Recent reviews by Randy

For how long this game has been in the works, it's embarrassingly underdeveloped.

Combat is a joke, fighting feels awful. Wolves attack you with confusing animations and sounds that don't line up with what's happening, from like 4 meters away. Enemy NPCs instantly know where you are, shoot you without missing, and in the event you actually kill them, they don't even drop what they are carrying.

The building interface is horrible. So many other games do this better and it's outrageous how bad Rust's is.

With how easy it is to get food and water, the survival stuff just kinda feels tacked on. It's not interesting.

The exploration is fine, and the procedural island is honestly pretty impressive. If you're a hardcore griefer or whatever, I can see the appeal of this kind of game, but otherwise you'll have more fun with Valheim, Project Zomboid, Subnautica, or any other exploration game, for that matter.

====== OLD REVIEW - SEE BELOW FOR UPDATE =====

Alright, here we go.

+ Gathering? Fun.
+ Building? Fun!
+ Hunting? Fun, too.

~ Leveling up in order to learn things you need to survive? Pretty grindy, but once you get to level 20 or so you're fine.
~ Getting meta rewards you can bring with you on every mission? Pretty cool at first, then very grindy, then pointless, as you're limited to 10 items you can bring... so why bother getting more?

- Learning that the items you can build with about 20 minutes investment in the mission are BETTER than the best, most-expensive item in the meta shop? (looking at you longbow) Umm.... why?
- Having a real-time timer on missions that is stupidly arbitrary? Like, between 30 days (pointlessly long) and 5 hours (stupidly short)?
- If that timer expires, you lose your entire character and it doesn't actually say that in the game at all?! Complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
- Having missions that take 20 minutes reward you with 150 spacebucks, then having missions that take 10+ hours reward you with..... 250 spacebucks. Do the devs even employ a systems designer?!
- Having boring, grindy missions with 90% just running? Not fun.
- Having boring, super mega grindy missions where you need to get hundreds of some resource? Like, really not fun.
- Having a mission where you tech to tier 4 which is so boringly grindy that it puts all the other grinds to shame, only to have to just... sit and wait for a timer to count down before the mission ends for OVER AN HOUR?! Just, like, really bad.

I put 140 hours into this game because I had fun playing with my friends. Then, I realized that the devs didn't care about design or fun, they just cared about making the game "hardcore", which apparently to them means tedious and boring. I had hope that it would get better as I completed more missions and unlocked more things from the workshop, but it got worse and more boring actually.

Save yourself some time and anguish. Buy Valheim. Buy Subnautica. Those are such better exploration survival crafting games that it's almost hard to compare. They're so much better.

Just skip Icarus.


===== NEW REVIEW =====

+ Leveling up is now much faster, I never ever felt like I wasn't able to access the blueprints I needed. Plus the level cap has been raised much higher now
+ Longbow no longer the best early bow, the workshop bows are MUCH better
+ Workshop has so much more stuff now, so much more interesting stuff too
+ Can take 15 items down to prospect, this is great
+ Mission rewards are still a little strange on Olympus, but it's less of a bother now
+ Permadeath is less of a concern

- The grind is still there
- Some missions still have you wait around for up to several hours doing nothing while the objective completes

+ I am playing this again, with friends, after 3 years of being away and the game is really much better.

This is, hands-down, the best procedural exploration game I've ever played.

Great things:
- Beautiful world, despite the low-poly, low-res look
- Great exploration, there are built-in goals that guide you to seek ever further from your home
- Intuitive building, it's just fun to make stuff
- Awesome co-op multiplayer, it's even better with friends
- MODS! The modding community is awesome

Decent stuff:
- Combat is pretty good, if somewhat simplistic. It straddles the line between Dark Souls and easier action RPGs
- It's early access, so there's some stuff missing. The stuff that's there is good, but it could use a little more

Not so great stuff:
- There are a few little balance issues: bronze is too time-consuming to farm; the difficulty spike in the Swamp is huge; and without mods, if you know what you're doing, the game becomes real easy.

I still 100% recommend this game, and once you've done a playthrough, mix it up with mods!

This is the perfect game for anyone who grew up wishing their friends could play FF7 along with them. It's a fun and challenging rogue-like with beautiful visuals and a very engaging combat and push-your-luck system. I'd recommend this to anyone who likes old school RPG's or cooperative board games.

Seriously play it. And get Brave New World