Recent reviews by Pain peko

its pretty fun

Easy 100% achievement. Fun game too.

Gone fishing

They keep nerfing everything I once loved... Season One used to be fun because anything goes, now the game TTK is too long, as everyone complains about wanting to have a "fighting chance." Don't even look into the fan-base on discord or reddit... there's literally nothing but white-knighting and ♥♥♥♥ riding Embark and complaining about balance issues which basically boils down to:
"Embark is the best game dev company in the entire world, also nerf light class because they exist and they can kill me."
It's basically an echo chamber of just that.

Co-op is ight, it only progresses player one's profile. Combat could be better, but it is kind of stiff and flat. Melee is weird to play, and my friend who play ranged looks a lot more fun but it's basically two button combat (shoot and dodge). Progression is locked behind death, and takes quite a lot of playing to unlock everything. There also isn't a lot of content, as my first play-through we manage to get to the second to last boss fight, and that's like without any perks or special unlocks.

Great game so far, the only issue is that the game would drop to 5-10 fps for a few minutes and it gets pretty annoying. Otherwise, if you played the older S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, you would soon see a lot of familiar locations. Gun variety is okay, but only when you start getting deeper into the game. Otherwise, in the beginning you will only see the same 4-5 guns all the time. The map is massive, and there's a lot of POI and stashes hidden everywhere. Some stashes are bad, some have really great loot. The world loose loot spawns and chest are also predetermined, and only a few locations have RNG related loot. I hope they address the optimization issue soon.

Big brain time

Pretty fun co-op game. Once you develop a sure-fire strategy, the game is quite easy. Initially, it was difficult because we didn't know how to avoid certain attacks. But eventually we were able to do runs without taking damage, and beating runs with trash RNG drops. Endgame is a little boring, you unlock more items but honestly, it doesn't change much. Overall, it's a solid co-op experience and worth playing with a friend.

Progression is way too slow imo. Resource gathering is one thing, but having workstations locked behind merchants, and more "side" quest, and more gathering. You might as well start hording everything until it is needed. Loot refreshes when you exit to main menu and come back. So if an area is abundant in a specific resource you just log in and out to farm it.

Another thing is that leveling and skill tree wise, nothing changes too drastically. An example would be the healer path where the skill nodes are basically just a healing aura that heals about 5-8hp per second and burst heal & hp buff to allies WHEN YOU DIE...
Combat wise, you basically fight the same way since lv 1—where you just spam attacks and occasionally throw out a spell or two. The standard enemies are annoying and just boring to fight. Early game bosses, also boring.

My progress 10 hours in... a wooden house.

Great weapon and gear progression and variety, but gated behind some very tedious grind and crafts. The attachments for guns are also pretty scarce and basically also somewhat gated behind a merchant. In general the progression is pretty slow and it gets worst, and eventually you'll be fighting enemies that are obnoxiously high in health. In my experience, one of the boss fights took about 10 minutes of moving around in circles, holding down my mouse 1 button and using every consumable I had in my inventory to finally kill him. They also hit like TRUCKS, they will basically one shot your team if you don't have enough buffs at the start of the fight. Otherwise, its a pretty solid game.