Recent reviews by Palandus

I've been one of the main testers of the game, getting it ready for Early Access launch, hence my hours being quite high. The game has come a long way since August 2023, when I started testing the full build, and it is quite stable now with all the big bugs squashed.

Content wise for a new player, you'll be looking at perhaps 20-30 hours. I've optimized my playstyle so I can get the content done in 10ish hours. Can keep playing if you want of course.

In terms of what is different from what you might expect with a regular Minecraft game, I'll try to focus on the 10 biggest differences (there is a ton of smaller differences, but I don't think you want to read a wall of text):

1. Has skill development, making your activities slightly better over time. Its more of an icing on the cake, than the cake itself.

2. Has 22 spells, mostly utility focused right now. Some combat spells.

3. Has perks that you can spend on different perk trees to enhance your preferred playstyle. Earn them by completing achievements set within the game, with some of those achievements being Steam Achievements as well.

4. Has a vibrantly unique night time. Its where the Avatar inspiration is found. Most things glow and things are quite pretty, though still dangerous at night.

5. Has a protection beacon that lets you make a place your home beacon and prevents enemies from spawning within the field of protection. Even reaches far above and far underground.

6. Has farming with 10 crops. Later on you gain access to composts and fertilizers, which can further enhance your grown crops.

7. Has meal cooking making basic meals at start, and can find further recipes in chests and off enemies to make superior meals that usually grant a buff.

8. You can gain one meal buff, one sleeping buff (from better beds), up to 3 buffs from alchemy (perk dependent) and potentially even 3 more powerful buffs (also from alchemy; see ingame perks for more details).

9. Many creature drops and objects can be found to create alchemical potions. You can get some very powerful buffs from these potions, that will greatly enhance your playstyle. Just be warned that death cancels out all your buffs.... so watch your step, as falling deaths are the most common way for me to die.

10. Has a very peaceful soundtrack, great ambience, and reasonably decent sound effects, allowing you to relax and just enjoy the game, when you know you don't have a wolf chasing you of course!

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Its come a long way, and has a long way to go, but its definitely worth checking out now. If you want to try the game out first, the demo allows for 1 hour of time, but doesn't have saving, so definitely if you are on the fence try out the demo first and then buy the game if you like what you see!

The core game loop is decent, but you are forced to do mandatory boss fights. Your character is weak, pitiful, with little healing. You have to do it all in one go, or you restart. You don't get to resupply your resources mid-fight and the boss constantly cheats, with an unlimited stamina pool.

But... in order to enjoy the horde mode, you have to beat campaign, and as the bosses are too tough, and your character too weak, its a hard pass for me.

I enjoy the rest of the game, but if we could skip the bosses, and let me just play the game, I'd love that, but you can't so, if you hate cheating bosses with limited resources, this game ain't for you.

EDIT: Thanks for the reply, developer/publisher.

I watched someone play Horde mode, and it didn't look very fun, so its not a loss for me to not play it. It highlights the main issues the game has which is limited build space, brutally constrictive resource production, and lack of gold. The campaign missions, although problematic with the boss fights, remains the better game mode. Because there you can capture more build space, have places to buy/sell or get hack silver and acquire gold. Horde mode just lacks that stuff, and so it doesn't seem to be a huge loss that players like me refunded the game before experiencing it.

Also the guy who played it suffered massive FPS loss over time of playing the Horde mode, likely due to all the arrows, javelins, and other things stuck in the background. Maybe at a later point I'll check it out again, but you guys have your work cut out for you. Not only to make the campaign more enjoyable, but actually have an interesting horde mode that is as fun to play as the campaign, or moreso. Right now they aren't there yet, but might get there with effort and time.

Its just not that fun. Here are my reasons:

1. Metaprogression is extremely slow and very minor improvements, many of which aren't even noticeable.

2. You can only upgrade weapons with overclocks once you get the weapon to rank 12 in one run. So every time you die at rank 11, it hurts.

3. Mining the metacurrency is very time consuming and you don't get much per vein. Not even 5 usually, and the meta upgrades cost in increasing increments of 5, so 5, then 10, then 15, etc...

4. Many of the artifacts are utter garbage or will get you killed by the big boss guy, the dreadnought, at the end of a run. And you won't realize it until you get to them.

5. The only class that I've beaten the game with is the Scout, the starter class. I did get a Driller, Engineer, and Tank? to the boss, but they had either severe DPS issues, were not designed for the boss fight, or were just too slow and couldn't dodge its leap attack fast enough.

6. Its not clear on how you earn money at the end of the run.

7. The mid-mission store often generates things you cannot afford, which means you get next to or nothing for that store. Like one time I had all Nitra costs, when I ahd only 5 Nitra, but had 163 Gold, but no has to generate Nitra upgrades instead.

8. Luck doesn't seem to have much benefit, or the Luck earned mid-run isn't being applied. Because when I ahve 8 luck from metaupgrades and take like 22 more luck that run, I'd expect roughly 1/3rd of my level up upgrades would be higher rarity, but I still see tons of grey tier upgrades.

9. Pickup radius is next to useless in this game, even with gaining over 200% pickup radius from upgrades, it doesn't increase your radius much. Or its at base so low that 200% doesn't do much of anything.

10. Similar idea with XP boosts. I've had over 40% boost to xp, but never noticed an increase to the rate of gaining levels.

11. Many weapons are utter garbage, mostly due to attack angle or attack speed. By that I mean like for the flamethrower or other beam attacks, they circle the character too slowly to be particularly useful. Its heavily why the Scout is the best, as it has no weapons that have to deal with this annoyance.

12. The other issue with many weapons is the reload time takes forever, but they don't have lots of damage or piercing or clip size to make up for it. Its atrocious waiting 15 seconds for the tank's minigun to reload.

13. The core stats you want for guns is reload speed, damage, critical chance, and critical damage. Fire rate just causes you to empty your clip faster and then get stuck in a reload.

14. The elements provided in the game is utter garbage too. Only cold damage is super useful, the DOT damage doesn't damage fast enough, even with +50% DOT damage from upgrades.

15. Enemies get super spongy in terms of health and your armor stat doesn't really protect you. I've had 45 armor, and still take massive damage, and it takes forever to get armor that high.

16. There are no rerolls, banishes, or save option effects. So the RNG often shafts you.

If some of this gets changed, I'd play more, but right now its a HARD PASS for me.

Its... okay. I had fun for the four hours I played, but the game trailer is very misleading.

You get a campaign, but you don't create your own deck.
You get challenge modes, but you don't create your own deck.
You get an endless mode, you create your own deck, but it gets boring after 10 minutes, so why would you play this mode.

I came for the idea of a deckbuilder survivors game, and was woefully disappointed.

There are other issues that give it a negative:
1. Upgrades that apply to some weapons and not others, for reasons. ie You have a projectile or beam weapon and the upgrade says it benefits projectiles or beams, but your weapon that is a projectile or beam, doesn't benefit.
2. You are given upgrade cards, even after you've discarded that weapon from your ship.
3. You are given upgrade cards, that can't be used and all weapons listed are greyed out.
4. If you die in campaign, you can restart the mission, but you lose all your cards that boost your weapon stats, like pierce, weapon split, or beam duration.
5. If you die in endless, you get like no real progression and there is no exiting, so you have to do it all one run.
6. You can take damage from things that aren't rendered. Fun...
7. The tutorial mentions astro chickens that will flee from you, and will heal you. In all 4 hours of gametime, I never once saw a single chicken.
8. Its too easy to take damage and you don't start with shields, and the ships are usually not very responsive, so you can get hit a lot.
9. Many weapons don't do what they say they should. Like heavy cannons have a burst of 3 when fired from front and sides, but fires one shot in rear slot. I mean.. what?

If it gets updates, I'll update the review, but it looks like the last update was 3+ months ago, so we shall see.

My hours are pre-Update #2.

Update #2 severely nerfed, to an extremely excessive level, all the best strategies, and didn't even bother to boost the weak strategies that no one was really using. It shows a level of incompetence on the developer's part that they don't understand that by nerfing the only effective way to reach 30 minutes, there is now no way to actually beat levels.

Until this changes, I'd avoid this dumpster fire. I would have highly recommended it to others before this, when asking for a great survivor like, but now its so terrible that I won't be playing it any further.

EDIT: Updated review to reflect that changes in latest 0.5.1 addressed most of my complaints.

I used to love this game, not any more. Apparently changes were made to 0.5.1 but haven't tested them out personally. We'll see when I have some time to get it another go.

Survivor Likes I'd recommend: Fatalzone. Or Survivors of the Dawn. Or Nebula. All great survivor likes.

Decent title.

Quite a few of the weapons are really subpar, mostly due to the number of foes thrown at you. Many weapons are pretty useless until upgraded to max level (8), like Plasma Torch or Space Mines. Some of the achievements are torturous to achieve, like 500,000 kills over all your games. Many of the unit choices are poorly designed. Played as Sickle for 80% of the game, and then when I unlocked Suzy, played that unit for the last 20% of the game.

However, with all that said, its one of the better Survivor likes out there. Controls well, pretty, and really makes you feel like a bad-@ss when you find a really good build. I might return to this one, if it gets more updates, but right now, all I have to do is grind out like 90,000 something kills, and then I'll hit all the achievements.

Not my cup of tea.

Firewatch is well known for being a great narrative experience and although the narrative grabbed me, I cannot tolerate games without simple conveniences. There is no sprint button, as far as I can see. Using the radio is cumbersome and irritating. The map, is quite simply a paper map from the 90s without any of the usual conveniences with game maps in video games. There is a lack of objectives or directional indicators, with no way to enable them. The directions provided to the player are more vague than the quest details in Morrowind (and it was similarly low on objectives/directional indicators, though I enjoyed that game). Movement is slow and ponderous.

I have heard that its a walking simulator. I did not realize that meant that there is no way to move faster or have quality of life stuff, to make finding the story easier. I wanted the story, but I guess I can't get it because I cannot deal with this kind of stuff.

So buyer beware. If any of these things are deal breakers for you, don't buy it. If you can tolerate it, then certainly buy it, as the narrative seems to be excellent, sound design is superb and the graphics are beautiful.

A fairly relaxing game, once you get past Sector 1. Currently it is the hardest sector of the game, but once you get to Sector 2, unlock the Sector 2 ship, it gradually gets easier, until you reach Sector 5 and feel like an unstoppable force of destruction.

I'd say I spent roughly 2 hrs to beat Sector 1. The first big hurdle is getting your first new ship, the Frigate, which will massively improve your ability to play, so prioritize getting it, to make the game experience better.

Its a slow start, but it finishes quite well. I'm looking forward to how the game develops and improves over time.

Main reasons why I do not recommend:

1. It is very performance demanding. Even setting everything to low, and disabling things, doesn't result in a performance boost. The main reason is because the highest drain on resources is the bloom effects, particle generation, and high polygon count of everything in your environment that cannot be reduced in any way.

2. The game is not well designed for single player, and its too easy to get overwhelmed by encounters meant for 2+ players. Its not as bad as some games like Diablo 4, but it still is problematic.

3. I thought I was collecting tons of money and had like 6,000 universal credits by the end of the first mission. Turns out it isn't much at all, and the cheapest gun in 15,000. So its going to be a huge grind for getting anything.

4. The map is huge, sprawling, confusing, and the map system isn't useful at all for not getting lost. There isn't any clear indications of what I have explored or not, which chests I've opened or if I've grabbed the rare resources or not. There is no fast travel as far as I can see and you can't sprint or use vehicles, so enjoy the walking simulator.

5. I was looking at transmogrification and wanted to preview it. I clearly clicked the wrong button because suddenly I spent 2000 of my 6000 credits and... it didn't even do anything. >.< I clicked on my equipped item, so it transmogged to it and charged me 2000 credits. Seriously... I wasted my money to get nothing and there wasn't even a confirmation window warning me about what was about to happen.

6. I visited the transmog because I kept finding these skins and colors and the transmog guy wouldn't even let me change them, so it was added salt to the wound.

7. My internet died, so I logged off the game and when I came back on my save data was wiped. So spent 1.2 hours, to have nothing saved. I hear some players had it worse with losing a 25 hour savegame to this bug, so I see the writing on the wall, and I'm out.

8. The UI is pretty bad for describing important information. Like what do all the numbers mean for my equipped armor.

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It did remind me a bit of an old PS3 game Dead Nation, but I honestly would stick with that game, over this one.