Recent reviews by Nipukka

The time that I've spent in the game has been enjoyable but it stopped being fun far before I completed every main quest or side activity available to me. The last part of this review will focus on the negatives while the first part will describe what the game is about and what I liked about it. This game was very gripping at first and I was highly immersed in it until the blatant gameplay flaws became too noticeable to deal with anymore.

The game is based around gathering materials to upgrade your weapons and build up your little village. You gather fellow tribesmen to join you and also find specialists to join you to get better weapons, gathering skills etc. After that you can build them huts in your village and upgrade those huts for further skills and weapons.

An ability that you gain early on includes the ability to tame many different animals. Wolves, jaguars and eventually even sabertooths. There are more animals than what I just mentioned along with rare variants of them. You get to have that animal follow you around and act as your companion throughout your scavenging adventures. This is optional and you can dismiss and call any tamed beast at any time you like. You can give them basic commands like go here, attack this or call them back to you.

Gathering materials is not at all tedious and is quickly done, especially if you disable looting animations in the options menu (which I highly recommend doing). Different areas of the map contain different materials and you need different animal pelts to upgrade your gear.

There are human enemies alongside all the dangerous animals. These are Udam and Izila tribesmen. They're always hostile and basically just this game's version of bad guys to kill. You capture their outposts to grow your own tribe's influence over the area.

This last part of the review is focused on what I found negative about the game and why I stopped playing it early.

- Weapon wheel is annoying. You have a weapon wheel that comes up when holding down Q. It's fine at the beginning of the game but as you get more weapons and tools it gets very cluttered. You get two different clubs, three different bows and several different throwable items. If you want to change your bow you need to open the weapon wheel and highlight the bow, then use your scrollwheel to select different variants. Same with throwables, highlight the item and scroll through with scrollwheel. This weapon wheel constantly resets the items to their defaults so I ended up constantly scrolling to use traps because it defaulted to bait all of the time.

- Losing in cutscenes. This is common in many games but this game especially annoyed me with it. Your character is a great hunter who can tame apex predators but still gets knocked out or captured in cutscenes because we need to see the big baddies of the enemy tribes. I'd have my sabertooth tiger by my side during gameplay but then a cutscene would trigger and the tiger is nowhere to be seen while I go through my mandatory enemy tribe leader introduction cutscene where my character is completely incompetent and helpless.

- One particular escort mission. One of your specialists goes off on a quest for revenge once he finds out the location of a particular enemy. Your task is to find him. You find him in a cave and heal him up. After that the enemy reinforcements arrive and you have to escape while escorting this person. This person in question rushes forward like a maniac and takes 25-33% of his total health in damage with each spear thrown at him. If you do nothing he dies in less than 30 seconds. So you're forced to rush even harder past him and clear all the enemies as quickly as possible so that he doesn't get himself killed. This is very frustrating since you also get killed easily by rushing so hard but there's no way to tell this person to stay back. Easily the most frustrating escort mission I have ever done in a game.

- Tank enemies don't make any sense to exist. There are big brute enemies. Pretty basic stuff. Except these guys eat absolutely absurd amounts of damage. In other Far Cry games this could be justified by them having heavy armor but they're just half naked dudes in this game. I could literally shoot ten arrows into their head and they would not fall. Don't even think about trying to melee these guys. I was able to stunlock one but got bored after like 15 swings. They eat far more damage than cave bears, mammoths or sabertooth tigers. It does not make any sense why these human enemies can take so much damage. They will literally solo a cave bear (a massive bear, bigger than a normal bear) and not even break a sweat. The only reliable method for clearing them that I found were traps. Gets pretty boring but it's the only thing that doesn't involve me shooting at their head for 60 seconds straight.

- Trap placement is very frustrating. You have the ability to place down traps. Except half the time you get giant red text that says you can't place traps here. So I ended up spamming the lay down trap button while moving around until the game let me place one. But you could go through the entire animation of placing down the trap and it will not be on the ground because you didn't stay in the one pixel that the game considers valid for placing down a trap. In enemy outposts I'd sometimes go through the animation of placing one trap 2-4 times before it finally appeared on the ground where I wanted it to.

- As soon as you're spotted for even one millisecond, every single enemy in proximity knows your exact location. This is what finally made me drop the game. I was lining up a shot with my bow and the guy turned around. I shot the arrow but the detection meter filled up completely right before the arrow landed in his head. At that point the entire fort was on full alert and enemies started to rush towards my location from all directions. The guy I killed did not have time to shout for help or make any kind of noise. No alarms were raised but because of the detection meter the game told every enemy my location. And even when an alarm does get raised, the game literally spawns extra enemies around the fort instead of just alerting the ones already in it.

Overall personal score: 6.5/10

Best played with a wheel + pedals. Continuous updates throughout the years and very open mod support make this one of the best games in the simulation genre.

Very relaxing to play with music, audiobooks, podcasts or whatever you can think of playing in the background while you drive around.

Overall very fun and I look forward to the full release. The cashier minigame was my favorite aspect.

A few points of feedback:

- The skid-steer loader (aka Rudy) is very sluggish to operate. The turning radius is far too wide, a skid-steer should be able to do very tight turns within a small radius. Aside from that it would be nice if you could hold down LMB while approaching a pile of sand so that you could pick it up as soon as you're in range. The overheating mechanic seems like an unnecessary gimmick to me since it's very predictable and just leads to a routine of LMB followed by RMB because you know the pipes will turn red as soon as you pick up sand. It isn't dynamic like pumping fuel or painting.

- Unable to change movement direction while mid-jump. While this makes sense in practical physics, I don't think I've come across a first-person game that doesn't let me change direction while jumping. It feels weird but hardly game-breaking. Just a small nitpick.

- The menu sound FX were a little loud. I had to turn it down to like 20 while everything else was 70-90. Especially pause menu sounds were a little too sharp and unpleasant to listen to.

This game uses a weird framebuffer and renders at sub 1080p, then stretches the game to fit your screen and applies post processing effects. This causes the game to be very blurry and a fan-made patch is required to fix it.

Before, there was nothing else to compare the port to so people just sucked it up so that they could play they game. But now there's a version of this game on Microsoft gamepass that adds improvements and thus removes the need for the fan-made patch.

This is a digital product. It's unacceptable that they don't also patch the steam version. It would cost them pennies to do.

Encountered a bug that made brightness extremely low and messed with contrast levels, effectively making the game completely unplayable. Brightness settings no longer worked and steam overlay was also so dark that I couldn't see anything clearly. I was able to play through the first mission and when I launched the game for the second time, this bug happened. GTX 1080 with latest drivers installed.

And on top of all that, the game crashed once.

Back when AAA games were allowed to have soul in them

This game is tranquil and relaxing simulator game that you can sink countless hours into. This game is perfect for playing while watching videos/streams on your other monitor. Listening to music/podcasts also works. Personally speaking this is a necessity because otherwise the game would get very dull purely on its own. But that's just my subjective opinion.

Some of the negative reviews here have fair points but a lot of them seem a little dramatic. This game is not identical to FS17 and offers several welcome improvements. But the number of improvements isn't massive either. It is up to the individual to decide whether it's worth the asking price or not. And considering the game is priced at 35€ I feel like it's a fair price. I will list several pros and cons to help you decide if it's worth buying or not.

Pros:

• Graphics are vastly improved in comparison to FS17. Vehicles and implements are very detailed, lighting is much better, field textures are nicer to look at, colors are more vibrant etc.
  
• You can now see field information by going to the field itself instead of having to open the map to see if it needs to be fertilized, plowed etc
  
• Weeds and lime are a welcome addition for field preparation. Gives a good reason to own more tractors to get these additional jobs done.
  
• Parts of previous DLC from FS17 are implemented in the base game of FS19. Stuff like a baler-wrapper, sugarcane crop etc.
  
• The mod support is really good. The collector's edition even comes with modding video tutorials on a disc. There is a mods section on the game's official site where there are currently a few mods uploaded by the developer. There's even a previous FS17 DLC map completely free. User made mods are on the way. The savegame is also easy to edit in notepad to give yourself more money if you want to do so.
  
• The shop now has a fully 3D model displayed so you can see exactly what different options look like. Previously you had no idea of knowing how big a difference there was between normal and wide tires for example before buying the item. Or how a tractor would look with a certain color on it etc.
  
• Menus are cleaned up and look nicer. You no longer have dark boxes to display information, everything is transparent this time around. All the relevant info is displayed in a compact and easy to read way.
  
• You can now save the game and come back later when doing jobs for other farmers. Previously you were pretty much instanced and if you had a big field you'd have to play nonstop for hours or you would lose all progress unless you left the game running overnight or something.
  
• At least some tractors have specific engine sounds recorded from their real life counterparts
  
• The AI is at least slightly improved. Previously they couldn't do triangle-shaped fields well at all, stopping at each end. This time around they are able to go through and continue perfectly.
  
• You can now empty implements like fertilizer sprayers if you need to switch from liquid fertilizer to herbicide. Pressing I will create a tank of herbicide or liquid fertilizer on the ground next to you.

Cons/mixed and subjective stuff:

• The nights could be darker. Currently it's very easy to see at night and it's a little weird.
  
• Distant mountains look really bad. When looking at a plowed field sideways it shimmers a bit and just looks bad. There are other graphical hiccups also, but nothing terrible.
  
• Mouse feels terrible in this game. Sensitivity is extremely low and it just feels very jerky. V-sync on or off doesn't make a difference at all. In a vehicle it's fine and when controlling front loaders and such but when walking around it's horrible. I've found this game to be best played with a controller and keyboard combo.
  
• Wheel support is bad. The game shows correct inputs for my G29 and it does pick up the pedals etc. Problem is that you can't control the force feedback in game so the wheel is extremely stiff. There is a workaround that worked for FS17 but doesn't seem to be working currently in this title.
  
• Economy and prices are all over the place. 350,000€ for a house? Why?? Things like cow pastures etc. are also way too expensive. In addition to that you seem to get a bit less money for your crops in the normal difficulty compared to FS17. The contracts (jobs for other farmers) also have really pathetic payouts. I recommend playing on the "easy" difficulty to get reasonable money for your crops.
  
• Create your own farm system is lackluster. It's just a bunch of placeable items on the map and that is it. No ability to make roads or change surface type etc. The terraforming the game uses to level out the ground to make items fit is also stupidly expensive.
  
• Physics are wonky. Stacking bales and lifting pallets just feels floaty. It works, but only just.
  
• Somewhat of a steep learning curve for a beginner. I went into FS17 without knowing a thing about farming. The game has basic tutorials and it'll get you started. But it can get confusing quickly when you start getting into baling, silage, total mixed ration for cows etc. I wouldn't worry about it too much, you don't have to do everything. There's no requirement to own animals and no requirement to do specialized crops like sugarcane or root crops. Just do whatever you personally want to.