Recent reviews by Rubat

Pretty good game, but does get boring after a while.

The graphics are decent, but not great. Especially disappointing are the weather effects. There is rain, but there's not really varying intensities of it, and it's usually too bright for rain and thunderstorms, in terms of sunlight not being blocked by clouds, etc. There is no foggy weather. Driving speed also does not affect rain effect on windshield.
Sprites on lights, especially indoors/in tunnels, look exceptionally bad, they are too opaque and just look wrong.

I think a few tweaks to the graphics and the weather system could go a long way to improving atmosphere in the game.

I appreciated the 3 hour long tutorial, the attention to detail is quite crazy, but the final exam felt like total cancer. The amount of precision they expect is nowhere near what's needed to play the game or any of the 26 tutorial stages before. It just feels extremely unfair to fail at the end of the long course and have to start over, often due to "not driving alongside the predefined path" even though you are on the road including the trailer, with no overhangs or anything. its just pure BS.

There is VR support, but it is only accessible on a separate beta branch and requires a launch parameter.
This game is one of the very few that still supports my ancient racing wheel's force feedback.

Other issues:
* There are no indicators for all the cruise control modes on the dash or the HUD
* Can't peek out of driver window and look forward/down
* Cities are super tiny, there's like 2 streets per city. Lots of roads just can't be driven.
* Trucks seem to be artificially limited to 90km/h by the game
* A lot of trucks do different beeps, and the game never tells you what they mean
* The speed limit road signs are pretty much always ignored by the game for counties outside of UK, the speed limit game forces on you is always lower than the signs say. For example the sign will say 100 or 120, but game still sets the in-game speed limit to 80 or rarely 90. What's funny is that all the cars in-game drive at the speed limits the signs give, not the speed limit the player is forced to drive at, so you just see everyone passing you, and you cant do anything about it.
* The multiplayer? convoy system appears to be non functional? It's just stuck on "fetching convoy list". The game never explains what the "World of Trucks" is, or why should I care about making an account for it.
* Headlights don't light up the road in the evening and under the bridges.

Weak recommend. The puzzles are decent, not too hard, not too easy The base game can be completed solo. Extra levels that require 4 players cannot.

* No online coop, only local coop.
* The game never tells you what the controls are
* I don't like that many "kill you" elements are hidden until they kill you. Spiked floors for example, why couldn't they have unique texture to signify danger? Or moving blocks that kill you? Why aren't they and their paths marked somehow? This is just bad design and these deaths are not fair. The trial and error process of learning what hidden BS kills you is not fun.
* Can't rotate the camera around the level, so sometimes its unintuitive or impossible to see where a laser is, or where to go, or where the secrets are.
* The physics based movement adds nothing but frustration when falling off of edges
* I appreciate the presence of voice acting, but a lot of the jokes are just so supremely dumb and cringe inducing.

A surprisingly better experience than Car Mechanic Simulator 2018. Nowhere near as grindy achievement-wide as well, you don't need to sell 1000 vehicles or unscrew 500,000 bolts.

It has its issues, but for the most part, it is an enjoyable chill game.

I appreciate the decal painting being able to load local images (and generally seems to be well made feature), only PNGs though, and your designs seem to appear in later quests which is cool.

Issues & nitpicks:
* No process automation for later game. You still have to manually screw in every bolt at hour 0 and at hour 1000. Thankfully it is slightly sped up by passive skills.
* The controls are still a bit wonky on PC. Camera controls are annoying - there's no way to pan or orbit using mouse.
* I don't like how you interact with the workstations. The over reliable on UI wheels for everything leads to waste of time. A more traditional USE key would be far more logical interaction rather than LMB into a UI wheel. On numerous occasions I had accidentally put workstations into inventory instead of accessing them because the remove button is very close to the USE button.
* Sometimes the shop or the inventory are just empty, so you cant buy stuff to progress, or cant see what broken parts you have on hand.
* Search doesn't work well with spaces in names.
* Texture quality is quite poor for the game's file size and how tiny the environments are, and the game's release date.
* The music is very loud by default and quite repetitive.

So I wanted to try this and see why it is so popular and why it has so many DLC, since I got it for free from some promo the developers did.

Little did I know that the promo was for a single christmas themed DLC and the game seemingly has literally no content without any DLCs. (I will grant that there is Steam Workshop support)

What really surprised me is that there is not even a tutorial in the base game. Not even as a free DLC as far as I can tell. It literally tells me in the main menu to "Start here" and there are no options to pick. No maps and no vehicles.

I don't know if buying the game from the "Buy Train Simulator Classic 2024" option would give you some DLCs "for free", (I wouldn't be surprised if they don't) but giving your game away as promo for free without any of the tutorial content to hook potential players is just insanity.

It's a decent VR stealth game. Very simplistic, there's very little to this game outside of that. Weapon selection is a bit underwhelming as well, but it works.

It is a bit pricey though for what it is. I beat it in 6 hours.

There are collectibles, "nightmare mode" and arcade levels with (local only?) leaderboards if you are into that sort of thing.

Item holding interaction is a bit wacky on Index controllers, it not using the grip at all which also limits when you can do with the stuff you pick up.

Some achievements are either broken or are extremely annoying to get.

It's fun for the short while it lasts, but the ending is a bit of an Outer Wilds situation, where there's a random "horror" section just before the treasure.

Another slightly annoying thing is that none of the hidden achievements are unlockable until you first beat the game and start a new one.

Unbelievably bad, to the point of me wondering why they even spent the 2 hours to make this "experience" a reality.

There are no controls. You just look around at some random points the game automatically teleports you around. No moving around, no inspecting details up close. There is no text to read about the history of the place or any of its parts, or anything at all.

The graphics are so bad here it is mind bogging. It was definitely much better in Assassin's Creed Unity than it is here, even ignoring the crusty render scale here that cannot be changed.

They had a perfectly good model already made for AC Unity years ago, and then they just compressed that into 2 pixels and put it out for free.

It's just a waste of time.

A great RPG with many, MANY flaws. Just like the case with Red Dead Redemption 2, the realism detracts a lot from this experience in my opinion.

The game has quite deep simulation of medieal times and life, both to the benefit and detriment of the overall experience.
I liked things like the reading skill. The alchemy skill, even though it does get old fast, due to how slow brewing potions are.

I really liked the atmosphere and the environment, especially at dawn/dusk or during rain (rain effects are kinda bad though).
The main quest like is pretty good, I felt like I actually cared about it, despite the overflowing amounts of information and characters in the game.

Lighting and global illumination are really nice in this game. Not the best I have ever seen, but really good. They can be buggy sometimes, mostly particles not having lighting at all.

The last few hours of the main story are very epic.

I didn't hate the save system. You can still save scum all you want, but it will cost you in-game resources to do so.
I felt that it adds to the experience, even if it did end up wasting a lot of play time because of crashes and progression bugs. Getting the "save potions" is quite easy.

First and foremost, I have to talk about the godawful combat system. It's just inexcusably bad, easily worst in any game I have ever played. Not even asset flips have combat this bad.
This is easily the biggest issue with the game.
Realism does come into the equation here, for sure. I get the "why would son of a blacksmith know how to wield a sword" argument, but this ia weak excuse for just how insanely unenjoyable combat encounters are.

You get ambushed (while just running around the map) by 3 or more people and you just have no chance of fleeing or defending yourself.

People may bring up the "master strike" argument - but it is also a very bad argument. A hidden 1-button combo ability that the game never tells you about, which makes you unbeatable in 1v1 combat, does not redeem this combat system. Not by a long shot.

The game has combo system for combat, but that is also simply unusable - enemies can perform master strikes on you (and do so extremely often) or they die in 1 hit later in the game, so you basically can never actually use any of the combos.

Worse still, in many cases your character will just refuse to perform attacks, such as in tight spaces.

Even worse still, is the camera lock during combat. It automatically locks onto enemies and forces you to look at them. So when you want to turn around and run away - that's right you can't! The game will try its best to make sure you see who kills you. Even if you do manage to break the lock, as soon as an enemy catches up to you and hits you, you are back looking at them!
EVEN WORSE STILL, when you get hit, often you can be "thrown around" by your enemies making your view spazz out, disorienting you greatly, and basically making the game simply unplayable.
It gets worse still, of course. The game has a directional attack system, which you select with your mouse. So when you try to select a direction to attack from, you may just accidentally lose enemy lock and be disoriented. Or the lock will simply just not happen for a few seconds after moves like "clinch".
Yeah, it gets worse again. When there are multiple enemies, you have to move your camera to try to switch targets, but the game will just refuse to let you do that most of the time, or switches to random enemy near the one you want to look at, or switches the lock to some other enemy that hits you right after you successfully switch lock. This makes story encounters with many enemies and friendlies just pure random chaos, no tact to any of it at all. You get very little control then.

The reason why the combat is bad is not because "peasant can't use swords". This combat system is just rotten from the very core of it. It was never going to work, and it can never work.

The best way I found to deal with the combat is to just do not engage in combat at all, or when you are forced - rely heavily on your compations to take aggro.

Bow aiming has no reticle, even if you level up your bow skill, not even as a perk on level 20 or something. Yet another combat feature gimped for the sake of realism. But you get a crosshair when riding on horseback. If you have no bow drawn.


Now to mention other issues.

First of all, the dog companion. It is also one of the worst implementations of this feature compared to any other game. Primarily the issue is that the dog gets in the way, WAY too much. Almost feels like the devs made it this way on purpose to frustrate the player.

Secondly, the horrible capsule-based movement that makes you unable to go up stairs sometimes, makes you slide off of everything. It is very frustrating sometimes, and it's crazy how this problem was solved in 1998, but yet here we are, sliding from slight inclanations on the floor in 2018.

* Extreme frame pacing issues - FPS counter shows 100+ FPS, but it appears/feels like 20 if you have very high shader detail or higher.
* Very inconsistent performance in general. Sometimes you get 30-40 FPS in the same area in the same PC and settings, sometimes 100+. No rime or reason to any of it.
* Experienced a few crashes after 30 hours of play, losing a lot of progress. Could be due to max settings.
* Game tells you to wear different outfits for different purposes, but there is no way to easily store different outfits, or mark stuff as favorite. So I ended up not bothering, and it never really affected me.
* Helping guards kill cumans (enemies) or bandits in random encounters randomly counts as a crime, for some reason.
* Multiple quest progression stopping bugs, sometimes loading screen doesnt go away for MINUTES at a time.
* Certain actions, such as pickpocketing and talking to NPCs are bound to the same key, so if you hold your talk button instead of pressing it, have fun being a criminal for no reason.
* The "move with the speed of the NPC" feature the game boasts to you about doesn't work correctly. You still always move either too slow and too fast. It doesn't work at all on horseback.

* The game kept unequppeing my weapons and random points.
* No way to put more than 1 custom map marker. So if you encountered a bandit camp with a very hard locked chest, you either have to write it out on a piece of paper, or just miss out on the loot.
* A lot quests expect you to check in on the NPC you did the quest for later for the actual reward, including achievements
* No skill XP gain notifications, doesnt tell you what reputation you gained or lost
* Game is fairly quiet by default, even after maxing out sound sliders.
* 30 fps lock in cutscenes
* I have experienced weird reputation losses without any logical explanation at random points.
* The map is annoying to use, the icons overlap each other, making it impossible to see some of them.
* The game is quite hand holdy in the beginning, and really discourages you from doing side quests as that will cause certain events in other unfinished quests to go "the bad ending" if you take too long to get around to finshing the quest.

It is alright, but very short. Maybe too short for the asking price, without a sale.

There is some replayability with collectibles and time trials, but I do not care about those.

I have mixed feelings about this game. Ultimately, I think it's a bit too rough for the asking price. The controls are bit weird, there's pretty much no story at all, you are just thrown into the world and told "Kill X boss". That's it. Crafting feels underdeveloped, and gear progression is borderline pointless.

There is some exploration, which is nice, but there's kinda no point in doing it due to the lackluster progression.
Music is a standout here, elevating the experience.
The boss fights themselves are quite repetitive. There are 8 in total (+ 3 mini bosses), and there are very few mechanics to those fights.

Playing on the normal/middle difficulty, the game felt very forgiving/easy. I am not sure I died once. The only frustration is slow movement/melee and minimal stamina for the first 2 boss encounters, before getting enough collectibles for the upgrades.

On a sale, this could be more appealing, perhaps if you also played the game this is obviously inspired by (Shadow of the Collosus) and have a craving for a "boss climbing" game.