Recent reviews by D²

No

4/5

Pros:
+Good sound design
+Gameplay feels modern, while keeping the AoE style at heart
+Fairly well balanced

Cons:
-BUGS. Not a whole lot, but enough to ruin 10% of the matches. And Crashes
-Oriented more toward casual play (both good and bad) - less opportunities for micro.
-Limited civ variety without DLC. Newest civs are DLC-only
-A mod is needed (Advanced game mode) to tune the game settings like AoE2 and that doesn't work with DLC civs.
-Unlikely to be as fleshed out as AoE 2 anytime soon

6/10
+Fun, multiple factions to fight against
-Overpriced af
+Variety of weaponry/strategems, a bit more replayable because the factions behave differently
-GRINDY!
+OST
-FPS gets worse with every update


+FOR SUPER EARTH!!

Why didn't I find this ♥♥♥♥ sooner?
♥♥♥♥ and stone to the bone!

I am assuming you know the premise of the game.
The good:

• A very unique ghost hunting experience. Has a lot of analytic skills involved, so this is like a 'detective' game to a good extent.
  
• Jumpscares are well balanced, imo. They are not sparse nor extremely frequent.
  
• AI Voice recognition improves the immersion by quite a bit. However, there is still a lot of creative headroom to work with here. Can still be further improved.
  
• Overall balance is good. Difficulty scaling is very vast, there are hard challenges that takes 100s of hours of experience to complete reliably, with the easiest being newbie level easy.
  
• Almost every ghost has easily detectable characteristic features, so 'no-evidence' challenges are possible.
  
• Multiplayer is fun, and relatively well balanced. The game does NOT get 4x easier when you are with 4 players rather than 1. It does get quite a bit easier, however.
  
• Game UI now mostly feels finished overall.
  
• Developers constantly interact with the community. The community is amazing, too. I highly suggest watching Insym on YouTube

The bad:

• Performance optimisation: The average performance is fine. However, there are times where you may get severe stutters or fps drops. It is still in EA.
  
• Occasional bugs. Some mechanics are bugged. Can't be bothered to point them out.

The ugly:

• THE SPRINTING. MY GOD, YOU'RE TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR GRANDPA OR WHAT?
  
• Favourite room changing mechanic is not something I personally want in this game.
  
• Room boundaries need to be shown far more clearly, ESPECIALLY in maple lodge
  
• As of v0.9 update some of the new items are dogwater. It's easier if you skip those items and figure the ghost by other methods altogether.
  
• I am not a fan of fuzziness in the sanity meter at the truck.

That's about it. Leave a like if you found this helpful!

9/10

A description of the gameplay:

You're put in a map, the map has several PoIs (Points of interests) that are hidden at the start. However, certain ones called "Lookout towers", are visible. Once you go there, you "survey" (a simple button press) to view the locations of nearby PoIs. Then you go to each one and unlock, and move on to the next lookout tower. One map has around 10-15 (unsure, a guess) lookout towers. Maps are pretty big, ~8x8km. some are a bit smaller, like 6x6 or 7x7. There are 2 free maps and the rest are all DLC.
There are missions that can be done ONLY in singleplayer. They seem to give more $/hr spend than hunting, atleast at the start. Do these and you can get started a bit faster.
Every map has a unique set of missions. Some of them are "hunt xyz in abc", ferrying goods, photograph certain animals, find tracks etc.
That is the "objective" part of the game.

The hunting part of the game goes on like, you spot animals either by following their tracks, or by looking out (the latter happens mainly in very open spaces) using binoculars.
When you're in MultiPlayer, you and your friends sync your shots so you get the maximum possibility of hitting the animal group y'all are targeting. Or, if there is only one, one of you spots and the other shoots.
Every animal is of a certain class. You can kill with any ammo, but only certain types of ammo will give you a good trophy score.
If you hit a vital organ, the animal will die quickly, otherwise it will bleed and run for several 100 meters till you find its' dead body.
Animals' internals are modelled fine. Heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, flesh and almost all major bones are modelled.
Guns have different types of ammo, there is soft point, hollow point & polymer point with different characteristics. Guns are pretty realistic in this game. There is sufficient weapon sway, recoil, wind effects, bullet travel time & drop, gun zeroing, etc. modelled in the game.

The graphics are really good, well optimized too. This game is incredibly light on RAM. At ultra textures they use only 1-2GB of RAM (3.5GB of VRAM though). FPS is very consistent throughout a given map, however, for me, it drops when i use my gun's scope. I have a rather weak card (a 1050 Ti that is heavily underclocked). Audio is good as well.

DLC stuff:
This is a grey area. You can probably say the game is P2W, because when you buy the DLCs, you get them for free in-game, unlike other guns. I, personally, do not support this.

Essential DLCs:
Modern rifle pack (The one that contains the Zarza weapons)
ATV 4x4 DLC
Silver Ridge Peaks
Medved Taiga
Vurhonga Savanna

The rest of the maps aren't bad by any means. Its just that these ones felt a lot better to me. For the weapon DLCs, the MR pack wins hands down. (Zarza .308 outperforms the M1 Garand and hence is the best bread-and-butter hunting rifle presently. (classes 4-8))
Apologies if i misspelled any names.

Note:
- The base game goes for very cheap during sales. Most of the DLCs go for sale as well. That is when you buy them.
- For map DLCs, only one person needs to own the DLC. Same goes with ATV. The same does NOT apply for weapon pack DLCs
- You cannot share ingame money with your friends. If you harvest your friend's downed animal, they will get the reward.
- If you want to skip progression and just hunt, you can download save files (I think, I am not sure)
- There are glitches, but not too much. Game feels polished in general
- The game seems to use P2P for multiplayer. Irrelevant of where you're connected to, your ping will be 0.

Overall, it is very fun with friends. I usually play with 2-3.

Stuff that needs to be changed:
- A price tag on the DLC weapons.
- Weapon Zeroing is shared between weapons. (Needs per-weapon zeroing)
- Bows & XBows are hard to use and guns are better. Maybe reduce the cost of arrows to compensate.
- Nerf the Zarza .308. Make it similar to the garand or nerf both of them to classes 4-7
- Weapon Ranges in every map.
- Some bugs need to be fixed.

9/10
I love it.
Many gameplay elements are straight up improved from DL1, mainly survivor-survivor combat.
Somehow, I feel this game has far better immersion than DL1.
However, this game has his rough edges. I encountered bugs, but only very rarely.
Performance: It is actually good. I did not have any stutters. It runs at 1080p low upscaled, at 40fps in my potato (i5 8300H, 1050 Ti, 16GB RAM).
Have not tried co-op yet. I heard it has a higher bug count.

Jumpkick is OP af. Needs a nerf. As of release.

Well polished

How is it different from other crafting-survival-open(ish) world games:

Enemies having notably more complex movement and behaviour but might still get stuck sometimes.

A touch of realism. However, food related stuff is nowhere as complex as green hell

The map is hand crafted, so the caves are very unique to this game. Extremely well detailed, lighting is done well but it is too dim, it looks proper when gamma is increased to max.

Horror - It is not scary like horror games, nor is peaceful - In between.

Items and loot - They are not really shared. If there is a duct tape lying in the ground, individual players can take a copy each. Loot is per player. All loot is pre set so there is no issue of one player getting better loot.
To transfer items to another player you have to craft the item with a metal tray (this is available at the start of the game) and show it to the other player and he grabs it.


Well optimized
Story is good but kinda short (15h for just story, will take more for all achievements/other side "missions")
Combat is good. It never gets dry.


Transferring items to players is tedious if you are transferring a lot of number of items

The night sleep cycle - There is a cooldown for sleeping. This sucks because if you miss your right time of sleep you are gonna have to either not sleep for the next day (so you can sleep at the right time the day after) or have all your nights sleep late because the cooldown does not end at the right time of sleep

7.5/10
Very good building mechanics, sandbox. Not a survival game, but has very few survival elements, like the need for Oxygen (depending on where you are)
You can make huge ships, they will need a lot of effort.
Play with friends, otherwise its a lone empty world.
Sold as a PvP Sandbox, however I do not play PvP so I am missing out on some stuff.
Graphical optimization is good, CPU optimization seems good but multiple huge ships in a combat may lag a lot

The cons -
The planets feel empty. Visually they're good but there is not much to be found other than ores. Mining ores can be made harder, like needing specialised mining towers or something to mine very deep (150m+) ores. At present, its not at all needed because ores are generally less than 100m deep
The game just feels empty and shallow at some times.
They should add more AI enemies, wolves are a joke. Bosses wouldn't fit the theme of the game, but wouldn't hurt either.
DLCs. There are too many DLCs, however not all of them are worth their money. Few are. Do your research before buying.

The physics - The speed is limited to 100m/s by default, but you can change that in the settings (upto 1km/s), with mods it can be practically infinite, however, the game cannot handle collisions well if the speeds are above these limits. Orbits aren't a thing as a result of these speed limits and the weird gravity
The way gravity works is there is a linear falloff with respect to the distance to surface. It becomes nil after a point.
These are fine for a ship-combat type game, just don't expect KSP type stuff.

Get it on a sale, and is much better played with friends.