A zombie bludgeon-fest with a strong focus on resource gathering and upgrades - amazing!

Dysmantle is a game that does not respect your time, and overstays its welcome by a frankly insane margin.

Starting with the good, smashing a house is highly satisfying the first few hundred times you do it. That about does it for the good.

The bad is that Dysmantle plays like an intensely grindly mobile game that is planning to sell you on speed boosts, but then scrapped that part and just left in the grind. So everything is ether padded within an inch of it's life or very slow to progress.

The map is fine looking, except they copy-pasted it into something that is 5-10x as big as it deserves to be. There is very little difference between areas in any practical sense other than the extreme weather in some. It is also very twisty, with an amazingly annoying amount backtracking, blocking gates and similar time sinks.

The progression is very weird, too slow in some parts, almost too quick in others, and feels unbalanced with all the many padded game systems. And there are a LOT of game systems at work. Fighting, destructing the environment, questing, farming, home building, puzzle areas, etc. But they are all very shallow (though, again, padded and mostly meaningless!). I can't even fathom, for example, why I would want to build a house. That time would have been better spent elsewhere.

In summary, Dysmantle is a very small game with one good idea that, with the power of the copy-paste key, has been turned into a massive time sink with no ultimate payoff to justify it. I appreciate the effort, but it is just not worth the time.

A mess that doesn't know what it wants to be.

This game's premise is great: an island "survival" game where you destroy stuff to get better tools, to destroy more stuff, with your final objective to escape the island. Simple, but efficient. It could have been great.

The problem is that the developers didn't believe this would be good enough, so they decided to make it more interesting (read: deeper)... except they REALLY didn't know how to make interesting stuff... so they added a LOT of pointless (AND SHALLOW!) mechanics:

- Temperature system: if you go too much to the north you'll freeze to death, if you go too much to the south you'll overheat. The solution? Wear a different hat and clothes if you are north or south, you have to use a campfire to switch clothes. Yes, that's it.

- Day-night cycle: the game has a day-night cycle... that doesn't affect anything... except that everything has a blue tint during the night. Yes, that's it. You can sleep, sure... except this is an unlockable... you start by only being able to sleep 6 hours, then 8, then 10... and you can only sleep every 15-16... the game just refuses to allow you to sleep before that.

- Smelting... that requires you to wait MINUTES in REAL TIME: to create some resources, you need to use a smelter... that takes minutes of REAL TIME to do the crafting. As in 15 minutes to make 6 *things*. This is literally the mechanics of a mobile pay to win game.

- Fighting zombies: the world map is FILLED with zombies (by filled with it, I mean it, there's one every 10 meters in cities and one every 100 meters in the countryside), so you have to fight them with a really bad combat system: hit with melee and move back (or roll) to avoid being hit. That would be acceptable... if the enemies didn't respawn every time you used a campfire - you can get an (expensive) upgrade in the end game (not before!) so that they don't respawn... except you need to get an upgrade in every single zone (there's a dozen of them)...

This fighting is one of the main things that RUINS THE GAME.



The other thing? The padding.


If you look at howlongtobeat, you'll see that this game is supposed to last (if you play the game normally) 55 hours. Yes, really 55.

The problem is that the game doesn't have 55 hours of content... so the developers padded EVERYTHING, this is the most grindy game I ever played:

- Each tool you make has upgrade levels, not 1 or 2, but 4 to 10.
- The map is designed in a way to block paths from you until you have a tool that can destroy the (stronger that you can destroy) obstacle they used to block you, except you can go behind the stuff that's blocked... you just have to take the long route... over... and over... until you finally, 5-10 hours later unlock a tool that is strong enough to destroy the obstacle.
- The game has quests... this should be fine except you end up with 10+ quests at once because you're often missing one item, and none of the quests are interesting, they're just here gate recipes that you can't unlock from your skill tree: meaning, you HAVE to do the quests.




The game, even if it's based on a great idea, is so badly developed that it ends up being awful.

The only way I was able to make it enjoyable after the first 5 hours of playtime was by:

- installing a mod (Peaceful Mode) that kills every enemy as soon as they spawn (the fact that peaceful mode isn't an option in the game with the enemy loots put in stuff you can destroy is just AWFUL, this should be in the game!)

- unlock (and max its upgrade) - with cheats - a tool (the sledgehammer) that can destroy more stuff, but not everything

- install a mod (from nexusmods) that makes the sledgehammer bearable to use (for whatever reason it causes massive screen-shakes every time you hit something with it)



All in all, this isn't a good game. This is just the only game that exists based on the idea of "destroy everything survival game"... except it's not doing it right.




PS: The game graphics almost look like an asset flip, but it's serviceable and "acceptable" (even if the developers REALLY LOVE to use fog)