once more, Studio Wildcard engages in deceptive marketing and community engagement, and pushes out a clearly unfinished product. (I know, this is early access, but if they haven't fixed these bugs in 8 years, do we really believe they're going to fix them in the next couple months?)

Edit: Three months later and I can't say the game is much of a better state. They've been pushing fixes and in some cases, bugs they claim are fixed are not. Their focus has been on the stability of the official network. Meanwhile, single player console players can't even reliably save their games. Couple that with the fact that we are going to have to wait another month (assuming they don't delay...) before we get a second map and it has been a pretty disappointing remaster; ~10% of the original game released in a barely playable state with a roadmap that takes us two years into the future before we even see some of the maps that we already have in the original (assuming they don't delay...)

Super fun, and really unique. This DLC captures a lot of what made the original game fun and adds on to it with cool recipes, an awesome setting, some new mechanics, and several quality of life improvements. The main campaign mode is a lot of fun and is the best of the DLC in my mind. It gives you set objectives but also a fair amount of freedom in how to accomplish them.

The hunting mechanic is okay, I could take it or leave it. Adds some to the setting, but I found after the first couple times, I didn't really want to do it anymore and just bought my hunted ingredients manually instead of shooting animals for them.

The planting mechanic is better, but also feels like there isn't a whole lot of reward to it when I can just purchase all of the vegetables manually at any point. It would be nice if they made some of the grown veggies (like the mushrooms) unavailable via shopping to better encourage growing.

Overall, great DLC with a lot of great aspects. I would recommend this one for sure.

Played for 10 hours on launch and it was crazy bugged. Tons of minor, visual and animation bugs, plenty of AI and combat bugs, and a few game-crashing issues. All together, they made it unplayable for me. Lost all immersion and found myself getting more and more frustrated. Ultimately, I think it's a good game, but for a $60 AAA launch, the current state is ridiculous.

One month later after the 1.1 patch I decide to give it another shot, hoping they have fixed a lot of what drove me away initially. Took all of 30 seconds to CTD. Making any changes to graphic settings, and even just Alt+tabbing out of the game caused it to crash out. Happened 4 times in quick succession doing different things. So did they fix anything? I don't even know. Now, a full month after launch, I can't even play it.

I can't even imagine what PS4 and XBox users are going through.

Super fun! Lots of new mechanics, features, and ingredients that come together to provide a great addition to the base game. The development team has been conscious of player feedback and is rapidly putting out patches to fix existing bugs and improve the overall experience. With so many studios becoming more and more indifferent to their player-bases, it is super refreshing to see a company that truly cares about their players. For $10 this is an easy recommend.

Super fun, but honestly, once you play it with Long War 2, you can never go back.

So much fun, and the developers are very active in improving the game, which is great. Highly recommend!

At its absolute best, this plays like a worse version of Fallout 4. Wastelanders is a great step in the right direction, but far too little, far too late. The game is still super buggy, so much is locked behind paywalls (but not nearly enough to justify what is essentially an MMO subscription), and the only way I can imagine enjoying this is with a large group of friends, and even then there's just not much depth. Too often I would discover a cool new location, only to find out that the entire area had been cleared out moments ago. Fallout and ES are about exploration, discovery, and crafting your own journey through a complex world, and they missed the mark on all of those things here.

This game is Bethesda at its greediest. Quality didn't just take a back-seat to profit-making, it got left on the side of the road.

A survival, open world, builder at its absolute best!