Recent reviews by excat

Very solid base for Early Access. Makes me look forward to the future of this. I haven't come across any EA jank so far. The game overall feels pretty good so far. It'll be awesome to see how it progresses with more features and polish over time.

This is an easy recommend.

I waited for this one to come out of EA, and 3 hours in, I'm not sure why it's not still in EA, it feels like it should be.

Everything is very stiff feeling, lack of fluidity. The AI bot thing is pretty bad, what it's telling you just disappears. Very subpar combat, even for this type of game which I play a lot of. What I experienced in 3 hours just doesn't make me want to come back and play it. I'll check back in a week before my refund window closes, but if it doesn't feel any better, it's a definite refund. There are too many good games in this genre to play something that is subpar at everything.

I hope they update this a lot.

This also shows the downfall of EA games sometimes, either the people that were playing this were giving bad feedback or they didn't listen to the feedback they were getting.

I would wait 6 months to a year before buying this.

Highly recommend. They have done a great job at addressing community requests, and the game has gotten better and better with each patch.

I hope they add DLC and hopefully a way to enjoy the game with friends. Something like Red Dead Online would be amazing in this world. I don't think the campaign would be great multiplayer, it would need some sort of standalone or specific content for multiplayer to feel good. I feel like the campaign would definitely be less enjoyable co op as it would take away the natural progression of exploration with and co op tends to rush things, and this game is better enjoyable at a slow pace.

So far, this is easily my GOTY, and I have a hard time seeing anything upset it that is supposed to release this year unless another sleeper releases. I haven't enjoyed an RPG like this since The Witcher 3, which is my only 10/10, even with it's flaws. This has been an 8.5/10 so far, but I'm expecting before I get to the end I'll probably seriously conder a 9/10. Some good DLC and/or some sort of good multiplayer would take this to a 9.5/10, one of the best games buys I've had in many years.

Very solid game. The story is interesting and the missions are enjoyable. I've had a lot of fun with the game, currently working on beating the story on hard.

There is decent replay value, but I'm not sure how long it would take for it to get very repetitive. Currently there's 3 difficulties you can replay each mission on. Each mission is on a map that is open to explore.

There is classes with abilities to customize your playstyle and weapons that you level up for attachment progression.

Combat feels really solid.

I am curious on the what they plan for the future, if anything. I would hope they continue the story and add more maps. If they do not, it's a solid 20-30 hours without a dedicated friend group. A friend group would get more time out of it most likely.

Biggest negatives is weapon prestige is pretty meh, basically just a time/resource sink and not rewarding enough for what it is. Performance has been pretty stable outside of connection issues playing online, it does get a bit laggy at times.

Due to price, this would be a neutral if I could not knowing if they are going to be adding more content. $40 is a bit steep for the current limited content. I got it on humble bundle for 20% off, which feels about right, around a $30 game in current form.

Enjoy it, it's definitely fun!

This seems more of an idle game than anything. I see there is some charm to it, but there seems to be no purpose to the game. It's just a time sink, no real story or content, no reason to explore. Everything takes a long time to do and no reason to actually do it. There's not really quests to do or any reason to explore that I could find in almost 20 hours. It's all about gathering resources to, in the end, gather more resources. The quests I experienced were to teach you the basics of material processing.

Combat is barely tolerable, it's not the worst I've experienced, but it's not far off either.

Basic breakdown:
Gather raw resource > process > process again > process into final form > craft what you're wanting to craft
Repeat this with every resource type - and they are painfully slow

You aren't going to make much progress without finding a group of people to join if you intend to progress into the later tiers. After chatting with the community it seems you need a decent sized group if you want any meaningful progression. Many people are multi-box running 2-4 characters at a time due to this.

And empires - one of the "features" of the game, don't even waste your money on that.

There are interesting bits I've experienced so far, but overall everything is very very rough.

They have monetization that's almost an exact replica of Black Desert Online with the different account buffs to buy, inventory slots and weight. Actually a lot feels like BDO, except what matters the most, combat. Combat is horrendous and beyond generic and actually makes the game unenjoyable.

Is it worth checking out while it's on sale for $1, yeah, I think you can have some fun and experience something different and you won't feel bad you spent $1. I wouldn't put any other money into the game. I highly doubt this thing ever launches or has enough players to populate a server. I can see myself putting in 20-30 hours possibly just to experience some more of the different parts in the game. It would be a lot easier to want to put time into the game if combat was even remotely decent, it competes for worst combat ever, I'd be embarrassed it's so bad. It's like day 1 proof of concept need to put something in to run around with so buy an entire combat system for it off some generic marketplace and throw it in your game engine without even testing if it works well or even know how to properly put it into your game level bad.

There is a lot of history behind the game as well if you care to dig into it and who is making the game. I didn't allow any of that to change my opinion any, it just further reassures me to not spend more than the $1.

A Pro is they have both PVE and PVP servers. If they ever get around to making this thing decent, it definitely has appeal for people that love BDO for the life skills without having to deal with toxic side of BDO.

This may be for some people, but it's not for me.

Too many negatives, even for EA.

Horrible voice acting
Story you could care less about almost instantly
Generic combat
Bad performance - game runs decent until an enemy spawns in and it makes the game stutter with every enemy
2 crashes while just changing the graphic settings

(5070ti, DLSS performance, all settings on med or low as possible. Kept stutter no matter settings)

I play a lot of EA games as I enjoy what they are about, but typically a game has to have something going for it, great bones hidden somewhere in the EA jank and sadly this game is missing any bones at all.

Edit: I forgot to mention, I got 49 phishing alerts from my ISP (AT&T) blocking a malicious connection attempt while playing giving me the IP number of the connection. Not sure what that's about and if it's actually legit, something the devs many want to look into. Sorry, if AT&T is saying this IP number the game is trying to contact is connected to a phishing attempt, I'm not allowing it through. Even just putting the IP number into Google search, AT&T blocks it due to phishing.

I'm not sure if that could have been tied to the overall performance issues or not, but, I'm not taking that risk. The performance issues seemed more around rendering and hard pop-ins of enemies, not "network" related.

I want to leave a neutral review, but that's not an option.

Playing Witch Minion build (currently lvl 92) - My gripes are first:

Performance is bad once you hit late game builds. 5950X/5070ti all low settings DLSS performace. Anywhere from 100+ when there's not much going on all the way down to 15 fps. There's things that will help, deleting your shader folders when performance starts to dip, changing your audio settings, etc, but this legit has horrible performance.

Inventory management, it almost feels like a job.

Stash tabs are way over priced for what they are. Making problems, especially QOL ones then selling solutions is just dirty.

Cosmetics aren't cheap, but they're good. I wouldn't mind the price of them if it wasn't for the insane costs of stash tabs. If stash tabs cost 50% less it'd give the MTX store a much better overall feel.

I don't mind the death penalty, but with the performance being as bad as it is, it sucks pretty hard getting one shot by something you can't see and losing xp and your map.

I know it's EA still, but once you get mapping, it gets pretty boring after some hours and then with the performance it makes it harder to enjoy.

Balance of the overall game seems off. Certain campaign bosses are very difficult with certain classes where they are just a cake walk with others, due to movement ability/attack speed/etc.

What I like:

Story
Cosmetics
The build variety/diversity
The overall world building
Beautiful maps
Customer service was great for the one issue I've had to reach out to them about
The challenge is fun most of the time until you hit some of the things that are grossly unbalanced against a few classes
There is a lot of content to enjoy, even at this point of EA

Overall, I do recommend the game, but knowing it's going to be f2p, I would suggest waiting at this point and hope they at least get the game performance in check

Private dedicated servers are a mess. You can join fine, then you can't for unknown amounts of time rebooting the server hoping it fixes whatever is wrong. A lot of time and Googling later, this seems to have been an issue for a while now and it plagues a lot of people on and off again.

At this point, I've spent more time trying to get the server where everyone can join it at one time together and it just won't work reliably for everyone at the same time.

I've played through a hard lunar mode season and a novice season on 2 different characters. I would recommend the game even less now, but still would be neutral if possible. I started on a hard lunar and then made a second character on a novice server with my wife.

The floaty feeling feels like crap, but you do get used to it after a while.

I can see what they are wanting to potentially do with the 6 week resets, but it will only make sense if they continue to add more content at the end of each scenario so there is something new to experience. Only time will tell if this will work out. Think of the different scenarios as a new DLC that you can bring your existing character to, you just have to level up and experience the DLC for itself while your character retains the knowledge it has gained previously (blueprints). It could work, but you have to have something new to go do or people will stop playing very quickly when the only thing they have to do is restart and do the exact same thing over again and nothing is different. It's a weird and different approach.

All in game pricing is absolutely disgusting and predatory. People are spending a lot of money on loot boxes and what happens when the player base doesn't spend enough to keep the servers live? It all goes away. Due to the structure of the game, I heavily question the longevity of the game. If the glass skin pack was equal to $15-$20 in game and I could spend $15-$20 in game, I would do it, but not the $50 you have to spend to get the one building skin pack.

The game is a mass asset reuser. It's fine to a degree, but if you pay attention, after you've been to a few different POIs almost all of them are the same just in a different location with very few unique experiences across the map. This is even more insulting to the outrageous prices of the MTX and makes the game feel even more like an uninspired money grab for the absolute least amount of work possible. Map exploration is enjoyable though and it's easy to forget until you realize this is the exact same house/warehouse/compound you've looted 30 times in the last hour just in a different place on the map.

There is fun to be had in the game, especially if you have a group of friends to play with to synergize specialities with and you can avoid the temptation to swipe. The most enjoyment I've had is map exploration, dungeons and public events. It does seems that there is a decent amount of build diversity outside of meta builds, which is nice to see. You don't have to run meta to comfortably clear difficult content.

I tried out their $5 one month sub (don't recommend it) and premium battle pass as my way to support the game for the time I've spent playing. The biggest perk to the sub it seemed to me is your tent gains the ability to break down your junk so you have to go home less due to weight, but you don't get your perks so you just lose out on materials by using it if you have any perks at all on your disassembler. The battle pass is one of the cheaper ways to get a skin for your character if you like the one they currently have. I would only buy the battlepass after you've completed it and get the cheaper version of it, not the one that boosts you 15 levels for extra $$. Battle pass progression rate feels good for the time spent playing at least, it's not absurdly grind which is nice.

I still feel like there's potential for the game to stay around long term, but it's going to depend heavily on how much and how frequent they add new content with the 6 week model they have. They need to basically come out with 6 new DLCs per year to give players a reason to continue to play the game.

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Original review:

This would be a neutral overall if possible, but I can't recommend due to the negatives. If the over the top pricing of the MTX were lowered by at least 50% and loot boxes and seasons were removed I would recommend the game as it would be fun to build different houses with different skins in different locations around the map.

Decent graphics.
Decent game play.
Music has been good. (SFX are hugely lacking though)
Devs are active in patching the game.

Seasons - just...no.
Controls are floaty, unresponsive and overall feels bad.
UI is an absolute mess of menus buried in menus.
Some of the text translations and voice acting don't match, or even come close.

Cosmetic only MTX which is great, but they have loot boxes which are just cancer. (Loot chances to get what you actually want are 0.04%, less than half of 1% drop rate, yes they publish the drop rates in game, it's buried, but there)

FOMO - when can we be done with this...please.

Another game...another battle pass.... sigh (and not even a good one at that)

Extremely over priced cosmetics that aren't in the loot boxes. Shockingly so. Most of the nice things you want need to be reduced by 50-70%. You have to buy $50 in premium currency to be able to buy a single building skin pack. Even in FO76 the cost of the premium building skins are less than 50% of that, they are around $13 depending on which Atoms package you buy. These prices are egregious, on top of loot boxes.

It's a decent free game at best. Put money into it at your own risk. I don't see it has long term replay value with the current model. If you can keep yourself from putting money into the game and enjoy it for a season for what it is, that's about the only way it's worth playing in the current form.

Hopefully that will change though as there's great potential, but I feel like this is probably more of a money grab and ride it until it dies type of thing.