Recent reviews by Prototype 21

I'll start things off by saying this is the single most toxic gaming community I have ever seen. Secondly, if you ever play this game online at any point no matter what lobby you are in there are atleast three people hacking. Rockstar seemingly gave up trying to enforce the rules and modders run free. They can kill you instantly no matter where you are, crash your game on command, and temporarily ban you from your own organizations with the press of a button. The amount of time you have to play GTA:O to get even basic necessities is extreme. I'd compare it to a full time job with how many hours you have to put into it mindlessly grinding and grinding and grinding, only to have a hacker set you back to square one because they think it's funny. While the content updates are free and regular they only serve to install more paywalls and largely pointless missions that you'll never manage to complete because the matchmaking pairs you with idiots that have never played a video game in their life and this is their first experience. There are a ton of exploits that have been in the game since it's launch and in 2019 have not been fixed six years after it's release. This game also features the lovely always-online DRM meaning if you want to play it, even in single player, you're out of luck if you don't have an internet connection. Recently they also made it mandatory to install the Rockstar games launcher and Steam acts as nothing more then a button to launch the game from Rockstar's own launcher. I simply can't recommend anybody buy this game in 2019.

Scolding review aside I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy playing it in it's earlier years. It's a decently high skill ceiling game if that's your sort of thing. You can go grab a gun and shoot at anybody you see but you'll be dying alot if you don't learn your guns, environment, and tactics. While progression is excruciatingly slow and at times downright frustrating when you do finally get what you were after it feels like you earned it. The early game story sucks and is slow, but once you get past the dreaded Merryweather heist as Trevor it picks up pace and becomes a fun to play game that you can unknowingly lose hours on. There isn't really anything to do once you finish the story, though.

It's a very realistic sandbox car simulator that allows you to test out a plethora of hypothetical situations with all sorts of cars and configurations. The sky is the limit, so long as you have the skill to make it happen. One of the unfortunate aspects of the game is drifting, but I can't fault the game itself for being that way. Since it's only a video game and not reality you can't feel the grip starting to slip, or when to push/release the gas and brakes. Modding the game is made extremely easy by the developers and is as easy as dropping a file into the mod folder. With no additional work new cars, maps, objects and settings are ready to go. The graphics are way better than they have any right to be for something as simple as a vehicle physics simulator. When using a controller vehicles feel satisfying to drive and have a real sense of weight to them.

The largest negative of BeamNG Drive is the system requirements to make this game work. It requires a very high end and expensive computer for even simple, low intensity gameplay. If you plan to do anything intense in this game you're looking at a $1,000+ computer easily with extra emphasis on the CPU unit. The selection of cars that the game comes stock with isn't the greatest either. Very little variety when it comes to cars that aren't 2/4 door sedans. The user interface isn't very user friendly and takes plenty of exploring to get a firm understanding on, especially the car garage. I'm not sure if this problem is on my end exclusively but the controller support seems to break at seemingly random and the only fix I have found is to completely cycle the game. Cars controlled by AI are absolutely terrible and barely function with vanilla maps, much less ones you download from mods. They drive excessively fast, slam into corners, drive into large bodies of water and swimming pools with no regard to the roads, and pile up at any and every opportunity.

It's pretty good. Lots of content, takes forever to reach the end of the game first time around so you'll be playing it for a hundred or so hours.

It registers many of the programs I use as "cheating" programs, and refuses to let me play. This means I have to edit my entire OS in order to remove them just to be able to play this. I've got a custom version of task manager installed that it registers as a cheat, and as such I can't launch it. They really need to code this better.

As a heavily story and atmosphere based game, it does it's job extremely well. It's very immersive and easy to play, a perfect game to play for a nice tranquil feeling.

Great game, it has much potential for the future. It's in it's early stages as an Alpha right now, but I'd recommend it.