Recent reviews by Sunbather

A beautiful Ubisoft game but a Ubisoft game nonetheless. Outposts you have to clear, trivial loot, meaningless crafting, empty open world with fake freedom and markers everywhere (even when the markers are built into the world, they are the opposite of subtle), shimmerhing flowers and bushes indicating that you can collect them, an annoying half-arsed stealth 'system', mandatory X-ray vision, of course, brain dead AI, a meandering story that goes in all kinds of directions that is constantly taking away your agency, predictable character development, and a pacing that is way to discombobulated, yet so much happens in a short time that you barely know how you got from A to B and what tf is happening.

As a bonus you also get the well tried templates of a Sony narrative game: backflashs to the character as a youngster CHECK, tracking down an animal just like in RDR2, God of War and The Last of Us CHECK, a HUD that tries to hide as best as possible but is still superfluous most of the times CHECK, constant disrupting cutscenes CHECK.

Also, the game is NOT the perfect port it is touted to be. Yes, performance is great but audio sometimes bugs out for 30 seconds, subtitles are vanishing randomly and then reintroduce themselves just as randomly, got stuck in the death screen twice and could only get out of it by pressing Alt-F4. And worst of all: no subtitles for banter, e.g. when riders ride past you or you sneak around a village. Which makes Japanese VO a lacking experience.

With that being said, the combat has a good flow and can feel very satisfying. It is also laudable that enemies don't just stand by while their mate is slaughtered like in a Kung Fu movie but they actually try to overwhelm you, needing you to tap into your Samurai mindset. And I will probably re-buy the game when on sale or I got nothing else to play. For now, however, I don't want to pay 60€ for a game I've already played about 48 times in the past 15 years.

AAA gaming in 2024: if it isn't the cheaters that will f4ck you over, it is the developers. If the the developers are actually great and care more about gameplay than money, it is the publishers who will f4ck you over.

Updated to negative:

After 30 days the servers are still a stutter fest full of rubberbanding. A 3 second long stutter isn't what you're after in a game where you have to make split-second decisions.
Many exploits persist.
Development or rather for now just the process of fixing the game is one of the slowest I've seen yet for an Early Access game. Definitively wait.



Disregard my earlier rant. Yes, there are severe issues:

- several bugs that prevent people from playing as intended or playing at all

- AI either doing nothing much or just zooming around and headshot you although you just threw a frag grenade at them

- performance on an RTX 4070 and Ryzen 5600x very bad when Frame Generation is turned off

- sound files are missing, e.g. when you hit a car or a metal sheet or a wall there are no sounds

- griefers: no way to report people who utter disgusting things to you (shoutout to Flappy, you homophobic, racist Kant) or just troll you or outright teamkill or at least grief you in another way --- admittedly most people are friendly

- some people are too dumb for this game: someone continously shot at me, one time killed me, one time severly wounded me. I tried to talk to him and write him in chat and I think he was simply to obtuse to understand that there are players of your own faction, players from other factions, and several types of bots in between

- one guy shot me, I warned him, and then killed him when he tried to hunt me down (what a loser) --- the problem is that now I got the warning to not kill teammates --- something needs to be implemented that can distinguish between deliberate friendly fire and killing someone in self-defense

- lots of quality of life stuff is missing

- the font of the task descriptions is tiny and the description of items is even tinier


However, even in this stage the game feels much better than Tarkov in 2018. The fact that you can freely roam the world, that it's a real open world with real-time transporation and fighting between several factions and yet it does run better than the Streets of Tarkov is simply wild. People complain about the missing loop (especially streamers who play 10 hours a day and get paid for it "Where's the fun, chat?!") --- the loop is simple: find better loot, walk around the world and take in the extraordinary design of a world that truly feels like South East Asia, from the ramshackle or middle-class houses in the towns to traditional wood houses with partly open walls to naturally mitigate the heat to the incessant ambience of frogs and cicadas and birds, then some violence, some more loot, back to the base, maybe chat a bit with other members of your faction, go back out, maybe do a task while you're at it etc. etc.
Probably what I love most besides the open world and the design is the fact that unlike Tarkov you really can make a living without doing the quests because it is much easier to avoid PvP and do your own thing in this giant, beautiful, intriguing world.

PS: The shooting is also good but needs to be improved in regard to audio, general feedback of bullets going out and bullets coming in, and the fact that you sometimes need a whole mag to eliminate an unarmored AI.





Tarkov, especially in its early stages, was plagued by descync, rubberbanding, bad performance and weird glitches. It was a very bad game back then.

This, this is much worse. More akin to The Day Before than to a Tarkov Killer . It is mind-boggling that they chose to release the game in this condition.

PS: As a rule of thumb you can tell a game is rushed trash when shooting into water won't give you splashing water. It works every. single. time.

Intro

I always liked the polish and passion of Starni’s previous games but never liked that specific Panzer Corps style of abstraction. So with the new game having less abstraction and actual individual units, I thought I just give them the benefit of the doubt. But what can I say? I couldn't bear more than 30 minutes. This game is so much worse than I expected and it's clear that this is not a finished, full version of the game but rather Early Access. And so I’m gonna be strict. They made enough games by now, and for the first time had a renowned wargames publisher at their side, so there is no excuse that this game is such an unpolished, badly thought-out product.


Talking Points

1. Skirmish: I set up a game with 4 players (3 AI and me) and 2 teams. My teammates were not moving at all. The enemy was moving sometimes, sometimes they didn't. And this was not a tactical decision on their part, they simply refused to do anything with their numerous units. Their overall tactic, however, was to just form a long line with as many vehicles as possible and shoot at me every other turn. This was on the beta branch, by the way, which already included 2 major bug fixes for the AI.

2. The game is a blurry mess. I had already disabled Motion Blur and set Post Processing Effects to a minimum. Yet the game is just blurred. And when the "action camera" sets in, the whole affair gets even blurrier!

3. Stutters and constant dips below 60 fps! And that with an RTX 4070 and a Ryzen 5600x on an SSD with 16GB Ram. Skirmish ran a bit better but the first campaign mission of the Americans was just awful. Every explosion, every transition to the action camera, every fast movement with the camera resulted in stutters.

4. Tanks have health bars! Meaning that even if your caliber can't penetrate the enemy's front armor but is strong enough to theoretically destroy the tank, you just have to shoot it long enough for the health bar to deplete and it will magically explode. Similarly, my Sherman apparently fires HE or even incendiary shells against other armor because with every hit there’s a bright, fiery explosion.

5. The game is a constant succession of overwatch and fire and counterfire. You walk up your troops and trigger overwatch. You fire at enemy troops and trigger counter fire. Enemy walks their troops up and triggers overwatch. Enemy fires at my troops and triggers counter fire. I get what they were trying to do but it simply doesn’t work. It’s just tedious and makes your actual actions less impactful.

6. Some sounds are clearly missing. During the Omaha Beach mission artillery hits the ground all around you, yet, magically, there is no sound.

7. The narrative is as cringe as it gets. War's a breeze and at the same time a serious affair for manly man, for sure. Now get off that beach soldier and kick some German/American/British butts! (Germans speak proper British by the way.)

8. The map is so cluttered, you can barely navigate it with your brain. They really went hard to make this game look "beautiful" but it just comes across as fake and is overall a mess. The camera navigation certainly doesn’t help. You can actually zoom out quite a bit, yet you won't get any overview because nothing stands out.

9. I guess the devs knew this, so they made spotted yet not identified enemy vehicles shine bright red like a toy car. No, not like a toy car. It's literally a shiny toy tank. It figures that when you take out a AT gun with small arms fire, that the thing just explodes. Again, there’s a lot of magical energy in this game.

10. The UI is horrendous. Some things are way too tiny (the spreadsheet of hit chances and probabilities) while other things are way too big (unit symbols, portraits of the personnel of your vehicles??), yet gives you no relevant information.

11. Numerous other things: tanks are rotating completely in the direction they want to fire instead of just moving the turret 30 degrees; when vehicles retreat they do so by turning around instead of moving in reverse (which is odd because you can reverse most vehicles manually); the animations are too slow but you are able to skip them with a mouse click but that might be too fast, there is no middle ground.


Conclusion

So my critique is obviously twofold. The design choices and flow and ruleset of the game simply don’t gel with me. It’s basically a turn-based Company of Heroes , albeit with a gingerly increased degree of realism. You won’t see an MG take out a Sherman in this game but a lot of other silly stuff. Much graver though is the fact that this game is very unpolished. I am very tired of this new trend of either just skipping Early Access or rushing Early Access to 1.0 while the game is clearly not yet finished.

People seem to have fun with the game and that’s great, really. I wish Starni success, still. But if the points mentioned trigger you as much as they trigger me, keep away and buy The Troop instead. I myself just found out that Graviteam surprisingly dropped a new DLC only a few hours ago and I’m sure as hell gonna buy it together with the other latest DLC as soon as I get a refund for this one here.

At the end of the day, I like wine and steak better than beer and pretzels, if you get what I'm saying.

Good game, could be great. Suffers from bad design decisions and half-baked features. Now they've just announced the first DLC. Call me old school but I'd rather have them fix the game before bringing in more content.

1. Performance is now fixed, thank God. It was atrocious on 1.0 release. But the game still suffers from abnormal blurriness , especially when you're trying to decipher the excellent environmental storytelling. Reading a computer screen in this game is headache-inducing because it always shifts between blurred font and clear font. Yeah, part of the blurriness is me having DLSS turned on but: 90 percent of the games with DLSS implementation also have an option to sharpen the image. Why is it missing here?

2. The blurriness increases when you're tying to look at your tablet which acts as your briefing screen. If you can't make the thing clear with a good font and briefing pictures you can actually increase, maybe cut the idea and just give me a conventional briefing screen. After all, it seems silly anyway that I'm an officer standing in the middle of the police station, inside (!) the briefing room, and then read my briefing from a tablet just standing in the middle of the room.

3. The whole roster system needs a major overhaul or to be ditched entirely. It's a gimmick at best and aggravating most of the times. It bugs out, showing wrong active officers or an empty space although the offices is hired. Navigating the roster (again in that nice blurry tablet) is a nightmare. It could be a nice drag-and-drop or whatever but everything feels counter-intuitive, especially since there are many things you simply can't due because the whole system is so darn restrictive.
But what's worse is that the intention of the whole system fails to have any effect: not once did I bond with an officer. If they die, I just replace them. If they are in crisis and the 3 slots of therapy are already full, I fire them and hire a new one at no cost whatsoever. The only way the officers get better (and which is the gimmick that tries to make you bond with them) is that after some time they get a single skill like the ability to kick in doors with one kick or increase the armor of, well, your armor. They don't seem to operate any worse when they are "anxious", or any better if they are "content". The choice of words alone shows how little thought has gone into that system: would you call an officer anxious or would you rather call them stressed? Content or rather confident? When they get injured during a mission, they are miraculously healed when coming back. So they may have to spend the duration of 3 missions on the therapist's couch but not once do they have to see a medical doctor. Makes sense, doesn't it?
There are many possibilites to improve this system: make officers act erratic when they are stressed or near a crisis; give them actual benefits not just gimmicky skills when they get more experienced, e.g. more accuracy and a calmer way to go about their business. Maybe such a system is already implemented but let me tell you, I don't notice any of it. Another possibility would be to un-gamify the bonding. Just let me have conversations with my colleagues. They tell me about the earlier mission, we reminisce about trainging, whatever. There doesn't need to be any voice-acting, just some lines of dialogue with each officer have a small quirk, one to gets to have a after-work beer all the time, the other one just got another child. Nothing crazy. Just something to make them a minimum of human so next time when Officer Lopez get horribly gunned down, I don't just shrug.

4. Casualization : Listen, I'm against every game trying to be Tarkov-levels of hardcore. But there are some things that really were dumbed down from the EA versions of the game: some missions that happened at night are now happening at daytime (in fact, I'm halfway through and have only encountered a single nightmission so far). You can take a lot more shots than before, making the missions a breeze if only you have good enough reflexes. In fact, most times that I died was because the game itself was throwing sticks between my feet (see point 5) and not because the AI outsmarted me. They also added new voice lines for your teammates that are straight from a Hollywood movie about cool SWAT officers. They now say superfluous stuff like "This is where they hide old people" or "Can't belief I once lived in this neighborhood" or my favourite: "We should get out of this rain!" Yeah, that's exactly what a SWAT officer would say when he's about to bust a ring of pedophiles.
But worst of all : unlike in the EA versions, you now get immediately notified if all suspects are taken down which takes all of the tension out of the mission within a heartbeat. You now know nothing can harm you anymore and you just run around stupidly for 10 minutes to find that last piece of evidence or that last civilian. On top of that, I also have a feeling that missions are over way too quickly now. Suspects come running at you instead of hiding and trying to ambush you which only reduces the tense part of the game further and makes it a "Find the evidence"-game.

5. Countless minor stuff that breaks immersion or is just annoying: your teammates are sometimes very adamant on just blocking your way, e.g. you wanting to get back out of a room and they just stand right in the door and won't make a move, no matter how many times you nudge them; when you spawn into the police station again, your character is loading through his gun, making it ready to fire; in fact he should obviously do the opposite or rather: just have my officer empty-handed, why is he holding a gun in the first place? The bodies of suspects can jiggle around wildly and some other visual bugs like light sources reflecting in a very buggy way. Sometimes civilians bug out and they won't surrender so you just scream endlessly at them with nothing happening. If you haven't brought any non-lethal equipment good luck to trigger them into compliance! You also can't order your teammates to pepperstray or restrain them. Last but not least: enemies can still rush you and in the process of that your rifle will be blocked and you won't be able to shoot but the enemy will still be able to shoot you with their rifle which is just as long as yours, resulting in a ridiculous death which you simply can't prevent.

Well, this certainly is better than Dragon's Dogma 2. However, they introduced high-level gear for the early game so that people can grind fast to get to the expansion content. And they even have the audacity to give you a pop-up that the new gear "is now the default gear" and "recommended to all [!] players". Of course, you can just decide to not use the OP gear but it is always dangling right there in front of you: armour and weapons that are three or four times better than what you have in the early game. Would it kill them to at least give us a toggle on/off option for that gear? Or let people who want to go directly to the expansion content just skip to that point?

So summa summarum, with the introduction of cheat gear, Capcom destroyed any sense of gear progression and grind in a game that is all about gear progression and grind.

Back in the days, this is how PS3 ports felt like.

Mayhaps they should have put in a bit more effort? Averaging 45 fps with a Ryzen 5600x and a RTX 4070 and the game certainly does not look the part. It is incredibly blurry, pop-ins are ugly, the water looks worse than Morrowind. Controls are optimized for controller. It only tells you that AFTER you've bought the game. Yes, that info is hidden on the convoluted Steam page as well but other games have such info right above the buy button. Then there is the incessant (and I mean incessant!) spam by the NPCs. Your pawns are talking to you and giving idiotic remarks every 30 seconds, every 45 seconds you get approached by an NPCs who tells you some other triviality and you can't turn it off. You come near them, the game will interrupt and you are forced to have a 'conversation'. The camera direction is horrible. The game seems to be not curated at all. Your pawn is still telling you something regarding the main quest but you step into an area that is entirely empty and suddenly the game interrupts everything else and a cutscene starts and the former empty space is suddenly populated with dozens of NPCs. And you have another few conversations with almost zero content. The verbosity of this game is unparalled even for a cRPG fan like me.

The Long Dark is peak survival gameplay. Permadeath is a core element of the sandbox survival mode. You can have a bad start and die quickly or you skillfully manage to scramble together some supplies and find a shed to live another day. You can have a good start but you will think it's because of your prowess and you will bolster an unjustified self-esteem which will lead you to make a bad call days later and die miserably. It's hard to strike such a balance. Yes, there is some luck involved, but it never feels like the whole thing is out your hands. In fact, the more you learn about the game, its interlocking mechanics and its map, the better you get at surviving. There is an in-game RPG-lite progression system, e.g. the more fires you make, the better you get at it. You can also read books to get better at a specific skill. However, the real progression happens organically by simply learning the game which imo is the best progression there is. Even making it only a week into the game will give you a whole lot of satisfaction.

So, mechanically, the game is superb. But it is only in combination with the technical side that this game supersedes most other survival games. The music has some 80ies Carpenter vibes, very unintrusive, almost meditative, but then you realize that it's actually foreboding. The graphics are stylized but still very much grounded in reality, resulting in something eerily beautiful. The screenshots won't do it justice, you have to experience it in real time. Slowly scour the landscapes with the snow quietly scrunching or a frozen lake squeaking beneath your feet, hearing wolves howl in the distance while the clouds are racing by due to strong winds. In your shelter you sit by a crackling fire to warm up food and melt some snow or even indulge in the luxury to cook some herbal tea. Then going to bed and it feels cozy just as it would in real life after a long day in the winter cold. The next morning you awake and while you're still wondering why it's still dark, you hear a gale rattling the walls. A step outside and you can't see past a few meters, everythings white and grey and windy and loud. And what was that electrical buzzing during the night all about? Instead of staying in and risking cabin fever, you dare to venture out and soon you find yourself scouring for loot in an abandoned dam facility with only your gas lantern and some matches as a source of light, and you go past the frozen body deeper and deeper into the building, forward, forward, to live another day.

With all that being said, and with a short recommendation to also buy the DLC because it gives you many, many new items for the survival sandbox mode, I must say that there are some glaring design flaws that can be very aggravating at times and almost made me go with a negative rating:

- houses in villages have very similar interiors but some of it is randomized which results in logical errors (e.g. a house with kitchen, bathroom, a huge children's room with an oversized cradle but no actual bedroom or even bed for the parents

- the voiceover of your character is randomized which results in silly situations: you pick up money, literally worthless of course except as a mediocre fire starter and your character yells out: "This stuff will come in handy!". Moments later you find a huge can of maple syrup which is not only food but would also be a triumph IRL to soothe your mind. But what does your character say? "Must be good for something!" It's just lazy coding really. Specific items should include and exclude specific remarks.

- the inventory model of your character is a clown with white cheeks and a bright red nose. When I first saw this, I quit the game because it was so immersion-breaking. It looks like a placeholder but then again, it's in the game for years now. Why have a rudimentary body model anyway? You don't need it.

- interactivity with the world can feel very limited at times: e.g. you can't break down a wooden chair into firewood without having an axe. And even when you have found an axe, you can't cut down the wooden railing of a mountain trail which resulted in a very stupid, entirely unrealistic situation where I had hunkered down in a cabin on a hill. The next day when I wanted to go back down a wolf attacked me and I had to flee back up again. Now, I was wounded, I had no more water and it was very cold even inside the cabin. There were wooden (!) beds and shelves and there was meters upon meters of wooden railing just outside the cabin but I couldn't interact with it. No firewood means not melting snow either. No chance my character would take at least a bit of snow and melt it inside the cabin or just eat it. So in specific situations your character will prefer starving, being thirsty or even dying than soiling their hands with menial tasks... This doesn't happen often but when it happens, all that carefully built immersion is gone completely.

I am incredibly disappointed that this game still has no font / UI scaling after all these months and actual years since first release. Yes, you can adjust subtitles and since patch 6 you can also adjust font sizes in books. None of that has ever been a problem for me since they are crisp fonts, white color on a mostly dark background, like in the movies, you know.

The inventory UI, however, is a nightmare for people with bad eyesight and maybe even for people with good eyesight. I myself get serious headaches after 30 minutes of playing the game which is no fun evening activity at all. Why do I have a problem with the core UI? Well, there are several mindboggling 'design' decisions:

1. The tooltips partly consist of grey, slightly blurry text in italics on grey background. Who ok'ed this?

2. The inventory, when opened, takes up about 40& of the screen space. Why, on God's green Earth, does it not take up at least 80%? Do I really need a clear look on the world setting while I am rifling through my inventory? This is no survival game, no Tarkov, no DayZ where I need one eye on my environs?! So you can't even argue that they needed to make the fonts so tiny (and grey on grey) because they needed the space for their oh so complex game. No, they HAVE the space, they literally have the screen property for free without taking ANYTHING away from the game, yet they decide to make the inventory a small box.

3. The same goes for the party screen, the bartering screen (oh my God, after Patch 6 this one actually got even worse!), the toolbar, the tooltips etc. etc.

To put the cherry on the top, this game is a nightmare for mod creators and users. Every patch breaks the mods and/or causes incompatibility, every second patch seems to introduce a new file structure to put the mods into.

I, some random dork with poor eyesight, won't make any impact with the new holy company that Larian has become. Everybody's darling, I know. But the UI simply feels like a straight up slap in my face. Ok, they didn't have it in Early Access. Understandable, I thought. They didn't have it when 1.0 released. Huh, I thought, that's odd. But I'm sure it is high on the priority list since a lot of people are complaining about it. 9 months later I come back, nothing changed. And there are literally no other accessibility options for people who have color blindness or something like that. This is completely unfitting for a company that 9 months ago landed one of the biggest gaming hits in decades and wasn't a beginner's company to begin with (D:OS2 has far superior UI). So yeah. Rant over.

Actually, no. Rant's not over: Did you know that not only do they have the space to increase the UI, but they also already HAVE a bigger UI for inventory, tooltips and such. But you can only activate it when you play with a controller. So first I got slapped for having bad eyesight, now I get slapped for being a PC Gamer (who bought the game quite early in Early Access). Thanks for that, Larian.

You have a GPS from the get-go with markers of the locations already on the map for you. You basically just have to follow a line from A to B and be done with it. No sense of exploration at all.

Curiously, even the AI - the hallmark of the first one for me - has become much worse. They walk through fire to get to you, burning themselves. They don't toy with you. They just run around, waiting to get beaten or shot to death.

This might be the reason why well-known COD-streamers are now playing the game. Was that the goal?

The graphics are beautiful though.