Recent reviews by WhiskeyNinja

The game is great so far, great new accessibility features, love that low HR is just a pretty easy story, so noobs can get through the game without a ton of grinding, and veterans don't accumulate a bunch of gear/materials they'll never use again.

However, the performance is unacceptable - on a 2080 with i9 9900k - above recommended specs, if not by much, the game is barely scraping 30FPS at 2k resolution.

I have been playing this franchise since Monster Hunter Freedom 2 - almost 20 years. It is one of my favorite franchises, and it breaks my heart to have to not recommend this on performance despite the game hidden beneath smeary mandatory DLSS choppy framerate.

Will be live updating this as I go - but so far classic STALKER feeling. Only complaint is nowhere to view hunger with no-HUD on.

I'm getting playable framerates on Medium/High with a 2070 and i9-9900k.


Update, 8 hours in:

It definitely feels like a sequel to STALKER in all rights - the launch is buggy, but playable. If you are impatient, hold off a couple of months - I've had a couple of crashes, but I am on an ancient PC and generally have no issues except for some frame slowdown in towns and random crashes.

From a gameplay perspective, it's hitting all the right bits - fireside stories from STALKERS - and a ton of jokes and stories if you just sit and listen. The weapon durability system seems well tuned - there's good, worn, and broken conditions - you can only sell good and worn weapons, so scavenging dead enemies still has a place, but it isn't the giant money bomb it was in the original - I've actually had to pick and choose weapons I want to function as 'primary' and keep in good repair, and tuck a couple away until I can afford repairs and ammo, and that is immensely satisfying.
The balance in general seems pretty well tuned - radiation is present enough and damages health enough that I've actually had to drink vodka to wipe it - feels very immersive.
The plot, roaming the zone, the visuals of the new anomalies, and little story set-pieces, as well as some really interesting early moral choices have me hooked. This is 90% the game I wanted, and the last 10% will come from patches and mods, and for a sequel 17 years later I couldn't ask for much more.

Update 16 hours in:

The story is great. Cinematics were a surprise, very funny, and I was able to stealth kill through a military base and it felt very immersive.

EDIT:

I have ~60 hours now. If you're craving a solid survival ARPG this is it.

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I have 4 hours on my profile but played over 60 on the beta tests.

I wholeheartedly endorse this title at its price, and with the current amount of content if:

- You want a well-crafted, actually-worth-buying-in-Early-Access survival game, this is by far the best I've played.
- You enjoy quirky humor, and 90s-throwback graphics
- You love Half-Life, or apocalyptic sci-fi
- You love level-as-you-do RPG mechanics

I am reporting in to indicate the following:

- Game was stable, hosted on wi-fi with 3 players. Only issue we noticed was some devices not activating on other players clients (the choppy blades)
- The game is otherwise remarkably bug free
- They seem to have put a lot of work into balancing the skill trees. The Morrowind-style progression actually rewards diversification early (if you don't have a cook making food is a pain in the ass till cooking skill 3)
- Most importantly, this is one of the only survival crafting RPGs I have played that is entirely balanced for singleplayer as well as multiplayer.

Will update the review as I complete content.

They're waiting for you Gordon. In the test chamber.

I highly recommend Pacific Drive.

If:
- You enjoy exploring, setting-based storytelling (similar to a walking sim with much more to do)
- You enjoy extraction games - or like the idea of them, without enemies shooting at you constantly
- You like crafting, upgrading, unlocking abilities, dense customization
- You are a fan of scanning, plotting paths, planning loadouts leading to every contingency counted for
- You like Simon Stalenhag and wished his books were a PC game.

I've spent about 58 hours in Pacific Drive, as of the time of writing this. Probably could have finished it in 40 if I was really rushing. And I really, really enjoyed the journey. It's a slow burn, meditative game. You can play for 20 minutes and feel fairly satisfied, but a session can easily last hours. The process of prepping for a trip, crafting, customizing, upgrading, plotting the course, and departing is methodical, but each time I came back I was making new lore discoveries, bringing back new scans, new materials to upgrade the garage or car with, or a new mission to try to make it deeper in the Zone.

Trips into the Zone are eerie, but this is not a survival horror game. It is full of the Odd. Anomalies that don't care who you are - you're never stalked or hunted. The Zone is an eco-system, and while it would have been easy to include enemies with dense AI the setting is so good at establishing mood that I think I would have felt discouraged from exploring if there was greater risk. Things are already unsettling when anomalies can pop up behind you without notice. Your radio can randomly tune in to eerie frequencies without warning. I feel like this was the perfect balance. There are still Anomalies you interact with - behaviors that you can learn and interact with. But this isn't Outlast, at most it's Jurassic Park.

This game is gorgeous. Taking off for a trip in the night in deep fog, anomalies and lights from buildings setting a gentle glow, the horizon turning deep reds and yellows, sometimes from the sun rising or setting, sometimes from the Zone itself. Even without a photo mode I was constantly stopping to take screenshots.

I really enjoyed the loop of collecting materials. Building tools to enable you to collect more, methodically picking apart the safer maps, upgrading your car's storage to take more next time, really fun. If anything I think they could have upped the default difficulty a bit - if you're a pack rat and you're smart about your approach, and take notes about where certain resources are always found, you will probably never really be hurting for car parts, repair putty, and anything but the rarest deep zone materials.

The game does allow extensive accessibility options - ease of access and tweakable difficulty mean you'll likely be able to find the perfect balance for your playstyle - I'm looking forward to replaying in the future with the difficulty cranked up as hard as I can.

I've been making games for ten years now, and I can tell the folks that make Pacific Drive poured a lot of experience into this. The story of the game is ultimately about humanity - about sacrificing personal goals for work. About love and commitment. About learning when to let go. The Zone is a lovely backdrop, but it's a vessel for the rest of the story - there's no shortage of anecdotes, tapes, collectibles, and other things about the Olympic Exclusion Zone to keep you busy, and feel immersed in the world, but keep in mind that ultimately that won't be the focus end-of-game. I would love to see more about the mysteries of the Zone in the future.

I've had a few performance hiccups, mostly solved by turning of DLSS. Otherwise the game has run great.

I walk away from the game satisfied, but hoping for more. And even though I've finished the story, I'm still looking forward to my next run.

The Signal from Tolva is an interesting game. I bought it on release, tried to play a few times, and didn't manage to finish it till now - the trick was playing on Easy.

The Signal from Tolva (TSFT from hereon) has an immediately interesting setting if you enjoy science fiction. And with the developer stating their intent was to capture the essence of STALKER (one of my favorite games) it seems like a match made in heaven for me. But I had some issues really getting hooked.
TSFT is largely a walking sim, but with a core game loop of unlocking waypoints, fighting enemies and capturing bases, collecting currency, scanning artifacts, exploring, and then unlocking traversal. Again, right up my alley.
You're deposited on a large, static map, and told to move forward, and engage with the loop. The graphics are utilitarian but evocative, there's a day-night cycle to experience, and large landmarks that draw you towards them.

The friction I experienced was how disconnected the experiences are from eachother. Capturing bases is largely a convenience to spawn allies and fast travel, and unlocking waypoints only fast travel. Collecting currency becomes a chore eventually, especially when you're trying to find the last bit of scrap to pick up at a map market to clear it. Artifacts are just shapes or bits of the world with large tendrils visible on scanner. Many weapon upgrades are lateral, and it's difficult to know the feel of a weapon before you commit.

But it's still a serviceable shooter. Enemies take cover, use shields and utility, ambush. The combat feels very plinky though, and enemies can be a bit of a bullet sponge.

Comparing the game to the experience of STALKER, I think a lot of the rift in experience is the lack of a player driven story. You work for Information Brokers, but who you are isn't clear, and the unraveling mystery suffers a bit from being built in a world already alien, so it's a challenge to contextualize the lore you're unlocking. I know the devs were on a budget, and they've released a lore doc, but it would have been nice to see more of that in game somehow. I feel like a barely knew what the factions are in TSFT, in STALKER factions are the lifeblood of the game, the evolving world that you choose how to shape. in TSFT, they're just red and blue, generic bandit and religious fanatic.

I think I would have liked to see more character in the individual robots - they make noises, chuckle and chirp, but subtitled quips, or chatter would have made the world feel a bit more lived in.

The world itself is relaxing to explore. I think I had most of my fun finding new places, though in the main campaign I found the individual sectors lacked character except for a few. This was fairly well addressed in the Polar campaign, with places that seemed to have some distinct, inferred function, either from the war or whatever came before.

Exploring gave me one of my favorite moments in the game, actually - up against a rock wall, I could hear a strange, thumping pulsing from the other side. I couldn't get through, and had to find equipment to use another way through, but the thrill of the unknown, what might lie on the other side, had be buzzed for a bit.

Once that mystery wears off though, the experience starts to get a bit thin. I think this comes up most in the ruins that you can explore. What are initially thrilling, mysterious places that I thought might resemble the Labs in STALKER ended up being frustrating mazes that drained more enjoyment than they provided. No clues, just trial and error, even when you learn the right tools to use you can waste a fair bit of time just finding the correct path. Similarly to the mystery noise on the map. Initially exciting to find out what it was, then it became rote. I would have loved to have a greater sense of danger or the unknown.

Overall, I did enjoy TSFT. It's a game I wish (and I'm sure the devs wish) they had 3-6 million to develop, but for what it is, I think it's good - not great. So the thumbs up is conditional. Do you like slowly unwrapping lore, and exploring a strange new place? Then definitely give this a shot. But if you're expecting all of the systems to carry the game, and you come in expecting a robust shooter or the like, you may leave disappointed.

Big Robot, I hope y'all get the cash to execute your vision the way you want one day.

I finished a full playthrough in about 2.5 hours, without getting all of the achievements.

If you're a fan of Eric Chahi's, Another World and Heart of Darkness, or Flashback from Delphine, this is a great, short homage to the genre. Pixel graphics are crisp, the trial and error gameplay is fun, and you generally don't have to backtrack too much. There are a couple of slightly confusing puzzles but I managed to get by without looking anything up.

Definitely worth a buy if you enjoy cinematic platformers.

If you like STALKER or Tarkov, this is your cup of tea. The atmosphere and weapon mechanics are great, and it's a pretty good distillation of a lot of the mechanics of the larger games. Medical is quite simplified, no paperdoll and only tracking bleeds and radiation, not a bad thing necessarily.

At this point in early access my biggest criticism (with 40 hours, please don't interpret this as a complaint), are the way the missions play out over the maps. You can complete 80% of all of the gather missions on the first map, so if like me you are trying to clear out the maps one at a time of missions, you will get through a fairly large portion of all available missions and not have much left to do on the other maps.
I have no doubt this will be tuned as Early Access continues, but if you pick it up, make sure to play all of the maps equally.

It is what it says on the box. 4-6 hours of some lightly branching content, one secret route and a few alternate endings. Well-written, corny, cute. If you came here because you liked how it looked it's worth a buy. The game mechanics aren't deep, but they are very clever, and the secret route has some legitimately interesting counter-spelling going on.

This game is Simcity, but with factories. And instead of remotely planning the city you actually run around it and place things. You also don't have 'citizens', instead you have angry bugs trying to attack your factory.

This game also has a concentrated version of whatever ingredients cause you to sit down to play 'just a few rounds' of Civilization. When you buy this game, if it clicks, you will sink at least 4 hours into it over the first two days.
When you start the game, you are but one Engineer, with some scrap and a coal powered miner and furnace. Your goal is to build a rocketship to escape the planet you've crashed on. You put the miner down on some iron, set it to feed into the furnace, and neat! You get iron plates from the furnace. But you need fuel.. you can chop down some trees but you use your pickaxe to grab some coal from a nearby patch. Then you grab some stone, and you have enough resources to build another couple of miners. So you get miners and furnaces setup on all the resources. You use the collected resources to make more resource collectors. Now you can build a lab to start unlocking additional technology! But the lab needs power. So you build some boilers and steam generators, but they need coal so often that you need to build conveyors and robotic arms called inserters to feed the coal to your powerplant automatically. Now you can get to science! But you need to build science packs. So you setup your first automated assembler, building science packs from other resources. And you want more. But you need more resources, so you build more miners and furnaces, then you upgrade them to electric, then you run out of power and need to expand your power grid, then you need more coal to feed that, then bugs attack and you need to build turrets to automatically defend your base, etc. etc. you realize 7 hours have passed and you haven't blinked for 10 minutes.

It sounds daunting, but the game has a tutorial, a gentle learning curve, and you can completely customize your experience, turn off bugs, turn up or down resources, install a billion mods...

This game is a dangerous satisfaction loop and I love it for that. It's one of my favorite games, and I recommend it whole-heartedly.

This game is finally the vision they sold originally. Also my 1st or 2nd favorite game for VR - I'd argue more complete as a VR game than titles like Elite: Dangerous.