Recent reviews by Matt

I say this having beaten 7 of the episodes. The game should have been a show or a movie. The actual gameplay of being a dispatcher is simultaneously frustrating because it's intentionally vague on the details or who you should send or when, and unless you build characters correctly some missions are impossible, but also pointless because even if you fail every mission it doesn't even matter for the rest of the game. It hits a nerve I personally hate of "How could I ever have known to avoid that?"

The story aspects are also frustrating, and the writing around some events makes it very obvious what choices the devs expected you to make, some so glaringly obvious that it becomes a continuity error if you make the "wrong" choice.

And to top it all of the end credit comparisons are bugged. On episodes where I had no failures, completed every mission, and had multiple instances of perfect hero choices the stats told me I performed better than 1% of other players. I looked online and this is just a normal occurrence. Edit: And after playing like garbage in the final episode I got told I performed better than 90% of other players lol.

There is gold in here. Great characters, and an overall great story. I don't personally like the game but I see why everyone else loves it. Maybe I'll come back to it later in a few months and really enjoy it now that I know what to expect.

I'm torn because the game is worth the money, but the caveat being I recommend you drop it as soon as exploration starts becoming a slog because you'll have gotten your moneys worth, but the exploration doesn't get better at all. And in some biomes it gets worse. Or just skip any extra stuff and only focus on the bosses which is what I plan to do from now on since you can buy items that show you exactly where they are. If you enjoy the exploration then it's a great game all around, but it's not for me.

The first section of the game is great, but after you beat the first 3 bosses exploration becomes a slog. The area you uncover on the map isn't even as big as what you actually see, which is also incredibly small, and every biome is massive so finding anything other than bosses is very difficult. As I saw someone describe it, "No one wants to choose between using a wiki or wasting hours wandering around a way too big biome trying to find a needle in a haystack." Except even in this case with wiki help and a map tool, I still wasted hours wandering around the biome.

Travel in general is honestly frustrating because of this even when you get minecarts and other forms of moving around the map to places you've already explored because there is so much backtracking. Riding a the fastest minecart to the outer parts of the map takes almost 2 minutes, which doesn't sound like a lot but when you're going back and forth carrying resources it takes up a lot of time (which happens a lot because unless you're being extremely judicious in what you pick up your inventory fills up quick). Portals exist but the grind required to get even just one of them is genuinely prohibitive. And teleporting items exist but that only pulls you back to base.

Really well made otherwise, and if the exploration doesn't bother you at all then it's just great all around. But seriously just maybe be mentally prepared for what to expect.

Short Answer: It's worth the money and extremely fun so if you like the genre skip this review and buy it immediately. However there are some cons to the game I need to address that I hope they will fix eventually since it's early access.

Long answer:

Pros: Engaging characters, people feel alive and talk amongst themselves, and everyone has a ton of conversation available at any given time. It really feels like you're part of a community and it's great. Tons of cosmetics and it's all basically recipes so you can change your appearance at literally any time. Conveniently placed crafting spaces so you can easily craft even in the early game when you don't have the crafting table or kitchen in your inventory. Crafting takes from chests so you don't have to have a crafting material in your personal inventory to use it. Everything about the map has been really well crafted to make traversal easy, no accidentally walking down a hallway you think is an exit but it's not so you have to walk all the way back to actually get to the exit. At worst you just jump down a cliff and you're good. It really does feel like they've put a lot of thought into avoiding a lot of the pitfalls of other games in the genre as far as user friendliness. Everything about the gameplay feels very balanced in the sense that I do not feel pressured or pulled by any given task whether it's farming, mining, questing, fishing or whatever you want to do. It's all equally fun.

If you're a fan of the genre you should definitely play it because it's the first one I've played in a long time that didn't just make me want to play Stardew Valley instead and that's high praise.

Cons: I have to mention the negatives because now that the honeymoon phase has ended they're getting annoying instead of just okay to deal with. Inventory management is just inexcusably bad. No quick stack into chests, no organizing your personal inventory, only one upgrade for inventory space. This is remedied somewhat because crafting can take from chests and things you drop on the ground never de-spawn no matter how long it stays there, but that certainly doesn't reduce the amount of backtracking you have to do sometimes.

It's good that there's no rush on any quests because you really have to plan out your day or you'll be backtracking for quests and without a faster was to travel around the map it can take the whole day. I want to emphasize that I've never felt the rush to do anything, and I mean that in a good way. Which is why it took me so long to notice but there is just an obscene amount of walking around and sometimes a ton of backtracking especially with inventory management being what it is. Yeah sure you can leave stuff out forever but you eventually have to run back and get it. And sometimes there is so much running and wasting hours just to check an area for something like if a pond has fish or a tree has fruit only to find it doesn't. Once again, if you're a planner this is all manageable but for a game with such casual emphasis on play it kind of punishes playing casually in some ways like that.

good dungeon crawler

Absolutely zero reason for solo play to be online.

Despite that it's one of the most interesting survival crafting games I've played in a long time.

Good game. If you like farm games then this is quite possibly the best to ever do it.

Fun little survival base building game

A classic

Very good farming/crafting sim like Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley/My Time At Portia

No FOV options and for some reason they've deliberately locked down ways to work around it for now. Console commands don't work and at least for me making a notepad with the updated FOV in My Documents>My Games>Starfield didn't work for me. Hopefully in the future it'll be easier to fix but if you get headaches or nausea with small FOV I can't recommend it. I just can't imagine why they would do this.