Recent reviews by 8BitTrash

First, the STEAM SPECS on the STORE PAGE are only up to date for the legacy version. Evrima and subsequent Hordetests require quite a bit better specs than what's on the STORE PAGE.

I also think its false advertising that the Store page shows pictures of a T-Rex, Allosaur, Shantungosaur, when none of these dinosaurs are available in the version of the game the Developers are currently working on.
Instead, they're in Legacy, which is a branch of the game that has been abandoned as a "first run" kind of thing and will not be receiving any of the hyped updates like water dinos, flying dinos, mutations, humans, new night vision, (This is like the fourth "new" night vision by the way...) etc.

I could play Legacy and Evrima just fine. But when they introduced the mutations update a few months ago, (Even though I wasn't playing hordetest branch) the game decided my computer sucks and gives me the directx12 error. since then I can no longer play it. I've verified game files, I've uninstalled and reinstalled, nothing works.

specs; Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7400 CPU @ 3.00GHz ; 32 GB DDR4 ; AMD Radeon RX 580X 4GB DDR5; Windows 10

I've been playing since 2017. I miss it.



As for the review...

I think the hackers are rampant and the server system itself sucks (Everything all lumped together, you can't select or filter based on rules or playerbase). There are multiple different kinds of hackers on official servers, from dinosaurs giving themselves extra speed to dinosaurs giving themselves the ability to see players no matter where they're hiding on the map, or giving themselves enough damage to one-hit-knock-out your player. It's hard to enjoy a game that takes time to grow, you can easily lose hours and hours of progress to some two-bit juvenile who's turned on Max Bite Force and kills you in one bite, no matter how big or full grown you are. There's usually one or two on any given server at any peak time.

I imagine a server system where you could filter based on gameplay style- PVP (How many FG dinos killed) vs Survival (longest time survived, with leaderboards etc).

The map itself has too many spots where you can get stuck or fall through. There is one set of buildings where a door just sits, open, and you can see under the map through the doorway like it's a portal to the Nether dimension. Twitch Clip of Portal Door [www.twitch.tv] <<

The dinos themselves have great gameplay, (aside from rubberbanding/teleporting server lag issues in hotspots) stamina is realistic for dinos, (We as humans are so used to having INCREDIBLE stamina, so anything else seems less, but it's accurate to animal stamina) I love what may be coming to night vision and the inclusion of humans as a food source, though no one will realistically play them except as ranged weapon-havers. Imagine sniping a raptor from 500ft. That could be cool.

I do not think the dinos are BALANCED though. A good system should have checks and balances to balance each dinosaur out- There should not be "one" good dinosaur, that is so overpowering it's boring to play (stego, deino, looking at you guys...). On Legacy I took down multiple rexes with raptor packs of four-six. You can do it against a stego too, but with the game being unoptimized, you're more likely to rubber band into its tail, or it will teleport from where you pounced and you end up dying anyway. I understand that they're adding more dinos to the roster and that will help balance it, but as of now, it's severely unbalanced. Most smaller dinosaurs will die in one or two hits by anything even a little big bigger than them.

I would not recommend the game to anyone right now. It's janky and broken and it's been in development hell for ten years, and apparently each new update has a chance to make it unplayable for you, as it is now for me.

There's no tutorial, there's nothing telling you how to play the game. It throws you into it and that's it, and that ends up flooding the discord and the subreddit with simple questions like HOW DO I EAT or WHAT DO THESE FOOTPRINTS AT THE TOP OF MY SCREEN MEAN or WHAT DOES THE BROKEN BONE SYMBOL MEAN ON HERRERASAURUS GAMEPLAY etc.

There's tons of graphical glitches, and a common word of mouth game strategy is to go to your settings page and hit APPLY a bunch of times because it likes to reset itself to default without warning or start bugging out. Additionally, bushes that seem perfectly fine to hide in despawn within render distance of other dinosaurs viewpoints, rendering your hiding spot very visible from a distance, it's not every bush but I've seen enough streamers playing this game that have pointed it out to their voice-call friends that they are, in fact, not hidden.

Overall, my review, until the game changes; No. Don't waste your money unless it's on sale.

As much as I want to recommend this game to others, I really can't for the full price they're asking, which, with all the DLC (Which is basically a couple animal packs and said environmentals for those animals), is eighty american dollars. Forty for just the base game.


And it's buggy as hell, to the point where it's damn near unplayable for more than an hour or so a day, unless you LIKE restarting your game every so often. The issue I run into is the menus. Placing things is super wacky and it's not intuitive- Z to rotate? I had to wait for the tutorial to tell me before I figured that out, I was sitting here pressing everything else.

But the biggest issue, to me, are the drop down menus that pop up to tell you, say, what a transformer is covering, or how much a donation box is taking in or has taken in. Sometimes the drop down menus- On animals and buildings, just one, just some, or all of them- will just refuse to work. There's no way to force them to show up unless you shut down and reboot the game, which is annoying because the load times are phenomenally long. And without them, the game is virtually unplayable- You can't see the welfare of an animal, or if something you just built is powered, etcetera.

The icing on the cake is the "joke" of allowing you to manage whether or not your game plays in windowed mode or fullscreen or borderless. I like to multitask, I like it in windowed. But it won't let you change your resolution- And so I spent the first six hours of playing this game with all my text cut off around the edges because I couldn't change the size of the window, which was just a centimeter larger than my display. After some finagling with the graphics in their notepad option- Which is something I should NOT have to do for a fully realized game that costs 40$ just for the base, which is not in early access and has been out for over a year- I managed to fix it, but it's still something you shouldn't have to do.

Get it on sale, then it's probably worth it. As of this review, it's 50%, which is nice.

I'd also like to see some option to mute the voices of Bernard and Nancy and read only, but it's not there either, but that's the least of my complaints for this buggy game.

It's pretty, but that's about all it has going for it- I have a decent computer that supposedly meets all the specs of this game, but my framerate drops to a stutter every time i have anything set to more than "high" and especially when they're doing the opening cutscene "tour" of a new zoo you're entering, so all that prettyness is kind of worthless when people can't really get to enjoy it without turning down the graphics.

If this game fixes their ♥♥♥♥ anytime soon with any game patches rather than just releasing new content, I'll update the review, until then, live fast, eat trash, and die last.

A good game, nice pace, the missions are easy but can be difficult at times, which is fine. A good timesink if you're looking for one. I know nothing about IRL hunting or calibers of weapons, and I still can play this game.

There seems to be a few persistent bugs however:

Sometimes when I open the game, it plays in slow-motion until I restart my computer or my steam. Not sure if this is me or the game, but it does get frustrating. As well, the path tracking for animals can get a bit buggy- You can hit an animal and it can stay bleeding at the same percentage for a long time.

Going with the path tracking being buggy- sometimes, if there are large herds of animals, new tracks will not display until old ones go away, including blood trails or footprints of a certain tracked animal. I wish the colors of your tracks would dim in brightness so you know they are old, or you could perhaps have a separate track color for the track of an animal you have already checked. Quite often when an animal loops back, they will cross paths or follow their previous track very closely, making it hard to differentiate what path you are following, especially if both tags say something like "Fresh", even though they are the same animal. I've had to utilize a spiral pattern to find the tracks that leave the area to successfully track an animal I cannot seem to find.

I also have encountered a bug where a new area will not display tracks until I down something. I encountered this by hitting a bow-shotting a moose that was two feet in front of me, but there were no walk tracks or blood marks, and when I downed a coyote and returned to the path, they were there.

Also, Roosevelt Elk are still bugged to hell- Sometimes they'll stand completely still and only run a few feet if you hit them. It can make picking off a herd super easy, and it doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen.


Overall, a good game, but it does need a little more polish for the base-game elements!