Recent reviews by FireWynd

Game was free when I got it, and i expect it to stay free. Right now they use a model where it is pay to win, although not as bad as some games. You can buy premium characters (or get them via an in-game grind). 95% of skins have to be bought from the store. There are only a few available for free via in-game events where you have to grind.

Pay to win also in the sense that you can spend IRL to buy Caliber (premium currency) and then use that to buy some end game items which minimizes the farming needed.

The game is PvE. There is no PvP aspect. I like this. So you can play at your pace.

Each "zone" (probably something like 40-50 zones) in the game can have up to 4 characters in it at a time. If a zone is full, it will create a new instanced zone and throw you in there where other players will be added if other zone instances are full and they traveled to your zone. This is also fine. 4 feels good.

You join the same quest as other characters by doing damage to any of the mobs they are fighting. Rewards drop individually, so they are not shared. Also nice. But if someone is on the same mission/quest as you and you kill all the mobs, they will still get the random drops from the mobs (you do too).

The main town, Albion, does have something like 50 players per instance. This idea of instances is largely hidden from the end user. So players just go somewhere and are put into an instance without knowing or any action on their part. You cannot travel to a particular instance like on Lost Ark.

When you party up (max party of 4), you all travel together. It will open a new instance if needed for your party size, or throw you into an existing instance if there is room for your party.

You can do private instances if being with other players is annoying. It sometimes is (they don't know the mechanics of something so mess it up, or you are trying to finish a particular quest with a certain weapon, and they keep killing everything. I use this feature semi-often. Super helpful.

I play with some family members and overall it is a lot of fun grouping together and doing quests and other content together. Farming for the ultimate versions of the characters isn't tooo horrible. Probably something like 15-60 hours depending, with the majority being something like 20-25 hours.

Fun game. Recommended for co-op, though very playable solo - though you are a bit more at the mercy of bad players for boss fights.

Update: Still playing the game at 200+ hours. The end-game content of Hard Collosus is real. Play with pubs is pretty hit or miss. There are many players who don't belong in some of these fights and die constantly. This hurts because you are pidly DPS from them, but even worse, you lose out on DPS because you need to help them up. If you let them time out while down, then it subtracts an attempt. There's a limited numer of attempts, so generally you can't ignore them. It is something that is quite annoying, and i feel like a majority of the time pubs are terrible and im the one carrying the team. Having said that, if you have friends you can play with, you can avoid or minimze this terrible part.

I bought the game a week or two ago (June-July 2022) and I've played about 20 hours of Rust so far. This includes setting up my own server and playing with another friend. Note: I did not do any substantial play on official servers yet, mostly because I expected it to be a miserable experience due to not knowing how to play the game very well and getting killed constantly.

I played on maxed graphic settings on a 3700X / 32 GB RAM / 3060 Ti / 2TB NVMe SSD. My PC handles the game no problem at 144 FPS on 1080p on my 144 Hz gaming monitor.

Summary thoughts:
It feels really old. I looked it up and the game originally came out in 2013. Yeah, you can tell. The way the assets load in, the graphics, and quirkiness of the game overall just feel like an old game. Nearly all of my complaints are probably tied to the game being built on an old engine and that isn't something that the developers can easily fix and thus probably won't be fixed. And that's fine. I don't expect a developer to switch gaming engines 10 years later. I knew I was buying a game that has been around a long time.

Things that really stood out (Cons):
1. It takes a REALLY long time for the game to load in. I'm not talking about getting to the main menu. That happens pretty quick. I'm talking about loading into the world after connecting to a server. It takes forever. I never actually timed it on the client, but I'd guess 3-4 minutes. It feels like forever though. I can't think of a game I've played recently that has such long load times. I can't even imagine how painful this would be on a slower computer. 5-10 minute load times for slower PCs are probably not uncommon. Painfully long. Ark: Survival Evolved loads in a lot faster for me. I'd guess about 1/2 to 1/3 the load in times for Ark. I tried it both while running a stand alone server and not - and they were about the same time for me.

2. Server start times on my PC were around 5 minutes. Also really slow. Ark server boot times are also long, but Rust server boot times are longer by 1-2 minutes I'd guess.

3. The way assets load in is funky. Probably most people don't notice, but it stood out to me as weird and janky. Something that you would expect from a 2013 game, but not in 2022. Again this is the engine's fault.

4. Really strange collision boxes. There were times that I was trying to mine rocks or ore. It felt like I was right on top of it, would swing, and would miss. Probably happened to me about 10% of the time. Often even repositioning would not fix it. Often the only way to solve was to crouch. Just bad engine collisions which is problematic of an old engine.

5. A lot of stuff is not intuitive.

5a. Like trying to figure out how to water plants was way harder than it should have been. Water tank / water bucket usage was very unintuitive and had to look it up outside of the game after getting very frustrated.

5b. I also found the armor and gearing system to not be intuitive. It isn't clear which piece goes where on the body and which ones are mutually exclusive with other pieces. TBH I still don't understand it, and it is very trial by error. It drives me a bit crazy to be honest. The progression isn't clear, or obvious - neither are the pros / cons. I blame this largely on UI organization but also the design here feels bad from a progression perspective.

5c. You can't move or pickup walls after 30-60 sec of placing them. You can't easily destroy them either. You have to manually destroy them. This is probably understandable from a game design perspective. However, I wasn't able to destroy a stone wall in my base and it wasn't clear to me why that was. Other games give you a clear indication as to why a weapon you are using is doing no damage, or they show you the damage. In Rust, it wasn't clear to me what was going on and why my tool / weapon was ineffective or nearly ineffective at damaging the wall. I nearly broke two weapons, only to discover they did no damage after equipping my hammer to check. Again, trial by error stuff - but newer games often provide more in-game info to make this more clear.

Pros:
1. Lots of skins, some of which look really cool.
2. The build UI looks nice and feels good and is quick. But also it doesn't match up from a styling / theming perspective. I was fine with this though as I mainly only cared about ease of use / functionality.
3. Requires a lot of in game knowledge and personal skill to be good. A lot of room and variance in player skill levels and knowledge and it really shows in game which is great
4. House building is done well here. Lots of variance from build styles which affect strategic options during raids. It is well done and adds a lot of interesting gameplay which other games lack.

Overall:
- I'd give this a cautious recommendation if you don't mind quirks and oddities of playing on a nearly 10 year old game engine - and want high skill / high in-game knowledge gameplay. This enables a lot of really fun pvp opportunities. I would not recommend for PvE as it is fairly minimal gameplay and lower PvE depth compared to Ark (which has a lot of PvE by comparison). Pick this up for the PvP high skill gameplay, but something that is less twitchy than fortnite / League - and includes some persistence aspects and progressions tactics / raiding tactics around housing build strategies.

I've been a life long fan of the Total War series. I started playing when the original Rome Total War came out. The Warhammer series has, by far, been the best of all of the Total War series games to date.

One of the glaring weaknesses of previous total war games (excluding Warhammer I) has been unit variety. There just hasn't been a ton of unit variety in non-Warhammer games because they are all based on historical settings and lets face it - most kingdoms of the era had the same technology and fought in roughly the same manner. There was some variation that made things interesting - but overall generally rather bland.

Warhammer is amazing because the factions are sooo different from one another. Most races feel very different from one another when playing. The dramatic differences in unit composition, stats, strengths and weaknesses makes this game incredibly fun. Also Warhammer has magic thrown in which is also a total blast.

Warhammer II graphics are pretty incredible. They've made some improvements in WH2 vs WH1 that make WH2 a much better overall game. Though WH1 was pretty incredible until WH2 came out.

If you are only going to get one Total War game, this is the game to get (yes even over Three Kingdoms - which is mostly a historical game and so has the bland unit variety problems).

Some notes about how WH1 and WH2 work together. If you get WH2, you won't be able to play the WH1 races, as they come with that game. If you only buy WH1, then you only get the WH1 races.

WH2 introduces: Skaven, Tomb Kings (DLC worth buying as it gives you a new race), Dark Elves, High Elves, Lizardmen, Vampire Coast (DLC).

If you own both WH1 and WH2 (like I do), then you get everything (though you need to buy a few expansions). It's awesome that both games are additive like this. WH1 has its own map. WH2 has its own map. But if you own both WH1 & WH2 then you get a map called Mortal Empires which is a combination of the WH1 and WH2 map. Awesome!

So IMO it's absolutely worth getting both WH1 and WH2. Tomb Kings is the best DLC, and a must have IMO.

Pros:
- Has some funny aspects to it which make it fun. Cultural, sci fi references.
- Combat is fun, and I enjoy the mechanics
- Turn based combat brings a nice tactical aspect
- For pixel graphics, they aren't too bad
- Challenging

Cons
- Pixel graphics
- Some game mechanics around Chruul respawns can be annoying (can't destroy certain ones and they instantly respawn with max level ships)
- Ground combat is either too easy or way too hard

Classic RPG which holds it's charm well after all of these years. Still one of my all-time favorite. It's that good.

Pros
* Graphics still feel appropriate due to uprising of all of the pixel style games around these days
* Lot's of replayability due to:
** New Game+ mode
** 13 different endings
** Several dungeons with really good gear that only are accessible after beating the game a certain way
* Interesting variety amongst the characters you can have in your party, none of them feel like duplicates of another, and they generally each bring something unique, especially when paired with different characters
* The dual tech (spells only available when certain two characters are used together in a party) and triple tech provides a lot of variety and strategies for party composition
* Good variety of gear with various tradeoffs
* Amazing music. This can't be emphasized enough.
* Good variety of various areas and times
* PC game has all of the various additions of the other console editions, making it more or less the ultimate version
* Decent story. Not the best out there, but pretty good
* Fun gameplay
* Many, but not all trash mob fights can be avoided

Neutral
* IMO, best played on a controller - though there are a few occasional quirks with the controller that require the mouse

Cons
* No mini-map, or ability to access a map in most locations except for the overworld. Most of the time this doesn't matter because most maps are not that complex, but it would have been helpful a few times
* Limited to 3 save games
* Generally limited / controlled places for saving a game whereas most modern PC games allow you to save anywhere. There is a resume feature that gets around this, but its effectively a single slot resume. Maybe I'm weird. I like being able to save whenever and have a lot of slots for save games.
* When doing all of the various game endings, you have to reload back to a prior game save to continue doing more game endings which wipes out the game win count. Fortunately Steam keeps track of your achievements correctly, even if the game doesn't. Although doing what I did might be considered cheating by some people, but it sure saves a ton of time
* There are some "trash" battles you can't avoid which can get a little annoying when trying to beat all of the endings, as by that point you are very high level and would prefer to just skip some battles.

Overall, this game feels too much like an actual job. Everything you do is timed, and there is pressure to get things done quickly to try to make ends meet in the game. If you are too slow, game over.

This is by design.

This probably works for a lot of people. I've have not played a game like this. The approach does a good job of getting you to role-play in the universe and to relate to characters better. This forced mechanism is effective. I did feel like it was actually my job and it helped with immersion.

Unfortunately, for me at least, I have a considerably stressful job IRL, and it is hard to find enjoyment from a game where I'm on the clock and can't take things at a more relaxed pace. I play video games to relax, not to experience the similar emotions I feel at the workplace.

I'm sure this is great for a lot of people. It has fantastic reviews. However if you are a work-a-holic and have a very stressful IRL job, and you are looking to relax and take things at your own pace, then this game is not for you.

Fun solo game. Also a fun co-op game. Plenty to do. If you grind through it quickly, maybe 40-50 hours of content.

If you take your time and explore a lot -> hundreds.

Very Sandboxy, although there are things to do and overall objectives as far as progression goes.

Pros
* Building bases is a lot of fun
* Crafting is awesome, one of the best parts of the game
* Mining and exploration is fun
* Boss battles are fun
* Different levels and biomes are great. Lots of variety

Cons
* You pretty much need a guide to play this game. Very difficult to figure out on your own. I mostly attribute this to the complexity of crafting and there not being adequate in-game help for you to figure out the crafting progression and what the items do.
** Because of the above, you will spend a fair amount of time outside of the game researching things. For many, this is not fun.
* Some crafting materials are pretty grindy to get

Overall great game that I like quite a bit

I love this game. I've sat on the sidelines for a while since there are a lot of games in this space. Reign of Kings, Rust, etc... Coop, sandbox, builder style games.

What made me finally pull the trigger on Ark is the amazing graphics, and it has similar gameplay to the others out there PLUS tamable dinosaurs.

I tend to play solo, and so nearly all of my Ark experience has been solo play. It's been a lot of fun. I've died a LOT. But that's been pretty awesome since it helps the game really feel like a survivor game.

Pros:

• Beautiful graphics
  
• Great soundtrack
  
• Frequent content updates. Something like 15 since I've started playing - adding new tech, new level cap, new environments, new maps, new dinosaurs.
  
• I feel like they got the environment part right. Weather / temperature / food / water is well done. I've _almost_ died several times to it.
  
• Dinosaurs make it scary and give the right survival feel. You can be walking through a forest and hear a big dino and it's really scary! Esp if it is a carnivore coming to kill you. I've died a lot to this.
  
• Crafting / resource system is fun. Complicated enough for me to enjoy.
  
• Alternate game modes (SOTF) is a blast.
  
• Huge map. Lots to do. I'm 60 hours in on my solo play.
  
• Lots of customization features for running your own server (like I do for solo play). Day / night speed, resource rates, tame rates, etc...
  
• Caves (dungeons)
  
• Bosses - although I haven't even gotten close to activating one. Something to look forward to!
  
  Cons:
  
• For good graphics, requires a decent gaming rig. You can't expect decent graphics / framerate if you buy an off the shelf computer. Either buy a full on gaming machine from a reputable gaming computer company, or build one yourself. I don't really recommend Laptops due to graphic card heat issues leading to fast laptop death.
  
• Load times can be long if you don't have a SSD.
  
• Incorrect graphical settings can make the game a complete slug. This isn't the game's fault. But it is something to be aware of. I was getting pretty bad framerates even though my machine should have been able to handle it. But tweaking some settings made a huge difference - doubled my framerate.
  
• Still some bugs to work out. Pet pathing isn't great. So far it hasn't been much of a problem in solo Ark - but on SOTF where you might tame up a lot of dinos and try to get them to the center - sometimes the pathfinding drives you crazy with them getting stuck everywhere. In my opinion, this is the biggest thing they need to fix, although it mostly affects SOTF since I'm not often running around solo Ark with hordes of dinos following me.
  
• RAM requirements. I have 16 GB and while running mostly high settings, the game often is using around 6GB. Higher texture settings affect this a lot. I reduced mine from ULTRA to Very High and a few other settings (like some view distance stuff and some shadows) and it cut my RAM usage in half. I had to do that because the game was using so much memory that the OS started paging a lot and my HDD was going crazy at 100% usage and often chopped up the game pretty bad. I have a R9 280X that I'm running this on. The bare minimum system RAM I'd recommend would be 8 GB, but you would need to have lower graphic settings than mine. I recommend 16 GB, although if playing on Ultra everything, 24 GB with a SSD ought to do it nicely.

I only played this during the free weekend, and was only able to get through one game.

I only have vanilla Civ V and do not have any of the expansions. So my comparison is on a vanilla Civ V to vanilla Beyond Earth, which is more fair as most other reviewers had the Civ V expansions.

However, based on the poor reviews I was expecting the game to be pretty bad. However, it was actually quite fun. I like new and different and this certainly is that.

Pros:
- Civ V but feels newer and different (in a good way)
- I liked how the other civs land some number of turns after you have got started. It's an interesting approach and adds immersion to the game.
- The Affinities are pretty cool and I could see how that could lend itself to unique strategies. On my playthrough I just did everything. I'm glad they don't shoehorn you into just a single affinity.
- Graphics are beautiful and really feels like an improvement over Civ V.
- I really like the trade system (most of it anyway - see cons for the bad parts)
- Diplomacy: Feels a bit better than Civ V. The animations are great. I really love the whole "favors" concept - where you give them stuff in return for a "favor" that you can trade back to them later for stuff. Also at least on an easier difficulty setting, the AI didn't make insane decisions (like ally with you and then backstab you a few turns later. I've had that happen in Civ V). Also some cons.
- Virtues seemed better done than the culture rewards of Civ V. I personally like them better anyway. It made more sense to me and plus you weren't forced into making tradeoffs like Civ V does.
- Quests are new, cool and fun. At least the first time through. I didn't do enough repetitive play to tell you if they would be annoying over time.

Neutral:
- Units feel the same as Civ V. You have your melee, cavalry (faster melee but no terrain bonuses and can't fortify), archers, artillery, and air units. Different names. But they behave identically to Civ V. Good in some ways, but nothing pushing the envelope.

Cons:
- Tech tree. While it's less linear which is cool, I also found it confusing. They need a new view of the tech tree. I felt lost trying to decide what to go for next. I think the zoomed out view didn't show details on the sub techs which made the zoomed out view worthless. So then you had to go zoom and and spend a bunch of time figuring everything out. I strongly felt like this could be organized in a linear fashion which made more sense (industry down this path, science down this path, health down this path, military down this path, trade down this path, culture down this path). Also they could have a different view which reorganized the tech tree by affinity. That also would have helped. As it stood I probably wasted an hour or more in the tech tree which is pretty ridiculous and frustrating.
- Wonders don't seem all that great or really powerful. They provide a very minor advantage. I built a LOT of them and it never really felt like I gained much from them. They need to make wonders more powerful. I am almost tempted to say that you could skip them and put the production towards military units and go stomp someone instead and you would probably be better off.
- Diplomacy: While I love the "favor" concept, all the AI treated the "favors" as practically worthless which made me quite angry. In several cases I had given away quite a few strategic resources for around 300 turns and had accumulated around 10 favors in return. When I tried to bargain with the AI with my favors, I think they valued my favors at around 1/10th what I had given them. Basically I could trade all 10 favors for 30 turns of a very small amount of strategic resources. Seriously?!?! What a friggin joke. So while favors is a cool concept, the execution make them effectively totally worthless and very frustrating. I give them a giant F in execution here. How can a diplomacy system ever be effective or fun for the player when the AI constantly devalues you and the favors you do for them? So once again, I feel like the diplomacy system had a chance at finally being decent - but the execution made it terrible.
- Comparison / statistics view. Needs more detail on being able to evaluate your civilization to others. I thought having embedded spys would improve this, but it did not.
- Spying is a cool concept, but one thing that was frustrating was the UI did not provide a simple way to evaluate cities you had spys embedded in and to see the extra info that provides. You physically need to go scroll around the map and find the cities (if you can even remember which cities you have spys embedded in). It's a long and tedious process. Very annoying.
- They BADLY need a strategic resource view. I swear Civ V had this. This would help tremendously when trying to plan out where to settle new settlements.
- They BADLY need a resource view. Right now the only way you can view resources is when you FINALLY have a colony unit, and even then it only shows resources nearby. Having a resource view (I swear Civ V let you toggle it on/off 24/7) again would help planning significantly - as I could figure out where I want to settle ahead of time and send military units to clear a path.
- Trade: Whenever a trade unit finishes a full cycle of its route, it seems like it wants you to give it new orders. This doesn't seem too bad until you have like 30-40 trade units. Then suddenly each turn you are having to give 2-5 of them orders. It's very annoying. I wish you could just say: keep doing this forever. Or an alternative option would be: keep doing this until a potential better route opens up - then notify me so I can chose at that point. As it is, this makes trade very annoying.

Overall:
It was new and fun. Different enough from Civ V to keep my attention despite the host of annoyances. I wanted to keep playing it after the free weekend was over. That's enough to give it my recommendation. Though I cannot strongly recommend it.