Recent reviews by Zarkkill

>Start first game
>Idle too long
>Get killed by robot
>Fair enough, my fault
>See it again after I find weapons
>Go time
>Bullets do literally nothing
>Grabs me
>Kills me instantly
>Spend the rest of the mission playing Stamina Bar Simulator as it chases me and I run around and it teleports behind me constantly for the next 10 minutes

No thanks.

Low poly Stalker 2 with random maps that cycle. Instead of the emission forcing you to take shelter for 5 mins, you run back home and chill in your bunker for a minute and when you exit, the map is different, and sometimes terrifying. Overall super fun and addictive, probably even better with friends too. Lots of content for an early access game that is only a few months old.

If you like Stalker, you will like this game.

A game with a fantastic premise, good gameplay, and an interesting design unfortunately bogged down by terrible balancing and a difficulty curve that is vertical.

I hoped that Early Access meant the devs would eventually get around to balancing the game to the point where it's actually feasible to progress and get really good at the game, but unfortunately the crushing difficulty, something I actually greatly enjoy, leaves no room for fun or growth as the game simply lacks the balancing required to make such difficulty enjoyable. You will fail many times before you can even get past the first boss wave, and that's cool because it makes you learn the systems and practice. However the game escalates the difficulty to the point where it's basically pointless to try as you realistically have no chance of progressing. Even on the easiest difficulty, getting very far in survival is extremely difficult, and on "normal" it's essentially impossible. This isn't due to the player's lack of preparation, time management, or base building, the player simply lacks the time, resources, and stats to last. The best buildings you can get are still not nearly enough and still get shredded, as well as your units.

Even all of this would be fine if the campaign could make up for it, which I was looking forward to, and while the first few missions are fine, you eventually get sent into the survival style missions which should be the high point, but the game is designed in such a way that these missions do not allow you to realistically complete all of the side objectives in time, and even if you forgo them, just surviving is extremely difficult, especially with the pitiful resources and time constraints.


One of the worst design choices of all is your laughably meager maximum storage limits for resources. Unless you build a dozen storehouses or heavily upgrade your storage, which takes time and requires you to be later in the campaign, the base storage is pitiful. You can store enough for a handful of troops and enough wood to build a couple walls, which means that unless you are constantly pausing to micromanage your base building, switching from map exploration to base building every 2 minutes, you are going to be wasting resources as you will hit that cap very quick, which doesn't make the game more difficult, it just makes it annoying.

So much wasted potential with this game and it's purely because of bad design choices that limit the player and try to prioritize the most brutal difficulty without understanding what makes difficult games fun.

Re-released the game but removed original from the store, that means you have no confidence in your new product, don't support anti-consumer practices.

The game does exactly what you think it does and gives you exactly what you want. The roadmap details the rest of the additions to the game which will add everything else you could really want in the game.

The game is very stable, haven't had a single freeze or crash, optimization is great.

Game has good QoL features and the gameplay loop and mechanics are satisfying.

Best of all the dev is active, regularly giving updates for the game. Dev also reads the steam forums and will reply and address issues the players have, which is huge. I posted about a minor issue I had with the most recent update and within 2 hours the dev had replied to it and added an update for the game which reverted a change I thought was bad. It shows the dev is open to feedback and listens and does so quickly, and it was the reason I wanted to give a review.

Dev is definitely worth supporting and the game is good!

When the game first launched it had this awful system where you would use 1 water a day and if it ever ran out you would get raided and lose everything in your stash. I hated that because it meant that all my progress could just be gone because I stopped playing for a few weeks. That's why I was so happy that they finally did away with the system, I just didn't realize I'd encounter the same issue anyway.

It feels bad enough spending an hour carefully traversing a map and then losing all of that progress and loot because of one thing or another, sometimes even just because of a bug, but I can get over that, because I can try again and do shorter runs to stockpile loot, and as long as I extract I know that all that loot will be safe in my stash. That's what I thought anyway.

Little did I realize the wipe "feature" was still very much in the game. I did see that if my water reached 0 I'd get raided, but it was easy to stop that since I could choose when to expend water and had plenty. Unfortunately for me, doing a mission on one of the later maps would prove to be the last thing I did in this game as it triggered a water thief attack with no warning and no way for me to know that I would cause such a thing. As soon as I enter the map to defend my base the game crashes. Game crashes are not unusual, but this time when I loaded back up, I had "failed" the defense, since the game had decided that my game stopping during the defense was as good as a loss.

And just like that all of my hard earned loot, all of my guns, ammo, resources, money, backpacks and upgrades that I'd spent the last 60 hours painstakingly grinding out was just gone. Even the older backup saves did not go far back enough to change it. I don't even know why there are backup saves when the difference is 1 minute, not nearly enough to reverse this.

I was totally addicted to this game since buying it, but seeing all my progress and effort just deleted before my eyes, I cannot find any desire to continue playing a game like that.

I hope the devs decide to remove this "feature" for future players, but I know I won't be coming back after this. There's no reason for me to play a game that will just unceremoniously wipe away all of my hours of hard work.

For that reason I cannot recommend this game, even though I otherwise would.

Devs make the game worse with every update, ignore criticism about updates making the game ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and the community is too retarded to demand change and improvements in the game.


Here are the best examples:

Ingots: (Primary upgrade resource) Were originally capped at 30 but raised to 100, why not raise it higher or remove it? Upgrades to level 3 can be 20 ingots or more, that's a really low cap that punishes players for playing a lot.

Shadow nerf to weapon drop levels: While the patch notes don't mention this, and many people seem to deny it, it is almost statistically impossible for the drop rates of weapons level 2 and 3 to change so drastically after an update if nothing was changed. I went from finding 90% level 2 weapons during 15 hours of play, to finding maybe one level 2 weapon every hour or two over 9 hours, and finding one level 3, versus finding 4 level 3 weapons over 15 hours before that patch. There's no way nothing was changed. All that does is make the game grindy and repetitive, because you can only keep weapons by holding them in your 3 slot inventory.

Mission Ingot cap: this was what sent me over the edge. In some of the longer missions you can find like 8 components, which reward you with ingots if you finish the mission, 1 ingot per component. So you'd finish the mission, get 2 ingots for the mission reward, and any components you found added on. I got as many as 12 ingots from a single long mission before, which means I did a lot of exploration and put a lot of effort in. Now, if you go through all that trouble you get NOTHING. You'll get the standard ingot reward of 2 or 3, and then if you find components, it caps the total ingots you can get at 5, so if you found 8 ingots on a 2 ingot mission reward, you get 5 total, meaning 5 of the components you found were a COMPLETE waste of time because you get NOTHING if it's a component you already have which it almost certainly will be. This makes the game way more grindy to the absurd degree. Now instead of averaging 7-9 ingots per long mission, you will only ever get 5. That's insane. That means in some cases you have to grind for twice the time to get the same reward you used to, and while the game is very fun on its own, grinding a pittance of a reward to upgrade my ship is NOT FUN, especially when I know if I do TOO WELL in a longer mission, my reward will be TAKEN away from me, even though I EARNED it. You have to go out of your way to find components, sometimes even boarding enemy ships to find them. This is like the devs spitting in your face.

Not to even mention the patch that tanked the game's fps for half a day, I'll let that one slide though since they fixed it later in the same day.

Ridiculous to charge people money to add a couple of new units into a turn based army game. This should have been added in a free patch.

Yes, the units are really cool, that just makes it feel even more insulting, because now you have to pay more money to get better units to make your army stronger, which makes this game P2W in a way.

♥♥♥♥ this business model.

I don't know what this is supposed to be, but it sure as hell isn't Dawn of War.

This might be a good game too but unfortunately they make you fight a boss in the 3rd mission and it's just...it's the worst thing ever. You have a tanky melee focused boss that 2 shots your units, and so you just have to run around trying to kite him while constantly reviving your units. You can re-engage him after failing and pick up where you left of, but he just has so much ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ health it's pure monotony, I was bored out of my mind fighting him, it was so bad. If there are other bosses, which I'm sure there will be, I can't imagine forcing myself to slog through them just to maybe enjoy the game, which is now less of an RTS and more like a real time top down ARPG almost, it's just not great.

Game frequently freezes and crashes, especially right after you just busted your ass clutching a narrow victory.