Recent reviews by Sv443

I tried to stay as spoiler-free as possible and will continue to update this as I play.

Summary:
Firstly, I'm enjoying the hell out of this game. It uses the base formula from DS1 and greatly improves upon every mechanic, down to very minute details.
However it also has its list of problems, some of which are pretty fundamental flaws. To highlight them I decided to make this review negative.
If you can live with these flaws or had a great time playing DS1, the game will still be an absolutely fantastic experience for you.
If not, it will still be very enjoyable, but possibly not for the full price tag.

Performance:
I'm playing with DLSS on and am using the "Very High" preset and I get around 100-120 FPS at 1440p resolution.
Sadly the performance is nowhere near stable and after a few hours there's a noticeable decrease to about 70-90 FPS and quite long lag spikes (<1s).

Positive:
+++ Game looks absolutely amazing. The first game was already beautiful, this one took it to another level. The environments are busier this time around, but in a good way where it makes your eyes less bored.
+++ Many new weapons, for complex loadouts and very diverse fights against 3 different enemy types.
+++ Finally some living, breathing animals. And shiny ones too!
+++ Environmental mechanics that just make sense to have (flooding rivers, earthquakes, erosion, wildfires, avalanches)
+++ New structures and overhauled previous structures.
++ A music player that works outside of private rooms and even has playlists.
++ Lots of settings to customize very miniscule details, which are sorely missing from most other games. Seriously, I could and probably will spend hours in photo mode. Also just lots of stuff to customize in general.
++ Monorails!
++ Resources are much easier to farm.
++ Very interesting new characters and reappearances of old characters.
++ New BT variants with their own mechanics.
++ Skill tree for choosing a loadout of cool enhancements.
++ I finished the story after around 80 hours (and will probably continue to play it for another 40), so the price tag is justified.

Negative:
--- Vehicles are still way too overpowered. Their ubiquity and utility defeats the entire purpose of the game as the world is littered with them and you can carry obscene amounts of cargo, and even use them as an offensive weapon by attaching auto-turrets while firing guns of your own. This renders a large chunk of the game mechanics and diversity of loadouts useless.
--- There's still too much handholding in my opinion. DS1 did this, with Diehardman calling Sam every 10 minutes to explain something that another NPC and two separate popups already explained, and this game sadly does a lot of the same things.
This also ties into how oblivious some of the characters act; i.e. I'll have figured something out already but the game takes another few hours of people saying "hmm I wonder" just to come to the same conclusion.
-- You can no longer see which other facilities have deliveries for a select facility. This means to unlock or level up facilities you just need to go around randomly in the area and hope and pray for RNG. I don't see any point in this feature being removed.
-- The dialogue can start to feel oddly synthetic or forced. I don't know if it's just me, but this sometimes makes it hard to make out the emotions and intent of characters and then that sadly takes away from a scene's impact.
-- Sam has a dumb habit of putting away guns randomly and then refusing to take them out again even after 10 presses of L2. This is the only instance where the controls and combat feel awfully sluggish. Seriously, it'll often take me upwards of 5 seconds to swap weapons while actively being shot at by 8 different enemies.
-- Dollman talks too much. I can appreciate the occasional joke but I don't need him interjecting some dumb one liner into a tense scene between Sam and the main antagonist, or doing Diehardman's job of explaining things that were already explained twice, for a third time.
-- After a few hours, lag spikes really start to accumulate, so the game needs to be restarted. (Quite a few people complained about poor performance. For me the initial performance is close to flawless, lag only starts to appear and get worse over the span of a few hours.)
-- When parts of the HUD are turned off, they are just entirely gone, like the BB stress level or battery level. I wish there was a way to bring up the HUD for a few seconds with a button press. Maybe on the unused "create" (select) button.
- The Zipline hitbox is about 3x as large as it should be. I lost countless S-rank orders already because of running into it with a tri-cruiser.
- The game autosaves after delivery and before accepting a new job. This means all prep work you do will NOT be included in the autosave. It was quite annoying to get used to having to manual save immediately after an autosave.
- I don't know yet whether they added a cat and did not make it pettable, or if I'm just missing some obvious Kojimaism. I'm hoping I have yet to meet a Tarcat Pettingman who bestows upon me such technology.

Very nice though kinda short Clicker and Katamari-esque game.
Feels very satisfying and addictive to play, there's a good amount of upgrades and the prestiging also feels fair.
Horror elements are there, but I wouldn't go so far as to call this a full-on horror game, I kinda expected more, what with the "psychological horror" tag being the first content-type-tag.
I got all achievements in 8 hours, so I'd say the price of the game is about right.

The Good:
- Incredibly well done mix of many genres; Roguelike, Base Building (like those mobile game ads but actually good), Soulslike, Metroidvania, Dungeon Crawler, Extraction Games, whatever.
- Amazingly done sprites and animations (although watching long animations without the ability to skip them gets boring after a while too).
- Amazing soundtrack.
- Fluid controls that feel very intuitive out of the box.
- Great number of accessibility options.

The Bad:
- RNG. Take a slice out of Subnautica's book and PLEASE use a semi-deterministic RNG. I can't take the fishing minigame anymore. The story is already finished but I cannot get a lobster for the life of me. The consensus online is to "use the fishing ritual", which you either have access to, which gets the quest done in like 3 minutes, or you don't, which means it'll take many, many, many hours. Tough luck. Have fun replaying the past 40 hours to choose the correct doctrine.
- The game seems to have quite a crashing problem, which only loses up to an in-game day of progress but can still be annoying. In my playtime up to writing this review I had 3 unavoidable crashes.
- Recurring tasks that don't evolve over time and just end up taking up valuable time. I get that any good cult has their daily sermon, but after watching it for the 200th time I just wish it were skippable, just like some other repetitive tasks.

- Any time you dare to interact with any polygon in this game (at any speed) it's a gamble of whether the physics engine decides to do absolutely nothing, or catapult your truck 20m into the air and make it do 7.3 somersaults. This gets about 10x worse at higher speeds and 100x worse on multiplayer.
- "Features" like the lane keeping assistant are over-sensitive and imbalanced and will make your truck turn 90° on a whim randomly (probably because road segments are inconsistently made). This happened multiple times to me, ruining my cargo instantly, and now I'm fed up and just have it disabled for good.
- There are roads hidden from your GPS until you find them which have no "X overlay", so the game tries to make this the indicator that you found a hidden road. However, 98% of roads that don't have the X overlay instead just have a plain invisible wall which you'll run into. Additionally, these roads don't give you ANYTHING but a few prefabs the devs plonked down. They could've been a great gameplay enhancement by unlocking extra sleeping lots, small gas stations or ACTUAL SHORTCUTS which would make it worth the discovery.
- NPCs will always run into you in specific scenarios (which you have to pay for), regardless of hazard lights or you spamming the hell out of the horn key.
- Menus still feel clunky, probably because of the lag spike when pressing something and the transition delay. The fact there's no setting to disable the transition and to "never show again" certain popups like post vehicle and trailer purchase after all this time boggles my mind.
- Achievements range from super easy all the way to "spend 50 hours waiting for RNG to give you this very specific cargo from this very specific city, which you have to drive to this other very specific city. Three times by the way. Also we won't tell you which companies count towards this achievement, tee hee :3". Since you can only sleep 3 times to refresh jobs, it ends up boiling down to "teleport to a ferry port, take a ferry back and forth literally 30 times and check each time if the incredibly specific job you need is available, then teleport to it"
- There's a super weird bug on controller where in some constellations it's entirely impossible to drive forward or backward, while pressing W or S on the keyboard still works fine.
- Graphics are pretty good, environments are very beautiful, realistic and stay engaging (except the Iberia DLC).

Truly one of the games ever, I will be 90 years old and still enjoy playing it cause it actually has infinite replayability.
Just unlocking all actual game content probably takes around 1000 hours, and then there's the entire steam workshop to keep you busy until cryo-sleep gets invented.

They went and turned a 100h per playthrough game into 1000h.
Hats off Wube.

This game has an amazing balance of detail and ease of use and I love that there's no "strings" attached like micromanagement or overly precise placement.
The daily theme also made it much more engaging for me because it gave me a loose objective and then I could decide for myself when I achieved it.
All I wish for is more map themes, making the color-change tool able to change flower patches, and more different kinds of decoration than just lanterns, windows and trees and randomly spawning ones (or even just add a menu to choose from all of them).

I love the gameplay loop of this game. It has a nice difficulty curve and the type of micromanagement it offers feels just about right to me.
However:
- It gets unbearably laggy the more customers are walking through the store, and it stacks each day. By day two it's noticeably laggy, by day three the game is barely playable and needs to be reloaded from the main menu.
- The earning to recurring cost ratio doesn't feel well balanced. Upgrades cost like $5000 and you'll be making $500 on a good day.
- Taking out a loan basically means you can't really buy or upgrade anything for the next x days (15 by default). Without taking out loans the game's progression comes to an absolute crawl, no matter if the prices are above, equal to, or below the average market price.
- The gigantic amount of boxes that are required to fill up the storage at the start of the day is also a massive pain point for me. Where's the fun in spam clicking 100 buttons, then sitting there for 15 IRL minutes doing nothing and watching NPCs sloppily pathfind to put boxes into storage?
- Also one of the delivery spawnpoints is inside a building, meaning the delivery expires, which causes some kind of memory leak or other bug with perpetually worsening performance, until the game is reloaded from the main menu.

This is some super essential stuff that should've been caught instantly in playtesting, which makes me fear this game isn't ever gonna take stability seriously.

Edit: instead of fixing these problems they have now announced DLCs. Way to build on unstable ground, can't wait to not buy them!

I really loved this game when I first played it. It brings some new stuff to the endless table of city building games and it was interesting from beginning to end.
The problem is that's about it. You will have about 10h of gameplay and then you're done and you have seen absolutely everything the game has to offer. There are achievements for playing through the entire game 6 times, but the devs have announced that they are done with this game and will not add any new features, so the second playthrough is already extremely boring and I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
This game had lots of potential, being a fantasy-medieval-type game with good graphics and not too much micro-management, but they squandered it.
I'd recommend you buy this on a 50% sale or something (if at all).

Spoiler-free TLDR: I don't recommend this DLC if you already finished the base game. Try to get it in a bundle with the base game and other DLCs on sale.

First off, the base game is one of my favorites of all time so I'm not writing this review light-heartedly.
I bought this DLC after already 100%-ing the base game and Pale Reach DLC. Unfortunately, I was pretty much done with the Iron Rig in a couple hours story-wise and was then back on the 100% grind which is very same-y to the base game. The new mechanics (like the advanced rod tier or the "oil patches" and the associated hostile creatures) just don't feel novel enough to justify the full price and they require a lot of driving back and forth through the entire map, scouring for resources.
However if you can get the base game and the DLCs in a bundle and play with the Iron Rig from a new save file, it will be a much welcome expansion to the map and the playtime and will probably feel much more "integrated" into the gameplay loop.