Recent reviews by Dapper Raptor

Pretty enjoyable story, though I do wish it was a bit less linear. Quite short, but its enjoyable while it lasts and doesn't wear out its welcome. Try out the demo and if you're unsure, pick it up on sale. Generally, I'd recommend it though.

Changing my recommendation to a thumbs down for now. I adore this game, and can definitely see myself playing a hell of a lot of it... but in the launch state its just not good enough. I've gotten to a part of the story where the game crashes every single time, even if I put all settings on minimum and so on. If you look at the discussions, its very clear a huge number of people are having bugs, crashes, extreme performance issues, etc. If you want to roll the dice - try the benchmark but run it on loop for a few hours and see how you go. Even then though - I had really good results in the benchmark and really good stability... but now I'm stuck waiting for a patch to fix the game. I'll come back and update this whenever its patched, but for now, know you are rolling the dice on this one and just hoping, even if your pc is really good there's no way to know how well it will perform for you until you are playing it. And even then it might start crashing 7 hours in like it does for me lol

Initial review:

If you liked world and rise, you'll likely love wilds. Its very good. It definitely could use a little more optimisation on Capcom's part - so make sure you try out the benchmark first. But otherwise its playing great (for me) and I am looking forward to losing hundreds of hours to this lol

Really cool foundation already. Carts feel really nice to race. Can't wait to see what gets added.

Slept on this game for way too long after picking it up on a sale... Finally got around to trying it out and absolutely wish I had played it earlier. Ended up going through and replaying it multiple times to get all the achievements and such. Looking forward to jumping into the sequel now.

Picked this up impulsively on a sale after hearing it mentioned in a video or two... didn't play it for months. Just consumed it entirely in one sitting and I just want more. This had me super engaged the entire play through and I can easily recommend this to anyone who likes a good mystery. Hope to see a sequel or something similar come out in the future.

Addictive af and incredibly fun :)

Only a few hours in and some of that time has been spent tweaking and even trying to mod out an effect... But figured I'd post my thoughts.

The game itself is, so far, very good. I am very happy with the few hours I've played in terms of gameplay mechanics and so on. HOWEVER... I'd recommend waiting for a couple of patches. Right now performance is very rough, and very inconsistent.

If you like the Stalker games, or Metro series, then you'll have a good time here... but you really are going to enjoy it a lot more in a month or two once they've done some optimisation passes (hopefully)

EDIT: Just going to insert this here... your mileage with t his game will vary wildly. There are so many annoying bugs that can happen and it can vary from a small thing that just messes with the game a big (like shopkeepers getting out of sync with your world - so you just have to guess when they will be open and disregard their opening hours) to much more annoying things like entire cases bugging out because a character gets stuck in a combat stance in the middle of a stairway and just knocks out dozens of npcs who walk into their path, making it much harder to work out what is going on, to more game breaking things like getting stuck behind a counter that has been procedurally generated in such a way that you can jump over behind it, but not get back out.

I've restarted worlds ten or so times now and never managed to get tot he point of retiring because either something little bugs out and I decide to try again to see if I can work around, or things are going great and then a biiiig bug happens. I want to love this game, but if you are someone who isn't super tolerant of jank/bugs... maybe give it a miss. Gonna leave the rest of my review as it was and still hit thumbs up because I think its a great idea... but yeah - approach with that in mind.

Tldr; overall I think if you like what you see in the screenshots and trailer/s, you're probably gonna have a good time with this one.

Longer thoughts...

I've put about 12 hours into the game now after having bought it early in its early access life but deliberately waiting until 1.0 came out, and I am glad I waited. With such an ambitious concept as this, and from a small team, it is very impressive to see all the things that came together, but sadly the end result does fall a little short of the greatness I think it could have had.

What do I mean by that? Well... the game is far from bad - as the tldr said - if you think you're gonna like it you probably will. But I feel like some more time in the oven could have made what is a solid game into something truly remarkable.

Lets take, for example - the procedurally generated cities. They are really impressive - pulling something like that off without a giant budget to invest into R&D is really, really cool. But there's just enough hiccups in them to stand out. Sometimes you'll open a door to be blocked, entirely, by a random vent system. Sometimes you'll enter a room that seems like it should be important (like a security room) and its just empty. Sometimes you just get stuck on random objects and have to reload a save. Its not super common, but in the 12 hours I've played its happened about once an hour - which is enough that it stands out and dampens the effect of "wow these cities are so cool!" just enough to be annoying.

Another example is the character building, or rather lack there of. You always have the same few interactions available to you with NPCs in the world, and so far I haven't seen that change in any way. Either a NPC will talk to you, or they won't and you just have to throw money at them until they do - or find another way to get your info. There's no real differentiating one character to the next, there's no real growth in any of the characters, etc. Which is fine - it DOES work - but again, it does wear away at the experience over time. Your own character also doesn't really develop - you get some upgrade and such, but there's no sense of "I am this guy/gal in this world" at all.

There's probably a dozen or so things like the above mentioned things. None of them are issues enough to ruin the experience or make it not fun, but they just bring it from being amazing to "just good". I think that's why there are a lot of reviews and comments since the game hit 1.0 of people sharing frustrations - I imagine if you played this during the early access period, and fairly had the understanding that some or all of these things would be ironed out or expanded upon, the 1.0 release would indeed be disappointing in a fair way.

As it stands, I'm going to recommend this game - because I'm having a decent enough time with it, and as I said in the tldr - I do think you will likely have a good time if it looks like something you'd enjoy. I wish it had been given a little more time and polish - and its very possible the devs may do that over time - but I still expect I'll play at least another 12 hours of the game so realistically I can't complain too much. Its an enjoyable experiment that falls short of being a truly remarkable standout game - but its not "bad" by any measure.

Put a heap of time into this game on Epic and, honestly, its so incredibly well made and compelling as a game that it was a no-brainer to pick it up on steam as well to support the developer. Its incredibly satisfying, provides a good challenge, gives the player a huge amount of agency over how they want to play and progress, and is just all round a good time. Absolutely loving all the updates and can't wait to see what else gets added!

After playing the early access version on Epic for a few hundred hours, I forced myself to not play anymore after Update 3 and waited for 1.0... and that was a great idea! I'm having a blast. Satisfactory remains one of the best games in this style of game and the attention to detail, particularly in regards to the UX, is amazing. There's so many different ways to build and there's literally hundreds of tiny little tweaks and touches that the devs have put in to make your experience better... and that's all on top of a well designed, thoughtfully paced and rewarding building, automation and exploration game. One of the easiest recommendations if you have even a passing interest in the game.