Recent reviews by Zamasu.EXE

Got beaten up by the grandma from Coco Would recommend.

Ice Station Z has to objectively be one of the most disappointing games I have ever had the displeasure of playing. There are so many things wrong with this game that it is so hard to find a good place to begin. This is probably going to be a fairly lengthy review, so I will categorize each section, so that you can read through what is usually something that is important to you, and yes, there will be a TL;DR at the bottom.

Controls:

For starters the controls are horrendous, on both kbm and controller. The menu controls are not consistent in the slightest when playing on kbm. In the main menu before going into the main game it uses WASD to select an option, and e to confirm the selection. When in game, trying to navigate the pause menu you need to use the arrow keys to select an option and then e to confirm the selection. Navigating the in game menus to get to things such as inventory, your map, equipment, and so on is also a chore. It is just your usual push a button, it brings up an option wheel, and you select one style things (think how you change radio stations in GTAV). The issue with this is that on controller, you would think it would use the right stick to navigate the menu like every other game out there, or on kbm it would use your mouse or scroll wheel, but no it does not. On controller it uses the left stick and on kbm it uses WASD, so for your first ten or so minutes you are trying to adjust to the controls. Things like swapping items in your task bar on controller uses the DPad, which is definitely an alright choice, but on mouse if you use scroll wheel it is reversed from industry standard (scrolling down in this game moves the highlighter to the left instead of the usual right). Some other small, nitpicky things I have noticed about this games controls, is that for some reason "Q" moves your character to the right, while "E" does not move you at all and is used for your interaction button (probably one of the three normal things with the controls). All of this wouldn't be so bad if you could remap your controls, but that is not an option ANYWHERE.

Looks:

Probably the only thing positive I will have to say about this game is that it looks pretty alright. This is definitely something that is fairly subjective, but this game checks most of the boxes that a majority of people share. I think the best part of the looks is the lighting. It is definitely not the best lighting I have seen, but it was definitely unexpected with how decent it was. I guess all of the work went into how nice the game looks though, and it clearly shows with how the rest of the game is. This may not belong in this category, but the worst part is that you CANNOT change any graphics settings. I have been told that different graphics settings are in the game, but I am not sure how true that is. So if you don't have something better than a potato, you are SOL, unless you mod the game.

Game-play:

I would like to go over the good things that this game has to offer in game-play first before getting into the bad. Firstly, the idea is fairly solid. Run around and look for resources to stay alive, all while trying to fight zombies. The game has some fun little mini-games you can do to help break up the monotony, such as when you go to sleep in a bed you have to time your button presses like the skill checks in Dead by Daylight to stay asleep, or how if you walk up to a piano you play a mini rhythm game. These mini-games (like everything else in this game), get very old, very fast. The map itself feels barren, and is only broken up by a small handful of locations. You will eventually get to a point where you are going back to the same locations over and over, hoping that what you need has spawned there. To help aid this, Wobbly Tooth has added some hidden collectibles (snowmen and small figures based off of the model of the Ice Staion Z Guy from the 3DS version of this game). After collecting these though, it is back to the same thing over and over. Usually something like this is resolved by just playing the game in multiplayer mode, but the problem is this game is incredibly dead (on Steam at least). Another problem is if you don't have a vehicle, it is the most boring thing ever to go from location to location on foot, because as previously stated, the map is for the most part barren.

The gun play in this game is okay at most, but that is when you get to actually experience it. There was a solid ten minute period where I did not come across a single zombie, and the amount of people that play this game online is almost zero, so no luck there either. In fact, when I looked on the multiplayer server list there were none up and I had to host my own, and the only reason anyone had joined it was because I told some people in a server that I had hosted one.

There are probably a million other things I can think of that are bad with this game, like the menu controls and inventory management being the clunkiest I have ever used, or how with the communication system that is in place in this game is absolutely atrocious (the text chat brings up an on screen keyboard, and although you can use your keyboard to type on it, you need to hit send on the on screen keyboard instead of enter to send, and all of the characters are lowercase, and you are still unable to use your mouse cursor to maneuver around it), but I would be spending my entire night trying to type it out.

In conclusion, don't let the good reviews fool you in the slightest. This game reeks bad. One review I saw said this game still has developer support, but I would say that is extremely up in the air, because from what I have seen, this game actually has less content than the original 3DS version, and I highly doubt the developer would even put out a content update.

TL;DR

This game is a sad, terribly put together game the developer made thinking they could get quick cash because some people liked the 3DS version. It is clunky, monotonous, repetitive, and you can get a better experience elsewhere for free. If for some reason you still want this game, wait for it to go on sale for 99 cents, that way you waste a little bit less money.

P.S. I could care less to fully proofread this review, so please forgive any grammatical and/or typos. I just threw this together lol

You can kill people with funny things. Kinda lame that you gotta pay for episodes, but it's alright if you pick it up on sale.