Recent reviews by ivanvector

Purchased during a sale to try it out. The game download is small but on launch an installer runs to actually download the game. The base game is 95GB and the server it comes from is slow (I have 350Mbit fibre internet, it's still slow), and the installer's download time counts as play time. After an hour the download was only at 10%. I wasn't going to be able to even start the simulator before being ineligible for refund, so I'm forking out $80 on a game that I can't try first, and might not even run. Too much risk for me, uninstalled and refunded.

I get that the game needs to be big for the level of detail advertised, but maybe make the base download contain more of the game then, or make scenery download in chunks as needed like other simulators do. I also wasn't too enthused about how expensive all the DLC is, and there doesn't seem to be a single floatplane available. I might come back to this but for now I'll stick to more established sims.

Beautifully illustrated of course, and a fun survival challenge to go with it. "No instructions" isn't exactly true: there's no tutorial, but your character gets hints about simple first steps to survive, and you go from there. Pretty deep crafting and technology tree, mini-challenges, plenty of resources to discover and exploit and strange creatures to interact with. Easy to pick up but challenging enough that you'll starve on your second day but keep coming back.

A fun way to smash stuff and blow off some steam, good graphics and selection of vehicles/tracks/game modes, career mode gives you a good variety of challenges, good online play, just-okay physics and pretty simplistic upgrades/tuning. If you're looking for kind of a grown-up Carmageddon, you'll love this. As a racing/derby simulator, give it a pass. Damage is *rendered* realistically but taking damage (even losing a wheel, which would be a nice touch if it did anything) doesn't affect your car's performance at all until all of a sudden you're 100% wrecked and have to start over. Aerodynamics? No. The studio should hire someone who's ever driven a manual: shifting is game-breakingly terrible, with a pointless lockout after shifting so don't plan on rapid downshifts, and no way to shift directly into first or reverse so if you spin out in a high gear you'll sit and idle for 10-15 seconds hammering the downshift button to get to the right gear; you might as well quit the race and start over.

Overall: it's fun for what it is, but it could be a lot better. Just fixing the manual shifting would be an enormous improvement.