Recent reviews by MTheMan

Downsides:
-The controls are somewhat clunky.
-Theres no turn acceleration.
-Theres an iffy lock-on which you are forced to do in order to parry things.

Upsides:
-Despite the issues, the gameplay is fairly enjoyable.
-It's not one of those overly-punishing games, which works great considering the lock-on is a bigger threat than the enemies you use it on.
-The story is fairly unique and so is the overall esthetic.

All and all, if you don’t mind some janky controls it’s a pretty alright game.

Pretty alright game.
It’s a sort of a mix of X-Com and a bit of Darkest Dungeon, without the gameplay of either. And also without most of the flaws of either.
At times it’s more of a stealth game than a shooting game.
It has a tutorial that actually properly explains everything.
It’s quite bug-free.

You can edit difficulty parameters when starting your campaign, for example, instead of just having a preset like Easy/Normal/Hard/etc., you can choose to edit things like enemy damage and similar. Quite nice if you want to do some high difficulty without suffering the artificial BS of damage sponges like in most games.

Theres a story. It’s somewhat mid, but it is more original than most other alien games that stick too close to the movies.

The only complaint I can muster is about the vent enemies. Other than that. It’s a pretty alright game.
Just keep in mind: Its not a turn-based strategy game. It’s a pseudo-real-time, birds eye view game where you control a squad as a single unit.

(ARK:Survival Evolved - 99% of the bugs and grind) + Pokemon + Factorio + Elden Ring = Palworld

Its alright if your looking for a low-attention game to play while you watch something on the other monitor.

Past that it's a very bland, souless and unambitious game. This is what you would get if you told an AI to make you a more compact version of No Mans Sky.
That said, there's nothing mechanically wrong with it. And it's still alright if you just want a check list to follow while having your attention elsewhere. Or if you're looking for a game to play with your normie friend.

If you like the concept of exploring the world on a buildable mobile base, then you’re probably gonna like the game. If you don’t like survival games though, then this is gonna be an issue, as this game has some of the worst aspects of that genera.

>On the topic of the building, it’s quite good. Nothing revolutionary, but it does the job. You have platforms, you have platforms that look better. You can paint things, and something really good is that you can actually pick up crafting stations and similar structures back into your inventory. It’s a nice detail which really shouldn’t be absent from most other games. That said, the game is called Raft, so don’t expect to deviate too far from that with the building. It was not intended for too many crazy ideas.

>On the topic of the exploration, it’s quite nice, there is a decent amount of stuff to find, and there is a story that you follow to cool paces as well. There are plenty of good moments.

>There’s combat. And I’ll be honest, it’s like you’re playing a Mars Rover simulator. Both your movement and attack speed are painfully slow. There are also spears with your typical non-existent range. Enemies range from somewhat interesting to meh. With most enemies, your sort of encouraged to cheese them by jumping on a rock or out of their agro range. This is not a fault of the game for letting you utilize the environment though, the problem is more in the structure of the combat system.

>On the topic of the survival, this is where the game falls off. A lot. Your hunger and water deplete extremely fast. It’s only mildly annoying on the raft, but the moment you get off it becomes a problem really fast. It’s not exactly a level of difficulty either, as food floats to your raft in abundance, and farms are easy enough to get going. It’s just a massive chore. It’s one of the most overused complaints about survival games, and it’s a completely valid complaint in this game.
However, the biggest problem with this system comes from a completely different bad decision. You see, there is a cooking pot and a station for making drinks. The products from these stations not only give you a lot of food and water, but they also slow the rate at which you lose food and water for a while. The problem, is that the clay bowls and glass cups you use to pick up the food and drink from those stations get consumed when you eat/drink. And the main source of glass and clay is if you go digging underwater near islands, meaning that the later game system for improving your hunger/water is more tedious than helpful. This is especially annoying in the later story.
A game called “Subnautica”, for example did this exceptionally well. You start off that game collecting fish and water, but as the game progresses and the story kicks in, the starting systems become less relevant in favor of a greater goal. This is called progression. Going from a lone figure struggling to survive, to a well-equipped one following a greater narrative. Raft never goes past stuffing your face with beetroot.
For some reason, the game is too afraid to let you become too self-sustaining. And it expresses this in the dumbest means possible. As if your food being reliant on the clay bowls you eat along with the food wasn’t dumb enough, even the farmable crops have diminishing returns. Any farmable crop except potatoes and beetroot will not yield back as many seeds as you use. Meaning that you can farm 4 melons and get one melon seed as a result, meaning it is effectively pointless to farm anything except the lowest tier food, that keeps you fed anyway. Therefore making an entire cooking system redundant. And yes, the sand and clay that the beaches are made out of cannot be dug, you need to specifically go under water to look for small piles.
And that brings up another common complaint you find in survival games. That being durability, a complaint that is once again very valid here. Items in this game deplete FAST. Items that are made for convenience, like rebreathers and diving fins are greatly inconvenient to recraft once they deplete after being used for about 2 minutes. Meaning that you’re better off not making them. Imagine Minecraft if an iron pickaxe lasted 10 hits, that’s basically this.
With minimal spoilers, the game has bosses of sorts. And their utter garbage. The first boss-ish thing you can fight, you need the durability of two bows to kill it. The second one is sort of cool, but it’s undermined by the fact that you don’t expect it and your gear once again doesn’t have enough durability to do much in the fight. That fight also has a big exit right at the start, and as much as I like to think that it was because it made sense for it to be there, I am fairly certain it’s because the devs realized that you were more likely to die of hunger or gear depletion before you killed it. And then there’s the last boss, which is just plain bad. It has 3 stages and each one is worse than the last, especially with gear durability depletion mixed in. I won’t spoil much of the fight so I’ll just leave it at that.
Back on the topic of progression, the worst part is that the game already has a decent idea of how to do it. Things get atomized as you progress. Bulk cooking, one-man ship controls, NOT having to deal with the shark biting off pieces of your raft 20 hours in, materials you get from revisiting the smaller starting islands for a quick on-and-off dig. It has systems that make you want to play it, but then it ruins them with systems that force you to play it. Another example of systematic stupidity is with the mid-game engines. You get a means of steering your raft and moving it with boot-leg engines, the engines can be refueled manually with planks, or with Biofuel that gives more fuel and can be set up with a piping system. BUT, making biofuel requires the use of honey, and to make honey, you combine a honey comb and glass. And the glass bottle is then consumed in the process of poring the honey into the Biofuel crafting station. The game once again forces you to go digging up glass in order to attain a convenience that is more inconvenient to maintain than if you were just loading the engines manually with planks, which you passively get in your nets.
The game is littered with these horrible little designs, and the worst part is that the game is quite good on its own. And yet its insistence on making late game conveniences inconvenient, encourages the player to not bother with half of the content it offers. And it’s not like getting sand and clay is difficult either. You just go waist 10 minutes swimming around an island. The shark never goes far from the raft so there’s basically no threat. It’s just boring rehashing of the most tedious part of the starting content.
And on the topic of the tool durability, the only mildly decent tools you get are after you finish the main story, AKA at the point where your basically done with the game.

Overall, this game has heart in it. A lot of it was made with noticeable care. But its problem is ultimately that it is a game made up of two parts: survival, and exploring the world on a mobile base. The base part is mostly well done, but the survival part is ruined by the dumbest decisions, and it goes an extra step in impeding the exploration part. Normally I would overlook the survival part in favor of the other part, but this isn’t a complicated game. You do two things in it, and half of that formula is badly implemented and ruining the other half.
I sincerely hope they fix the survival part, and by “fix”, I mean change a few numbers and add one line of code for the bowls and glass. If that winds up happening, I’ll be changing this review to positive the moment I see it. Until then, I’m going to have to keep that thumb down. Though you might enjoy it if you just care about the base part.

If you like the concept of playing a Dwarf with some fairly generic shooter mechanics, in a fairly limited amount of mission types, then you’re probably going to enjoy this.

That said, do be warned, this is basically a generic shooter game with a few varying objectives. It’s a fairly good game, but it can be dull if you don’t find the idea of inhabiting a space Dwarf in a simplistic shooter fun.

While the game has a good bit of build variety, it lacks that late game power jump that can make these repeat-run games fun and tempting to stay in. Its procedural generation is also a pain in the long run, as when you inevitably get to that point where you want to finish a mission a bit faster, it’s going to be quite a pain considering random generation can make a mission last between 5 minutes and over an hour.

Difficulty is pretty good, no damage sponges, good stuff there. Only notable problem with current gameplay is how horrible the ledge-grabbing is.

Also, in case you’ve heard the zombie drones giving you the same NPC dialogue, you know the: “This game is great, all its DLCs are cosmetic!”, do be warned, this game does make the mistake of having a battle pass. Though in its defense, it’s a free one and nothing is limited to the pass itself, so props for making that dreadful system work.
Also, props to this game having the first properly good AI bot in video game history.

Anyway, this review is getting stretched, so to the point: It’s a good game, just be sure that you are interested in what its offering, because if basic-shooter-Dwarf isn’t your thing, you’re gonna get bored of this very fast.

If you just want to clash d***s with someone, regardless of means, then you’re probably going to like it.
However, if you’re entertaining the idea of actually playing what is advertised, then you are going to be sorely disappointed. The game is just one big cheese fest. Survivors run in circles around props, and the killer chases them in said circle like a clown.
The games systems are simply too undeveloped to properly function past simple cheese. Survivors can’t run forever, their only means of prolonging their existence is to cheese props, palates or windows, usually by running in circles while utilizing a combination of the three. Its like a parkour game where the only mechanics are “run” and “jump”.
Killers on the other hand are fundamentally clunky, being sluggish at almost everything they do in order to give survivors room to get away.

The game likes to entertain the idea of being a “Horror” game, though what “Horror” it has is quite easily lost in its half-arsed pseudo-arcade style of gameplay.
The survivors are in third person so they can cheese looking around corners and use a larger FoV, this has the counter effect of throwing off a more slow, methodical and dread-filled angle of gameplay that would actually make it scary.
The survivors also have “Skill Checks” a very lazy way to up difficulty, with the bonus effect of once again throwing you out of any immersion that is necessary to maintain the illusion of horror.
And finally, you have the killer from the survivors point of view: A clown running around in circles, ripe to be exploited by the very intended system of exploits.

The killer isn’t better off either. With the survivors chessing 24/7, the killer usually has to “tunnel”, a term one can see splattered on many steam profiles, written by salty people. Theres is also a meta of sorts, with a lot of killers falling off against survivors that know what they’re doing, and ironically, the literal Clown Killer is at the bottom of it. There is also a pay-to-win angle, with the majority of upgrades being locked behind characters that you have to purchase. Now, credit where credit is due, the dozens of crossover killers in this game are somewhat done justice. Most of them have skillsets that befit them. Though at their base, they still suffer from the same clunky blueprint that all the killers follow. The killer role was very obviously built with games like Friday the 13th in mind. As such, the game was built around killers that are more slow and brutish, which doesn’t work the best when your adding in killers that are meant to be fast and agile. Yes, there is one agility-style killer that has a limited run, but that’s about as far as it goes. All the killers are bound to the same Friday the 13th mechanics, slowly walking like Jason while the survivors run. Of course, they cant teleport like Jason, so they have this weird thing where the killers walk faster than survivors run.

From a balancing standpoint, the game ain’t the best either. The killer is generally at a disadvantage, since the moment they run into a group of survivors in voice call, they’re quite screwed. Meanwhile, if survivors get one or two people who aren’t proficient in cheeasing every minute aspect of the game, then the survivors are often the ones that are screwed.

Now, on the topic of the more misc. stuff:
>I have to ask, in a game about stalking somebody and gruesomely murdering them, whyyyy is the word “F**k” forbidden in chat? In fact, even words like “Butt” and “Blood” don’t fly? This is a game about killing people, where you can’t say “kill” in chat. What’s the point of this? This is more futile than when LEGO worlds tried to stop people from building d**ks. People in DbD prefer to go directly to Steam Profiles to s**t talk anyway. And even then, they can certainly find ways around the chat filter if they actually want to insult someone. Why is there such an over-the-top filter, in a game ABOUT MORDERING PEOPLE!? The snowiest snow flake would probably tell you this is dumb.
>The game has a battle pass, unfortunately. The pass itself is sort of fair. On one hand, if you buy it once, you get enough premium currency to buy the next one, and so on. But on the flip side, you need to finish the battle pass in order to get enough junk to actually buy the next one. So you have a sunk cost fallacy mixed with an incentive to give the game extra money at least once. It sort of depends on how you look at it. If you properly like the game, and enjoy playing it, then it’s great. If you don’t like the game all that much, or if you would rather have it be one of those games you pick back up every few months, than it can get very annoying very fast when you have to stay in more than you’d like. Also, the battel pass in this game is one of those ones where things become permanently unavailable after it’s over. So.. yeah. The Sunk Cost fallacy is definitely in effect.
>Regarding the Brightness. In the unlikely event that a developer sees this: You are aware that not everybody has the same monitor, right? The Brightness slider isn’t primarily there to exploit, it exists because some people can’t see s**t on their monitor. And for anybody who wants to exploit brightness, they don’t even need a brightness slider, they can just press two buttons on their monitor. I, for example, have an absurdly bright monitor, so what I have to do is to lower the brightness on it, and up brightness in game in order to even it out and avoid hurting my eyes. In order to actually play the game normally, I have to physically increase my monitor brightness, which A: Hurts my eyes. And B: Gives me such an absurd vision that I can spot someone moving half way across a dark map. In translation: Your reason for not having a Brightness slider not only doesn’t work, but it actually causes the opposite effect in some cases.


Anyway, I’m getting off topic. So once again, if you just want a PvP game, you might enjoy it, but even then, that’s a maybe since the PvP is actually really indirect. The chat sometimes has more PvP than the actual game. And on the topic of a more immersive, horror-like game, if you’re entertaining the idea that this is anything more than a cheese fest with member barriers from some other franchises, then you’re going to be disappointed.

How to be a bad game company, and get to this point in 6 easy steps:

Step 1: Realize you sold the majority of your game copies, and that income isn’t booming anymore.
Step 2: Delete the existing game and rebrand it into a Free to Play version, so you can implement a battle pass in an attempt to extort more money out of your player base who already bought your game for ~$60.
Step 3: Get ahead of yourself and make the mistake of promising PvE content in your soulless cash-grab rebrand.
Step 4: Get so lazy that you don’t hold up your end, and assume that nobody is going to care.
Step 5: Realize that the player numbers are mysteriously dropping, and move to Steam in hopes of pulling in more money.
Step 6: Be so greedy that you fail to realize that Steam actually cares about customers, and allows reviews of products.

I hold a small deal of pride to making reviews, and I strive to do them properly and fairly.
That said, the people behind this games recent updates are treating it as little more than propaganda. And so, I will do the same.

Respectfully, grow up, you stu*** man children. If you want to diversify, make something that stands on its own two legs. Stop attacking established characters and franchises. You’re not saints, you’re not do-gooders, you are little more than parasites leeching on the works of better men and women.
Forcefully changing races of established characters for no other reason than to change them is not only an insult to the characters and vision of the people who made them, but an insult to the races you are trying to represent.

Stop taking cr***y rights deals, and stop putting propaganda into entertainment.

Firstly, yes, they apparently said that they wouldn’t be doing paid gameplay content and then they went back and edited their own posts, shortly before releasing this bit of paid gameplay content.
That said, that is not the reason why I’m not recommending this.

The base game, is quite good in my opinion, and I respect it enough to judge this DLC fairly.
So, having judged it fairly, it’s not worth recommending. And by that, I mean it’s literally not worth the price.
Yes, it takes a lot of work to make something like this. BUT, the amount of devoted work does not dictate the price. The quality of the product does. And from a consumers point of view, this is a $15 DLC, that has less than 2 hours of playtime, and provides little new gameplay. In fact, strip away the graphics and it’s basically a normal campaign, of which there are 4 in the base game already.
Now it’s not bad as content. I in fact quite enjoyed this DLC. It’s just objectively not worth the price.

There’s also the matter of the class upgrades you get here, and the fact that every one of them is incredibly good while the base upgrades of that type are literally worth ignoring in most cases. One would call this a ploy to make the DLC sell, I would give these devs the benefit of the doubt and say they didn’t want to make everything in the DLC useless, so they did it for the sake of not making buyers disappointed. As long as they don’t eventually nerf these upgrades to the ground, a common tactic of predatory game studios seeking to make the next OP DLC sell by nerfing the previous OP one, I’ll continue to believe this.

Overall, I don’t mind this kind of stuff too much. I quite like this game, and I would prefer that it keeps getting content. As long as they still do normal free title updates, Ill count the occasional big paid DLCs as tolerable, assuming that they are somewhat fairly priced. Having experienced Jurassic World: Evolution, a neesh, 100 dollar park builder, I’ve grown quite tolerant for this kind of stuff. I won’t be recommending anything past 10 bucks though, not unless its half the size of the base game.

However, if you have money to spare, and you like this game, then get this DLC, it’s a good one. IF 15$ is pocket change to you that is.