Recent reviews by Laserspewpew

It's like actual space but with more pixels and xeno purges.

To start this off, I need to say that I’ve played Project Zomboid for most of its development history, going all the way back to when it was a tiny map back before the developers had to start all over from scratch. I’ve been keeping an eye on its development ever since, as I believed that it had some great potential. I even supported its Greenlight on Steam. However, in my honest opinion, today’s Project Zomboid is a game that I really wish had taken a different approach. The elements are there: it’s a challenging game that rewards you with immense satisfaction once you get established and don’t have to worry about everything that goes bump in the night. Sure, it can be a little rough to learn at first, but when you break it down it’s a good example of a survival game done right (for the most part).

As much as I could praise the game (as I’ll be honest, I greatly enjoyed it) I just can’t recommend it in its current state. I won't be going into the good things about the game in this review, as I think they would overshadow something more important. I feel like the developers have lost sight of what their original plan was, and that they’ve also become unaware or unwilling to acknowledge the community’s more pressing concerns. Quite simply, this is a game that has effectively stalled out – and it did so years ago. Focusing on new features is fine, but putting an unnecessary amount of detail into them is taking it too far and only leads to long waits and lots of disappointment.

As for the latest example of what went wrong: cars. Cars have been in development for the better part of almost a year and a half now as of writing this. So much time has been spent on things that we just don’t need in a game like this. We’ve been wanting cars for quite a while, but not like this…

- Detailed vehicle conditions? Just give the entire thing a health value, and give some visual cues that it’s been damaged… we don’t need a part-by-part breakdown of what needs fixing. If it hits zero, just let it stall out and be unusable unless it gets fixed.

- Varied gas usage? Just give vehicle types different sized tanks and have them use fuel by percentage points, so larger vehicles use more gas in comparison to smaller ones.

- Gear shifting? I’ll just drop a quote from one of the “news” updates regarding this, “…Firstly while playing around with sound implementation we realized that the noise of gear shifts was fairly vital…”

- Rollover physics? While I can see it being a fun addition, I don’t see this being something that needed its own focus point for who-knows-how-long.

- Suspension? Is this really necessary? Really?

I’m sure there’s more that I could pick at, but I neither want to look any further or believe I need to say more to make my point clear. Give us functional, relatively simplistic vehicles, not this over-thought-out mess.

(Edit: As of 02/18, I've still still seen nothing "major" being talked about. Every week has been focused on the over-the-top cars, now with even more unecessary detail. They should rename this game to "Project Car Simulator" at this rate.)

Of course, there are other things that I feel should have been left out entirely or should have waited until after all the major features were in the game and it could finally be called a “full release” (nutrition, clothing degradation, detailed first-aid)… while not bad, it should have waited. Some features that have been the subject of their attention for quite some time, such as new animations and models, still have yet to make it into the game in favor of their recent vehicle obsession.

Where are cellars? Fort Knox? Increased building height? Creative mode? NPCs? I’m sure I’m missing some, but you tend to lose track after several years go by with no news other than “vehicles, vehicles, vehicles, animations, vehicles, vehicles”. This game could have released years ago if they just addressed the things people wanted most, then they could have spent the time afterwards working on new extensions of existing features or new additions altogether. Instead, we are left with a game that is left looking more and more abandoned part way through development, and with the current pacing of content it is likely to have a full release sometime after 2020.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that the developers are still at it and keep us informed every week, but this game is no longer what it once was. Neither is it a game that stands out among more recent titles, as it has been held back for so long that it has become quite dated. I feel that I've given the developers plenty of time to change focus, and yet that still hasn't happened after years of waiting.