Recent reviews by Cypes

As anything that comes out of Hazel's studio, its worth buying and playing. The gold standard of what a coop story game should be.

That said, compared to the titanium standard that It Takes Two set (their previous game), this game does fall short on several fronts. The movement and gameplay itself feels more rough, the visuals feel more rushed, especially the talking animations, but also the gameplay visuals. For a heavily guided gameplay game, alot of things aren't THAT intuitive. Controls could be polished as well. What is "ledge-grabbable" and what isn't, what is wall-runnable and what isnt, and camera angle-controlswapping confusion (notably steering the roll-dragon-move). These, ofcourse, are minor issues compared to the overall experience with the game, and are purely negatives when comparing to what was shown possible with ITT. But using that as a baseline, this game DOES feel rushed. It doesn't feel like the game was given nearly as much time to put love into details.

But again, comparing to the average coop focused games out there, this still receives a solid A. It's only comparing to previous expectations within the studio that it makes me feel it could have been much better.
If you haven't played It Takes Two, definitely start there. If you loved ITT, you will like this game too. Its definitely worth. A way out is an honorable mention, which I feel isn't a direct fair comparison due to the thematic and subgenre differences, let alone age difference, but I do think split fiction comes out on top there.

TL;DR
Definitely recommend, is solid gold among the genre. Just that it's not as good as the previous title (in short, feels unpolished).

You should not need third party resources to get an answer to basic questions like which stat works on what mechanic and how things interact. There's unfortunately a big lack of information presentation. It does not help that every update they change how things interact without changing the wording for them.
You truly need 10000 hours dedicated to this game before you can call yourself experienced. And the negative point of that is that it's not time spent playing the game. Its researching.

To enjoy this game, you must be one of three types of players:
1. Someone who does not care about making their character as good as it can be, and just enjoy the process of discovery, exploration and adventure, not caring about the underlying mechanisms you're interacting with; just throwing things together and dealing with whatever seems to work *enough*. This is very sufficient for the campaign and a very normal player approach, dont get me wrong.
2. Someone who is willing to blindly follow a guide made from someone who is type 3, willing to accept that they do not have the capacity or time to become a type 3 player. You must accept that you will lack flexibility in making your character and will always be following in the footsteps of others, simply enjoying the process of progression, losing out on the vast scope of options you are presented with, but knowing you at least are somewhat optimal and can dedicate your time efficiently *enough*.
3. Someone who loves reading and researching things, learning things by looking at datamined information and obscure sheets of stats, having the time and dedication of testing out a multitude of things to verify what things are correctly stated in the game, and which things work differently. It will require many thousands of hours to accumilate the experience to know how things work to know what to expect. This knowledge is not something you simply learn by playing a lot. It is not only experience, it is dedicated effort to learning and understanding. You might as well get a degree with that effort, or get rich trading stocks. Once you have that knowledge, you will need to keep it up as things are ever changing, and you will not be able to read the patchnotes to update your knowledge, for like the information ingame, these patch notes are riddled with mistakes and omissions.
As a reward for this effort, you will be able to make a significantly faster progress of power and peak of power. Know that for PoE2, this difference is not rewarded ingame in being able to clear game content you couldn't otherwise, but you will be able to clear it earlier than most, and refine your character's power to a higher level, earning more currency and using it much more efficiently than even the best guide follower.

As someone who has the time and dedication to be a type 3, but not the patience to deal with the fact that you can't get there from experience and time alone, but need to do actual research and readily discard knowledge that you don't even know is to be discarded, this results in an experience that does not bring joy. I want to dedicate time to this game, but my time is not rewarded. Without the proper method of study, it is punished and it pushes you down to a type 2 player. You can enjoy the game just fine on type 2, but it leaves a void of wanting more - one which you are used to filling with time and dedication in other games.

The game feels like you took the progressionsystem of warframe and added destiny story/lore/gameplay. Except its done by throwing together a bunch of free unity assets, putting most of the development into reallife currency cosmetics and pay to win options. The narrative feels AI written, so does the voice acting sometimes, though not an insult to the paid actors, simply what they had to go with.

The gameplay is rough. Maybe its a server issue, I wouldnt know, but it takes 500ms for a shot to register (on a host session, with my own internet being 20ms ping). Abilities have really wonky hitboxes. Movement, especially with the grappling hook, feels extremely rubber-bandy. Like, jumping on repeat (on place) varies within 500ms of "recovery time" before you can jump again. Swapping weapons feels like I have to send the input 3 times, same for menu navigation.
It just doesn't do it for me. It feels like I actively have to spend half my focus on making sure the game does what I told it to do, rather than play the game.

Multiplayer is also really confusing. As a client, you get not even half of the information feed that the host does for missions in open areas.

In general, it feels like 5% of development went towards gameplay, 5% went towards copying and un-copyright-ing warframe/destiny, and 90% went towards paid user leeching.

I love how you can visually see your factory progress by looking at the fps counter.
A great gradual degradation, training you for playing on console.

A personal milestone of mine, is reducing my fps to 5% of what an empty world loads with.

On a more serious note, this game is surprisingly well optimized despite being in early access (experimental branch would like to counter), more so than many fully released games.


10/10, Spaghetti cooking simulator is a great game, can recommend

mmmm. popcorn

car go vroom vroom haha

You live. Your work hard. You try to survive. You die.
You live again. You work harder. You try survive. You survive a bit more. You die.
You live again. You do a bit more hard work. You survive a bit more. You die.
You live again. Hard work has become easier. New harder work. You try to survive. You die.
You live again. You do alot of hard work. You try to survive. You find something new. You die.
You live again. You do even more hard work. You survive a little bit. You find that thing again. You die halfway through exploring it.
...
You live again. You do all the hard work. You survive. You see it all. You find something harder. You die.
...
You live again.

...

You live again. You do all the by now easy work. You survive. You beat em all. You find it easy. You don't die.

You forget. Your genome has adapted.

You live again.
You live again many times. You forget many times.

You Evolve.

I'm not gonna rewrite all other reviews. Game's great.
I'd like to adress the practically only negative point to this game; End game / Replayabilty.
From what i see, 90% of bad reviews talk about fun but short. Problem being, you feel like you unlock most of the game, and exhaust most of the "exploring the gamemechanics" within just a few hours.
I can see how this is the case. It's not as replayable as CS:GO or LoL.
At 30 hours, i have access to most of the worthwhile-getting gamechanging upgrades/unlocks.
HOWEVER. The game has much more endgame content than it initially shows. Alot of it is probably only for completionists.
It's there to give you an excuse to keep grinding, and the way it's done, the way the unlocks/upgrades are balanced, it fully allows you to do it the exact way you want to. play the modes you like. play with the amount of people you like. use the character etc. you want. Sure you can always optimize. But it's not like there's a meta you have to follow.
And its all doable in the difficulty you so choose. This game can be a darksouls difficulty if you want it to. It can also be so easy you probably dont have to fire a bullet, and let bosco do everything (the robot you get in solo) - tho you'd probably need to not afk.
If you still like the gameplay after the first "assignment" (the actual tutorial i would considder it), you can, if you want, easily find a way to hit the quota of hitting the "worth the money"-hours played.

It's not a multi-thousand-hour game. But you can easily find a reason to play up to and beyond the 200 hour mark. Wether that's trying out every sub-element and learning everything about the caves, unlocking everything for every character, or making your dwarf look as handsome or silly as you want.

Edit as I've reached 1000 hours:
haha dwarf go brr

This game became worse with the years.
New content = old content is more useless in terms of balance
Old theme: survive and learn to thrive among extinct creatures
New theme: not that.

The moment they started driving the game towards fantasy creatures and super futuristic things, was the day they lost roots with the initial selling theme.
You see people riding raptors in trailers.
Raptors are in fact, probably the worst "mount" you could use in this game balance wise.

PvP is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of "if you dont play 16 hrs a day, then expect your base wiped by tomorrow"
PvE is still fun, but lacks meaning due to devs only focusing on PvP.
2k hours were found back in the old versions
current state, prolly max 100 hrs of enjoyment, from learning how to play and manage to climb back to the top of the foodchain.