Recent reviews by Neren

Gut

The game is unfortunately disappointing.
I love the concept of games like the Long Drive and was hoping this would be a good fresh start for the dev, but as far as I could see, it's pretty much the same game with better but more generic visuals and the same lack of thoughtfulness in regards to gameplay.

First, credit where credit is due: effort has clearly been made to make the experience more polished and the game overall does feel much less janky than the Long Drive, and the addition of actual enemies, though simple ones, is nice! The cars seem to control much better as well and the UI/UX as a whole feels much more natural.

However, the dev seems to still ignore some major core issues.
Firstly, the driving itself: I get it, the whole point of the game is to drive, but surely there must be some way to spice up this part of the gameplay loop. As it stands, 75% of the game is just holding down the W button and watch the same copy pasted assets fly by for 15 minutes before you finally get to a POI.

Second, there's some really odd design decisions I can't get my head around. For instance, when you die, you get the choice of either loading a earlier save or to respawn back at the start of the game. Since the whole point of these kinds of games is to see how far you can get, I naturally respawned back at the base, expecting either my progress to be wiped or to have some way to get back to the point where I had died via some alterative means... but instead there was just... nothing. For all intents and purposes, it was a game over, but not an explicit one. I can't explain why as a designer you'd even offer that choice to the player.

Another example of this, is in the beginning of the game. To get the car going, you need to put in the engine, coolant reservoir and fill the car up with fluids. Naturally, I've dumped every jerrycan looking container into the fuel reservoir, before realizing that the brown colored jerrycan contained oil instead of fuel and that I therefore had contaminated the fuel with a lot of oil. This is a strange design because the dev did make the oil and fuel containers very distinct in the Long Drive, yet here, it looks almost like it was intentional to make the two containers similar. So, I thought that it was game over, that I would need to restart the game, but I tried driving the car anyways, just to see what happens, and much to my surprise, the car seemed to be running just as fine as in my second run where I hadn't contaminated the fuel, with just an low oil warning. Again, I can't understand why the designer would make things work this way other than just "I didn't think about that".

Finally, I hope that this is to be attributed to the early access nature of the title, but the sounds of the game seem to have barely been considered. The fact that you need to turn the radio of the car manually to have some music is nice and immersive, but not turning the radio on shouldn't leave you feeling like something's missing and the sound of the engine and the weapons are surprisingly underwhelming considering these are the sounds you'll be hearing all the time.

I am left disappointed and confused by this game. On some points this is clearly an improvement upon it's predecessor but on others I feel compelled to think that this lack of gameplay related considerations is almost maliciously intentional considering the now years of feedback that the dev has had from the Long Drive.
Frankly, I'm not at all opposed to the idea of revisiting this game at some later point, but for now, it would need quite a lot of "quality of game design" updates so to speak before I could recommend it.

The game is fun, even despite it's cringy and unskippable cutscenes, but someone at microsoft through it would be a good idea to put unskippable ads for DLC's into the game.

Not sure why people dislike this DLC so much.

The distribution of resources definitely does change your list of priorities but that's not really a bad thing.
I can't speak about the PVP aspects of the DLC, but PVE with friends has been pretty fun.

The map is pretty and the storm and leyshrine mechanics are fun imo. That's a DLC I'd recommend.

This ♥♥♥♥ is worse than a mobile game. Whoever is responsible for monetization in this game deserves having their nails ripped off with a rusty spoon.

Very fun game, best I'd describe it is "Minecraft in 2D": it's a builder's wet dream with nice, tight mechanics, some rpg elements and extensive modding support.
Can only recommend.

Good god the voice acting.

I've found myself really enjoying this game and I didn't expect it.
Turns out, fps and tower defence is an excellent combo.

Perfect game to wait for the ascension of Tarn Adams into godlihood.

Probably the most immersive zombie survival sim out there. Really enjoyable and oddly relaxing too.