Recent reviews by Brentonator

Game gets stuck in the tutorial not allowing me to complete missions.

Overall game feels unfinished when starting as a new player. I had to depend on third-party tutorials just to get through basics like galactic navigation. I was really hoping for more from this game after 8 years of development but it has impressively bad user experience - the tutorial doesn't even teach you about MMB headlook or MMB melee

Neither ChatGPT nor steam forums nor reddit nor frontier support had any insight on how I became stuck in this way or why I had to depend on painfully slow Apex shuttles to complete a mission because I lacked "Federation District P" license to complete any of the available missions.

Updated Review:
After playing a 30 hours or so, I've learned the gameplay loop and some of the quirks that make things feel good. The contact melee weapons have with zombies feels good. I feel there are way too many times where dozens of runners catch you off guard - this feels like "zone" spawning where a gunshot doesn't naturally trickle in nearby runners but ends up attracting every runner unpredictably from a building.

Using items from inventory was tough, didn't know you just click it then have to press E. Would like a way to easily refill batteries from inventory without that "equip" step.

The gunplay feels good, the gore is good, and the shove (F) mechanic does seem to interrupt most attacks properly.

My character is level 49, and every time I dive in it feels incredible. This reminds me of GTFO. The horror of diving in with so much to lose is so much fun.


Launch Review:

I have only played 2.1 hours not counting the 20 hours from when I was a developer on it back in 2016 before I left the team for personal reasons.

I like the direction the team has taken the game. The "permadeath" feature could be better explained. You get rolled a randomish character each time you die and when you start the game. You can level this character up until you die with him which for now might be frequent with the bugs the game has.

There are issues with networking where your movement seems to be de-synced. Zombies like to pop around. It doesn't feel like I'm fighting the zombies as much as the game at the moment. Dedicated servers as many have asked for would be a huge plus.

The objectives aren't obvious and the objective indicators just seem to disappear a lot leaving me lost as to where to go or what to do. Considering the objectives themselves can be challenging by themselves it would be nice to have more reliable indicators of where those objectives are located.

All of that being said, when I finished my first match, I was hooked and realized I had something "in the bank" I needed to now save by considering when and how I'll risk things with my now level 15 character in the next match.

I'm looking forward to when the servers are a bit more stable and when some of the small bugs are fixed especially around networking. This game has more than a lot of potential to be a huge amount of fun today and will continue to get better as more maps are rolled out, more gameplay loops, and more features like weapon attachments come out.

The guns were satisfying, the melee was enjoyable, and some of the staples of the original like bullet pass-through dynamics were preserved well. Lining up 8 zombies with the hunting rifle was incredibly satisfying in how much ammo you can save. I'm looking forward to ammo scarce missions once the networking and melee is a bit more consistent.

🦌💨💩 🏹🤷

Fell in love at first sight. Found out it's by ex-DICE employees is the icing on the cake.

Better than the original so far. No multiplayer matchmaking issues. Can't wait to see where they take it next.

Update: have not been able to play for three days due to server issues.

Don't listen to the bad reviews. The game is fine. There are some minor road bumps they'll get over and it gets better with every update.

The learning high external wall on this title is enormous to surmount. My first few times I just ran around as a naked confused and just died quickly. After managing to survive a little while and meeting with friends in a squad I slowly picked up what the actual gameplay is like and I'm so surprised there is any depth to it.

This game teaches you everything is temporary so enjoy it while you've got it. Favorite base you spent 40 collective hours building? No better than never having existed to begin with. Lots of interesting strategies and fun to have in this title.

Repetitive but has a lot of potential especially if they open up workshop maps and game modes.

This game HATES the mouse, and doesn't understand the keyboard very well for menu navigation. What makes them think clicking my left mouse button means I want to click the "highlighted" element on the screen I don't know.

Getting past the menu issues by restricting myself to arrow keys, the space bar, and escape button I began to be able to enjoy the game for what it was. Except they were constantly popping up controller-based icons trying to instruct me how to do things. I gave in and plugged in my xbox one controller and ever since I've enjoyed the game thoroughly without compromise.

Does this make it a console port? Yes and No. The game is not plagued by any sort of performance issues expected from a console port. In fact it runs smoothly at 60fps with occasional hitching when I'm travelling too fast or I've been playing too long. This is to be expected on a 4 year old machine with a GTX 770, i7-930, 12GB of DDR3-1066, and an SSD running over SATA2. Still, I've never seen the FPS dip below 40 and I have the settings all set to the highest they will go at 1080p.

This is an excellent game. The cinimetography is amazing. I haven't seen an offensive self-casting shadow yet. It is movie quality stuff here. I think the hair leaves something to be desired, especially the facial hair which looks very coarse on my PC. I think they tone down the graphics to reach 60FPS regardless.

The collisions engine is incredible as always, they almost need to turn it down because of how deformable the cars become. This is exactly what I wanted to see in a demolition derby style game. Can't wait to play online.