Recent reviews by RadKit

Over three days now, I've tried really hard to get into Pax and while I might still buy it at some point, if its cheap enough and doesn't seem like its about to be shut down... it might not happen either.

Pax is an interesting mix of Star Wars Galaxies (one of my favorite MMORGPS of all time) Everquest, Valhiem and Once Human. Thems some pretty big shoes to fill. Too big maybe.

Where to start as there's a lot to talk about with this game?
Probably the "hottest" issue. Money.

The game is "pay once" but you are not gonna get far without a plot.
You cannot craft past the very basic gear at the starting location as you need upgraded workstations, but the real reason is storage.

A dev recently responded to someone else's review that you dont "need" a plot to play the game... I think that's horribly disingenuous to say as from practically day one the game has been marketed around you having a plot to build your base on. After dozens of hours of thinking about this... the only way you could make it work is if you couch surfed with a friend or clan who did have a plot... that just sounds bad.

This game is a storage nightmare, and I like inventory management in games... Pax, however takes it to the Nth degree and beyond.

Well that's okay, just build a plot and load it up with storage containers, sure, but to keep that plot you either need to pay real money every month ($4.99), do a real money subscription (the lowest tier actually doesn't even include the plot token so you need the second tier subscription which I think is $6.99 a month), or make sure to login and play for hours, almost every day of the month, to earn enough gold to buy your way to not being homeless. It is not a great feeling... not at all.

Technically you could buy almost a full month's worth of Grace all at once... if you have over 18 MILLION gold coins that is. Ha!

Also worth noting is that you'll probably be spending Grace on other things as well, like teleporting, reclaiming your loot after death, buffing skills or harvesting amounts, so saving up 400 grace for a month extension is harder than it sounds.

Don't quote me on the exact math but if you don't do the premium subscription you need to log in approx. 26 days of the month to get enough login Grace to buy a month for your plot.

That's a lot.

It's a REAL shame that everyone who owns Pax doesn't just have 1 free non-expiring plot... this would be a huge, huge step in the right direction.

As is, unless you pony up (which doesn't solve any of the game's other glaring issues), this game is a full time job... strike that... this game is an unpaid internship at a company you do not want to work for but you're stuck doing the internship anyway.

Jobs can be fun and rewarding in several ways like money, power, respect, satisfaction, a sense of self-worth... Pax is none of these things, it doesn't respect you or your time and it only gets worse the more you play instead of better, all of this plus the whole pay to keep your plot thing... its no wonder the game is at very low player counts.

Here's an example.
A key aspect to a game like this is to build your own base, the marketing for Pax goes on and on and on and on about how your house is you, it's your mark on the world, it's your manifestation into this reality.

You need to grind resources and stand still watching your character craft items for literally dozens of hours to become skilled enough to make a door. It's hilarious how silly this is... but its a wonderful example of what awaits you in Pax Dei. Oh, here's another weird one... you can't teleport or fast travel to your base and there's no mounts or vehicles, just a lot of walking, so much walking, walking for hours on end.

Entertainment in general needs to be interesting or rewarding or just fun. There are bits of fun here and there in Pax, especially if you like gathering and crafting, but a lot of what the game makes you do... is not interesting or rewarding... or fun. It feels like a really big swing and a miss. The bones are there, but the body is not willing.

Seriously, you're practically a high level character before you can even put a door on your house, granted you could buy a door from someone else, or join a clan and maybe have a high level clan mate make the door for you, but from what I could see the game is beyond empty, with abandoned buildings littering the landscape, so most players are going to be solo either by choice or necessity.

Sure there's market stalls surrounding the starting area, but getting those coins isn't easy either, you need gear and experience and a lot of it before you're collecting any serious coins. Not to mention you need those coins to buy grace which is the non-real money way to extend your plot's REMOVAL timer.

Don't get me wrong there's nothing wrong with a game going slow, grinding, or having complicated crafting systems that need a lot of items... I'm fine with all of that... but again, I assure you, Pax is not that. It's common for players to go AFK watching TV shows or playing other games while their characters in Pax craft endlessly for long stretches of time, and this is after spending a long time gathering and prepping those materials to begin with...

On top of everything I've already mentioned there's serious design flaws with the armor system (light, medium, heavy) and the entire cooking system (you're better off just by far by just wearing heavy armor and eating raw berries than ever doing anything else). There's severe problems with weapon balance, abilities, skills, the combat system, how characters progress from fighting level 1,2,3 skull, 90, critters dozens at a time... you name it, its rough.

You might think, that's fine, I'll just go slow, take my time and enjoy it... and you can. Up to a certain point. Eventually to keep progressing you're going to need loot from POIs or dungeons or worse... wildlands. Things are solo-able, but really only if you cheese the AI or fight in a very slow and drawn out kinda way. In dungeons one false step swarms you with tough critters, in the wildlands if you die, you wake up naked at the nearest respawn and have (I'm told) an hour to get your gear back before its gone forever (or at the very least lootable by someone else).

A great game is often 90% good, 10% bad... Pax is more like 40% good, 60% absolute caca. I salute anyone strong enough to enjoy the good enough to keep going... and as always the game could really be a blast with the right group of dedicated players. Maybe Pax is exactly the kind of thing you and your friends want... well then why did you start reading this review? You didn't. Someone else is reading this right now.

TLDR: Pax is... a complete and utter disregard for the player's effort and time, riddled with design flaws and inconsistencies, bugs, and jank. It's far from the worst game I've ever played, but I have no desire to put in the time it wants, for what little rewards it offers.

While its not a perfect game that everyone will enjoy... I loved it, I really loved it. It got its hooks in me in a way that a good novel or TV show or movie or comic can that often video games do not, I was compelled to keep playing and sort of "binge" on it, where as a lot of other games I only ingest in small amounts or are just grinding (which can be very fun too).

Part Telltales Walking Dead, Part TV show Invincible. Dispatch is a choices matter interactive fiction, with a decent amount of gameplay mechanics, lasting about 7 to 9 hours long total across 8 episodes, with a good to heavy amount of replay value. It's got amazing voice acting with some high caliber actors, a compelling story, wonderful visuals and an emotionally charged soundtrack.

In Dispatch you are a down on your luck superhero who is forced to take a step back from the hero game a bit, and as luck would have it... there's a job offer for you to become a dispatcher to a team of villains who have been offered a chance to become heroes. They're outcasts, and so are you at the moment.

In Dispatch there are 4 main gameplay mechanics.

First, is the actual dispatch where you work form a map, sending 1 to 4 (sometimes 5, with a hero ability) to "calls" on the map. Each hero then has to get to the call, complete the call, sometimes with your help or interaction, return from the call and rest. There's more than a few variables to this but that's the gist of it. Dispatching is a resource management game and it can take some planning and luck to not miss or fail calls during your shifts. I wouldn't say its the best gameplay ever, but from a storytelling standpoint its a great excuse to be in contact and talking or giving orders to your team, they're often terrible or hilarious and it is entertaining.

Second, is the Hacking mini-game where you enter THE GRID to navigate a small maze of connections, dodge or defeat anti-virus nodes that chase you and can make you fail if they catch you too many times, often while working on a timer, to find passcodes and unlock the right pathway to complete your objective. While it wasn't my favorite mini-game and I tried to avoid it as much as I could, it also wasn't the worst, and it felt nice sometimes to be able to help the team out in the field.

Third, are some very limited quick time events like hold and drag or click at the right time, these are pretty weak and sometimes hard to see when you're engrossed with what's happening on the screen... but they do give you some agency over some of the combat through the story. I'm honestly not sure if I wanted more or less of these, a couple times it felt like it could be used and wasn't and the inverse was true also. All in all, at least it wasn't constant and annoying.

Fourth, is the dialog itself, where you'll often have choices to make ranging from things that don't matter at all, all the way up to firing or hiring heroes (this doesn't happen too often though). The dialog and voice acting in the game is fantastic, and by far this is the part that will make you want to replay the game again, making different choices and seeing how they play out. My first playthrough I got about 50% of the achievements and most of what I missed was based on dialog choices, so that's a good amount of replay value right there. I liked the choices a lot, they influence a lot of the story, if not the ending, and I look forward to trying out different things. Although, I like to play games like this in one or two sittings, and then let them rest before trying again. I'm excited to come back to Dispatch again soon. I think that says a lot about the quality of the game.

A little more about the heroes:
Each hero has things like stats that can be upgraded, powers that can be unlocked, synergy with another hero that can be unlocked and upgraded, and something that makes them unique. There's definitely a strategy to upgrading heroes and unlocking their powers/synergies to help you perform better during dispatch shifts, its not super clear to me how much your performance actually effects the story, but its still a nice bit of thinking things out that makes your team feel unique to you. There's a few chances over the course of the 8 episodes to cut or select different heroes for your team and this adds a lot of potential replay value.

Overall, I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes TV shows or interactive fiction, superheroes, tell tale games, and or choices matter games. I think it's very worth the purchase price for the content and entertainment you'll get out of it, as soon as it starts going on sale it'll truly be a fantastic value.

Really enjoying this game, glad I finally got around to it.
I really liked the demo, and have had my eye on it since. Now that I've finally started... I am SO hooked.

I AM FUTURE is not really hard or challenging or even particularly deep mentally (altho it can be a little complex or overwhelming, in a good way, at times), and outside of the first few minutes you'll probably have plenty of food and supplies to keep threats at bay so its not really even hard to actually survive... but It's just very satisfying to play. I cannot stress this point enough.

TLDR: If you love the idea of unscrewing all the screws in a microwave to get access to its pieces one at a time that you can then use to build something else like a robot or upgrade your power generator... BUY THIS GAME NOW.

Basically you wake up and the world is destroyed and you're surrounded by scrap and mean plants.
You need to collect, salvage, break-down, dis-assemble, and then rebuild A LOT of stuff. You do all of this while keeping your health up and your stomach full. You farm, fish, cook, upgrade, discover, explore... and even kind of defend against some invasive critters and plants. There's actually a lot more than I'm mentioning, this game definitely has a lot of moving parts. Pro Tip: Make more storage, you are gonna need it.

Sure there's like dozens of games that do all that, but I AM FUTURE feels unique in many ways from the setting to how the game play it self works and feels. It does a great job setting itself apart in ways that other games could only try and fail. Its a difficult point to put into words but I think its really got that X variable that makes a game better than the sum of its parts.

Unlike a lot of games in this genre, I AM FUTURE's actions do NOT have some kind of energy bar that then forces you to end the day. You don't even NEED to sleep! EVER! You can choose to sleep to heal or speed up the passage of time but you never need to actually do this. The only metric to your progress is exploring and finding the right key and regular parts you need to upgrade your tools.

It is a joy to finally upgrade your hammer or drill and know that now you have a huge area you can just completely dismantle, rebuild and make your own. Sometimes I just wanna spend huge amounts of time drilling and unscrewing everything in sight.

There's also a lot you can do as far as character customization and customizing how your area looks. The story might not be the strongest ever, but it feels more like a soft guiding hand to kinda just nudge you in the right direction... mostly you'll be on your own to figure out where something is, how to get to it, and then actually accomplish that.

All in all I just find the game very fun and it definitely scratches an itch, or several, in a huge, huge way... at a very low price point, who could ask for anything more?

I have not had any bugs or glitches or crashes or anything like that in 10 hours so far, and I'm probably about 1/2 through the story, but not anywhere near done with my dream of dismantling EVERYTHING.

If you like hardcore survival you might feel a bit let down, if you're more of fan of cozy games with exploration then I'd recommend this even more.

Every time I buy a borderlands game... I tell myself it'll be the last one.
Well, here I am again.

What might surprise you is that the game runs great for me.
No stuttering, no crashing. No problems at all. With or without the newest update. Really.
I'm not saying its not happening to a lot of people, it clearly is, but with my set up and config... shockingly the best part of the game is how it runs and looks.

Everything else is a huge let down.
The characters and the actions skills don't feel new or innovative or even really interesting in any way.
The story feels exactly the same as it pretty much always does, save the planet from the big bad and his underlings, nothing new here.
The humor is much, much weaker.
The map is technically open but its so bottle-necked all over the place that it might as well just be loading screens. Most places you want to go have 1 way in, and require you to pass through multiple locations on the way that also only have 1 way in... it IS kind of fun that you can ignore the main quests and explore, but over all the map feels so pinched and lumpy and annoying that it certainly doesn't feel like an improvement over previous games.
The terrain is so lumpy and broken that the sluggish vehicle (its really just 1 vehicle with different skins) feels terrible to drive.
Most of the quests feel very unrewarding since its mostly just random junk weapons.
The SDU upgrades feel boring as hell with absolutely nothing new and even at max the backpack is way too small.

BUT ALL OF THIS IS FINE. Yes, you heard me right! Who cares about all that other stuff! I actually don't think I do! I'm here for the guns. THE GUNS!

Well... the guns are terrible. Absolutely terrible. Randy Pitchford is channeling Peter Molyneux (google this if you're too young) when he says 5 billion guns. Outside of legendaries I wouldn't even say there's 100 guns and the vast majority of them are underwhelming, gimmicky, unfun or just plain bad.

The 5 billion gun's part comes from that the guns can have random parts of other manufacturers... well this sounds great because you could find the gun that's just perfect for you... sorry but there's a huge flaw with this.

Lets say you're bobbing for apples. You don't want the rotten apple, you want the good apple. In the bucket some are good and some are bad. Except, in this bucket... almost all of the apples have bad pieces in them as well as most of the other apples already being bad. Reducing your chance of getting a good (or even decent) apple to nearly nothing at all.

Sure you're supposed to need to grind for good guns, and legendaries... of course, who doesn't want a good rewarding grind, but the level its taken to here is like putting itch powder into your own underwear, and in the end you still don't have the gun you wanted.

And then... it gets worse!
As you level up the guns gain more "parts" slots, which again, really just increases the chance of your good gun having bad parts in it that ruin it... increasing the grind even more.

Not to mention the drop rate of legendary equipment seems to have dropped off a cliff. They're there, you'll just again really need to grind to get what you want... much more so than ever before in a Borderlands game.

Last but not least, and maybe more of a personal issue to me, I just really have never liked Randy's attitude. How he seems to act toward people he works with or over, and towards his customers, I just find it gross and unacceptable.

I hope you have a better overall experience.

UPDATE: DEV RESPONSE:
So, the devs hired someone to respond to EVERY SINGLE STEAM REVIEW.
Well guess what? Its a sales pitch for the DLC. That's shady AF.

UPDATE: FINISHING THE GAME.
Everything I said above continues throughout, and it does even effect the legendary weapons, its crazy to think that the more rare a weapon is the higher the chance it'll be not as good... but this is exactly what they've designed.

The back 1/3rd of the game is... not great. No vehicle (why?). Lots of loading screens that literally interrupt cutscenes and actual cool moments. Seriously... the best parts of the game and then -LOADING SCREEN, SECOND LOADING SCREEN- what the hell were they thinking?

The ending is total garbage and 100% a hook for the DLC.

The more I play this game the more it feels copy/pasted from previous Borderlands.

I could say inZOI has a lot of potential, because it does... but I'd rather talk about how it is right now.

The graphics are a huge upgrade from Sims 4, but ZOIs (the characters themselves) look noticeably worse in-game than they do in the character creator, and even on max settings you're not gonna get even close to the screenshots in the store's page. Also, when you zoom out, even a little, it looks just like Sims 4. Overall, graphically, while a big improvement, its still a bit of a let down. Maybe as the game works through Early Access and gets some optimization there's room for higher graphical settings? I doubt it, but you can hope.

The character creator, build mode and city editor are the real stars of the show right now. They all allow huge levels of customization that you could easily spend hours on and they each have fun tools like using AI to make an object or texture (and more) based on prompts (note that some of these features only work in conjunction with an iOS device).

A couple quick examples of the AI creator: I wanted some swim trunks with flowers on them (like a pair I have in real life) and was able to just tell the AI with text what I wanted the texture to look like and poof, now I have a piece of clothing that looks just like I wanted it. I also made a Tee Shirt from an old screenshot of mine, and it looks pretty darn good.

Build mode is a little disappointing in that there just isn't enough variety of objects, but this always seems to be the trend with life sims.

Let's talk about that for a minute.

One of the biggest complaints with a new, base versions, of the games like the Sims is that you are mostly just waiting for expansion packs to add more content, or objects or clothing, etc. inZOI feels very, very much like that, right now. Yes there are somethings that inZOI has over a base version of Sims 4, but there's also a lot that its missing. Will inZOI end up being another DLC heavy game with packs and expansions every so often asking you to open up your wallet again and again? Probably. It's a proven revenue stream, and so far, inZOI seems no different.

Continuing this problem of being Sims-like is that as much as inZOI takes (and boy oh boy do I mean take in the strongest sense of the word) from the Sims franchise its missing a lot of things, a surprising amount of things. Quality of life things, or small but noticeable problems that The Sims have already solved... inZOI apparently missed those solutions and is starting from step one, it's shocking, clearly the devs at inZOI know the Sims, they've played a lot of the Sims... they've (for lack of a better word) copied a lot from the Sims, so why have these problems? It's boggling. Some of these things have already been patched and will continue to get patched, but some are more core problems like path-ing, animations, automation, time speed... It just seems shocking in 2025 to see problems that Sims 4 had in like 2014.

Lastly, the game just doesn't have much to actually do outside of the creative aspects (which again is really good), the actual game play is clunky, not as good graphically, missing a lot of content and QOL stuff, the UI is a mess, the interaction with other ZOIs is an ugly interface, the game is absolutely riddled with pathing issues, the jobs are lackluster, there are still time scale problems... it just doesn't play as well as I had hoped.

So in the end the big question is... should you get this now at $39.99... knowing all the above, and also keeping in mind the retail price will probably increase (guessing up to $50 or $60) at launch. I personally think yes, because the creative systems are really very good, and you can have a lot of fun with them. Overall though I am disappointed in the where the game is now (vs where I hoped it would be), this current version actually seems to have less features than previous builds, which also creates more questions than answers.

It's a tough call, because it does have so much potential, but that's the thing about potential... you don't actually know how well its going to work out. It's an investment, a hope, a gamble.

I would tread very carefully about purchasing inZOI and I recommend if you do to really try to get into the game ASAP (don't spend two hours in the character creator) and see what you think of the game play before you are unable to make a return.

This could someday be the real Sims killer, but it has got a long, long, long way to go first.

Update after playing more inZOI and then going back to play more Sims 4:

inZOi:
Does look a lot better, like a crazy amount better, with a much more realistic art style vs Sims more cartoon-ish style.
Has a very good character creator, with a pretty good wardrobe with the ability to quickly create textures and patterns from almost nothing or screenshots.
Has much worse AI, path-ing and overall clunky-ness with animations and interactions.
Has way less content, way less interactions, way less everything...
Feels like its has way less X-factor. Not sure I can put my finger on it, but lets face it Sims 1 right out of the gate was magic. inZOI has something, but its just not nearly as strong.

Granted its not a fair comparison, even if you have a little bit of Sims 4 DLC and much more so if you have more and consider mod support, but hey life ain't fair.

I still do think InZOI has a place in the market and could be very good someday, but the more I think about it the bigger the gap seems... inZOI makes me want to play MORE Sims 4, rather than more inZOI.

TLDR: Really close to giving this the thumbs down but... for the price point I think it is worth it (just barely) IF you know what you're actually buying is more of a Walking Simulator or Interactive Fiction than anything else.

Nobody Wants to Die has a couple of major problems.

Problem number one:
It's not really a detective game.
I've run into this problem with other "detective" type things, its almost impossible to think going in that you won't be doing some, gee I dunno, detecting, but whew boy not here you wont be. At least not where you'd think you would. In NWtD the game dictates and waypoints every thing you'll be interacting with one. at. a. time. It's a level of handholding matching MMORPG fetch quests. The game tells you to go point a, and use tool x, then you do the mini-minigame (a 5 second no lose clicking thing that's probably the worst game design mechanic I've ever seen), then you go to point b and use tool y, then you do the minigame like 5 or 6 times. This is the entire gameplay loop at the scene of the crime.

Problem number two:
The game looks amazing, but that doesn't mean it is amazing.
I've been expecting this for a while, and it started really with UE3 and UE4... but UE5 really drives it home. It used to be that games that looked amazing had a very high chance of being amazing in other areas because they were so high budget... now UE5 is (relatively) cheap and that means consumers are going to see a lot more not great games that look top notch.

That out of the way, lets back up a bit and start again.
Nobody Wants to Die is like a noir + Blade Runner + Altered Carbon + Redux (System Reboot) mash up setting, extra heavy, and I mean extra heavy, on the noir. Its UE 5 so it looks great and the level design and ambiance are impressive. The voice acting is pretty good, again if you love extra heavy noir. The main character is right off a page of a 5 cent noir Crime novel, for good or bad. The main game play is much like Cyberpunk 2077's Braindances where you're rewinding and fast forwarding but here you don't get it all at once, you have to unlock more and more of the "reconstruction" by following the clues and using your tools, reminds me a bit of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter but with more mechanics, but like I mentioned earlier your hand is held so tightly and you're lead down the breadcrumb tunnel with horse blinders on and it can be hard to feel like you're playing the game more than it's playing you.

A big redeeming factor is that NWtD has a bit of choices matter with things like "so and so liked that" or "this choice will affect the story" and that does make it quite a bit more interesting and gives some replay value. There's also a crime board type of thing where you connect evidence you've found and some found by like a CSI team or after report/research. This is where you get to do some actual detecting, and there is a surprising amount of extra story and dialog that happens while you work on your crime board, but it doesn't appear that you can make any wrong connections and for me personally I always struggle with the logic of these types of puzzles and this one is no different, but at least I would say this qualifies as detective gameplay, even if you probably will be trial and error-ing your way through some of the crime board connections at some point.

Final note:
I do like the game, especially at its low price point it's just incredibly hard to recommend. If you wanted noir in your Blade runner or Blade Runner in your noir and you like walking simulators or interactive fiction with lite gameplay... you might really love it. If you're looking for more, you might end up impressed with the graphics and little else.

UPDATE 8/16/24: The new loot crate pretty much undoes everything good I say below about how the IAPs are not predatory. The new system is incredibly badly translated at least, and intentionally misleading at worst. To get all of the top rewards you would need to hit .05% 5 times or spend $435 dollars. That is the actual number, not an exaggeration. Yes it is just cosmetic and yes you don't have to do it... but this is pretty much exactly what I didn't what to see in the game. I shouldn't be surprised because its not new in other regions but still.

TLDR: A Free to Play Online Third Person Crafting/Survival Looter/Shooter that actually isn't Pay to Win, doesn't constantly pressure you to buy things like speed ups or unlocks, has PvE and PvP servers, and doesn't even have a cash GATCHA option? Yes, Please and Thank you.

Once Human (OH) is a great example of how Devs could choose to do IAP, and GATCHA without seeming like a predatory cash-monger that really only is hunting for whales. Slightly more detail: IAP (including the battle pass) is cosmetic only. The GATCHA machine, which is one of several ways you can get new equipment (blueprints) or power up your existing gear (blueprint fragments), can only be used with currency earned by playing the game.

OH is an interesting mix of The Division, Any survival game with resource nodes, and The Secret World. It's got a lot of gathering, exploring, looting, shooting, and crafting. Speaking of crafting, you'll be making everything from food, gear and ammo to houses. vehicles and gun turrets. OH has a sort of a modern / Lovecraftian ruined earth mysterious setting that works reasonably well and overall the game is more then the sum of its parts.

There's gotta be a catch right? Well, yeah, kinda....two things.

First:
The game is far from perfect. The gun play, the setting, the base building and overall game play loop are very good, its fun and there's a lot of quick and fast rewards for everything. On the con side of things... the VO is spotty, some of the writing misses the mark entirely, the overall story line (for season 1 at least) is a bit weak and there can be performance issues on certain PCs which is made often much worse in groups of players doing a large event. However my only one real gripe is that the puzzles are just not good, one thing that Secret World did right is that it had real adventure game style puzzles in an MMORPG that actually fit the setting super well AND worked well AND were fun! By comparison, the puzzles in OH are, with a tiny few exceptions, not really puzzles and not really any good. They are rewarding in the sense that you get a good reward for completing them but not in the sense that you feel like you solved something.

Second:
There are planned seasonal wipes every six weeks. There's a lot of info out there but I'm going to try to summarize very quickly (and probably do a really bad job). At the start of a new season you go back to level 1, and start fresh EXCEPT you retain blueprints, fragments, found formulas (furniture crafting) unlocked weapon accessories and pretty much all event or seasonal currencies... I personally think this doesn't sound so bad as the things you are losing are actually very easy to get back very quickly and the things you are keeping are exactly what actually matter. That said, until we see it (season reset) actually happen we kinda don't know, it could be horrible, but it could actually be okay or even good. It might be worth it if each season is actually distinct and there's new and interesting things to do, shoot, loot, craft and win from the GATCHA.

Final note:
Overall I've had a lot of fun with the game so far and I've enjoyed leveling up (my favorite part of any game) and watching my character get strong and stronger, kill some elder god level things and build a pretty awesome base. You'd think I'd be sad to lose all that at the end of the season (still a ways off), and sure being max level and min-maxing your build is fun but its the GETTING THERE that I like and I think it might be fun to do it all over again, maybe as a completely different build with a completely different looking base.

Disclaimer: I have spent 9.99 on the battle pass because I really liked some of the cosmetics in this specific pass but I honestly think if I look at the next one and don't see several things I like I'd be just fine not getting the next pass.

P.S.
I dunno, this review kinda went off the rails from where it started and what is usually a freewriting exercise that I just do in one go and then lightly edit turned into a sprawling mess that I re-ordered like way too many times, so if something seems horribly out of place or super poorly edited... that's why... thanks.

TLDR: I guess I'm liking it a little more than I thought? But there's really no possible way to give the game the thumbs up. Even if you might have a good time with it for a bit, it will probably bite you in the end.

The First Descendant (FD) unmistakably is the unholy spawn of Black Desert, Warframe and Destiny 2 (also any F2P Korean MMO)... unfortunately FD doesn't really do any of the things that those games do better, or even as well, FD is clearly worse across every front, but if you're done with those other games I could see liking FD for a bit, or at least messing around with it casually if (HUGE IF) you can force yourself to ignore the IAP and battle pass FOMO.

I haven't spent any money yet but everyone should be extremely careful about what you spend your money on because FD uses every trick in the book to make you spend real money.

Everything in FD has a "speed up", "unlock early", "+1 slot" or "purchase" button, even things that you really don't need to buy because you'll get them just by playing long enough or grinding or farming/repeating missions and bosses.

FD does also have quite a bit of the old drug dealer trick to let you "have a taste" to get you hooked on needing an item, only for you to then realize you need to craft more, which requires grinding for the materials and real time spent "researching"... or you could just spend premium currency to speed up or premium currency to get the mats or just outright buy the finished item... with premium currency.

As far as I have seen you cannot earn ANY premium currency by playing the game F2P, you do however earn some premium currency by leveling up the premium battle pass, but at a deficit. While I'm talking about the battle pass I'll just say: The battle pass seems really unimpressive and extremely time consuming (unless I'm missing something entirely), so I really don't want to buy the premium. This is actually a good thing I guess? It's one purchase I'm not even considering! HA.

There is some very questionable marketing with tagging IAPs like "Top Seller" or "POPULAR". I really doubt that the 100 dollar premium version of one of the starting characters is actually a top seller. Tags like this have been banned in other places because of how deceptive this trick is.

Additionally their response to early purchasing problems was: "Too many people buying at once." That has got to be the best spin on store issues I have ever heard. It implies that things are selling like hot cakes and you should join in! ROFL. Yeah, sure. Right.

You do get 1 character free out of a choice of 3 and I have to say do NOT pick the grenade guy, his skills are terrible compared to the others. The only thing he's good for is early access to fire abilities, which is not worth much at all.

Then you do very quickly get access to a 2nd and 3rd character just by doing quests, and maybe its more than that but that's as far as I am... and they do each play very differently... but also seem wildly unbalanced.

Right now I think I'm just doing the typical "beat the F2P game by not doing any IAPs"... which is always fun for a bit, but usually the advertising wears me down and I buy something, then enjoy it for 2 seconds then regret it entirely and then usually stop playing cold turkey... so it might just come down to what Stanley and Flynn have taught us: the only real way to win is to not play?

First Survivor game I've liked besides Vampire Survivors (VS).

It's still EA and there are some bugs, crashes, typos and some jank, but I've already played over 7 hours and had only 2 crashes and really no other performance issues. I've played AAAAA (lol Ubisoft) games that have way more problems, especially in EA or beta.

FatalZone has all the regular survivor stuff like ranking up weapons as you level during a run, bosses that drop chests that based on luck can have 1-5 items, evolving weapons (with a chest opening) when you get the right combos, re-rolling, revives... all that stuff.

Unlike VS, you have a base with several buildings that you want to upgrade with loot you find from crates or events during a raid (what the game calls a run). These upgrades get you all kinds of things like more characters to hire, more extraction opportunities (which also comes with free chests and heals), more upgrades to starting gear, access to deeper talent tree levels, debuff removal and healing (more on this later), and access to different maps.

In raids you gain infection points, every 1000 points you get stat decreases and a mutation, mutations range from very bad debuffs to very powerful buffs for that character, you can remove any mutations you don't want with gold but healing off those decreases means that merc is unavailable for 1 raid. Characters also gain exp during a raid which gives talent points as they level up from 1 to 10.

Should a character die in a raid, they are dead and gone, its not a huge deal (it only takes a few runs to decently level up a character) but its still enough to make you think twice about risking losing someone.

Also during a raid there can be little events that lead to extra chests, or resources, it kind of creates this choice between farming exp like you normally would or being less efficient with your exp gains to try to collect resources to level up your base's buildings. I find this very interesting because it at least gives the player something to think about other than just worrying about exp.

Overall I think its already a good game, and hopefully with a little more development it could become even better.

When you look at Against the Storm (AtS) on its store page... it looks like a standard city builder.
The videos and screenshots look like a normal city builder.
I'm pretty sure it has the city builder tag.

It's not really a regular city builder at all... maybe city builder lite, in the sense that you are building roads and placing buildings...

It's really hard to describe what this game actually is, because it is incredibly unique. I've played thousands of different games and I've never seen anything like it. Bits and pieces of things sure like sim city, frostpunk, several RTS games... but what it really resembles is a cult classic board game: Food Chain Magnate, in which you carefully micro manage every aspect of your Fast Food Empire, in AtS it just happens to be a settlement. Towns do operate much like companies, after all. It's a loose example but its the best I can come up with.

You'll constantly be looking at where your workers are, what season it is, wheres the trader, do I need more grain, where are those planks at, we need one less woodcutter and two more farmers asap, we need to get on that event before it expires, I'm not sure if I should burn this to the ground or fix it up... and a lot more.

Normally, I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of people) wouldn't think of "micro managing" as a positive... but in AtS it somehow is! The best way I can describe this is that almost every single thing the game throws at you has a counter move, or a way to mitigate the negatives, of course those counter moves are often a double edged sword as well, but I find myself extremely impressed with the design of the game to contain so much randomness, yet still give you a winning chance.

Each run of the game has you trying to make a settlement that has enough resolve (worker happiness) and ability to complete orders from the Queen, before that same Queen runs out of patience and declares you a failure. You also have to constantly contend with the land or Forest (although its not always a forest of trees) which gets more and more angry as you cut into it and its secrets. All of this is of course on top of the normal stuff like keeping your people fed, warm, and housed (among like 11 other things as well).

Each run is wildly different based on location modifiers, resources the map has, events, orders, what races your workers are, what blueprints you unlock during that run. You hopefully win and get some upgrade materials for the main city where the queen lives, unlocking or powering up your ability to do better next time, eventually you run out of time and all the settlements are wiped away in THE STORM, but not your upgrades or upgrade materials, and you set out again, hopefully getting further than you did last time, but of course more distance leads to more challenges.

This probably sounds like waaaaay to much to handle, but by god I don't think I've ever seen a strategy game that is so good at having information available to you to read and learn how to play as AtS. Between tutorials, tooltips, graphs, charts, info tabs and an encyclopedia of everything, all the knowledge is there and it works super, super well. YOU CAN DO EEET.

This doesn't mean its easy by any means, and I don't fault people who don't "get it" or don't want to put in the time to learn, I'm just now getting to the Viceroy difficulty (lowest needed to "beat" the game)... but you can earn materials for upgrades even on the lowest settings (it'll just be less materials at a time), and most importantly when you do start to "get it" it's like constant moments of that last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or beating a boss in a souls game, it is extremely satisfying.

Highly recommend this game to anyone who kinda likes city builders, but more so likes mulling over choices and then being flexible with your strategies when those choices fall flat and then juggling several spinning plates while the clock ticks away.

There's probably hundreds of things about this game I should also be saying, but I'll wrap it up here with:

TLDR: An actual unique game where you are given everything you need to succeed but still need to make a huge number of choices and then re-evaluate those choices and make more choices, you are never blocked from victory but its not easy, when you do get there: wonderfully satisfying.