Recent reviews by RadKit

TLDR: Really close to giving this the thumbs down but... for the price point I think it is worth it (just barely) IF you know what you're actually buying is more of a Walking Simulator or Interactive Fiction than anything else.

Nobody Wants to Die has a couple of major problems.

Problem number one:
It's not really a detective game.
I've run into this problem with other "detective" type things, its almost impossible to think going in that you won't be doing some, gee I dunno, detecting, but whew boy not here you wont be. At least not where you'd think you would. In NWtD the game dictates and waypoints every thing you'll be interacting with one. at. a. time. It's a level of handholding matching MMORPG fetch quests. The game tells you to go point a, and use tool x, then you do the mini-minigame (a 5 second no lose clicking thing that's probably the worst game design mechanic I've ever seen), then you go to point b and use tool y, then you do the minigame like 5 or 6 times. This is the entire gameplay loop at the scene of the crime.

Problem number two:
The game looks amazing, but that doesn't mean it is amazing.
I've been expecting this for a while, and it started really with UE3 and UE4... but UE5 really drives it home. It used to be that games that looked amazing had a very high chance of being amazing in other areas because they were so high budget... now UE5 is (relatively) cheap and that means consumers are going to see a lot more not great games that look top notch.

That out of the way, lets back up a bit and start again.
Nobody Wants to Die is like a noir + Blade Runner + Altered Carbon + Redux (System Reboot) mash up setting, extra heavy, and I mean extra heavy, on the noir. Its UE 5 so it looks great and the level design and ambiance are impressive. The voice acting is pretty good, again if you love extra heavy noir. The main character is right off a page of a 5 cent noir Crime novel, for good or bad. The main game play is much like Cyberpunk 2077's Braindances where you're rewinding and fast forwarding but here you don't get it all at once, you have to unlock more and more of the "reconstruction" by following the clues and using your tools, reminds me a bit of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter but with more mechanics, but like I mentioned earlier your hand is held so tightly and you're lead down the breadcrumb tunnel with horse blinders on and it can be hard to feel like you're playing the game more than it's playing you.

A big redeeming factor is that NWtD has a bit of choices matter with things like "so and so liked that" or "this choice will affect the story" and that does make it quite a bit more interesting and gives some replay value. There's also a crime board type of thing where you connect evidence you've found and some found by like a CSI team or after report/research. This is where you get to do some actual detecting, and there is a surprising amount of extra story and dialog that happens while you work on your crime board, but it doesn't appear that you can make any wrong connections and for me personally I always struggle with the logic of these types of puzzles and this one is no different, but at least I would say this qualifies as detective gameplay, even if you probably will be trial and error-ing your way through some of the crime board connections at some point.

Final note:
I do like the game, especially at its low price point it's just incredibly hard to recommend. If you wanted noir in your Blade runner or Blade Runner in your noir and you like walking simulators or interactive fiction with lite gameplay... you might really love it. If you're looking for more, you might end up impressed with the graphics and little else.

UPDATE 8/16/24: The new loot crate pretty much undoes everything good I say below about how the IAPs are not predatory. The new system is incredibly badly translated at least, and intentionally misleading at worst. To get all of the top rewards you would need to hit .05% 5 times or spend $435 dollars. That is the actual number, not an exaggeration. Yes it is just cosmetic and yes you don't have to do it... but this is pretty much exactly what I didn't what to see in the game. I shouldn't be surprised because its not new in other regions but still.

TLDR: A Free to Play Online Third Person Crafting/Survival Looter/Shooter that actually isn't Pay to Win, doesn't constantly pressure you to buy things like speed ups or unlocks, has PvE and PvP servers, and doesn't even have a cash GATCHA option? Yes, Please and Thank you.

Once Human (OH) is a great example of how Devs could choose to do IAP, and GATCHA without seeming like a predatory cash-monger that really only is hunting for whales. Slightly more detail: IAP (including the battle pass) is cosmetic only. The GATCHA machine, which is one of several ways you can get new equipment (blueprints) or power up your existing gear (blueprint fragments), can only be used with currency earned by playing the game.

OH is an interesting mix of The Division, Any survival game with resource nodes, and The Secret World. It's got a lot of gathering, exploring, looting, shooting, and crafting. Speaking of crafting, you'll be making everything from food, gear and ammo to houses. vehicles and gun turrets. OH has a sort of a modern / Lovecraftian ruined earth mysterious setting that works reasonably well and overall the game is more then the sum of its parts.

There's gotta be a catch right? Well, yeah, kinda....two things.

First:
The game is far from perfect. The gun play, the setting, the base building and overall game play loop are very good, its fun and there's a lot of quick and fast rewards for everything. On the con side of things... the VO is spotty, some of the writing misses the mark entirely, the overall story line (for season 1 at least) is a bit weak and there can be performance issues on certain PCs which is made often much worse in groups of players doing a large event. However my only one real gripe is that the puzzles are just not good, one thing that Secret World did right is that it had real adventure game style puzzles in an MMORPG that actually fit the setting super well AND worked well AND were fun! By comparison, the puzzles in OH are, with a tiny few exceptions, not really puzzles and not really any good. They are rewarding in the sense that you get a good reward for completing them but not in the sense that you feel like you solved something.

Second:
There are planned seasonal wipes every six weeks. There's a lot of info out there but I'm going to try to summarize very quickly (and probably do a really bad job). At the start of a new season you go back to level 1, and start fresh EXCEPT you retain blueprints, fragments, found formulas (furniture crafting) unlocked weapon accessories and pretty much all event or seasonal currencies... I personally think this doesn't sound so bad as the things you are losing are actually very easy to get back very quickly and the things you are keeping are exactly what actually matter. That said, until we see it (season reset) actually happen we kinda don't know, it could be horrible, but it could actually be okay or even good. It might be worth it if each season is actually distinct and there's new and interesting things to do, shoot, loot, craft and win from the GATCHA.

Final note:
Overall I've had a lot of fun with the game so far and I've enjoyed leveling up (my favorite part of any game) and watching my character get strong and stronger, kill some elder god level things and build a pretty awesome base. You'd think I'd be sad to lose all that at the end of the season (still a ways off), and sure being max level and min-maxing your build is fun but its the GETTING THERE that I like and I think it might be fun to do it all over again, maybe as a completely different build with a completely different looking base.

Disclaimer: I have spent 9.99 on the battle pass because I really liked some of the cosmetics in this specific pass but I honestly think if I look at the next one and don't see several things I like I'd be just fine not getting the next pass.

P.S.
I dunno, this review kinda went off the rails from where it started and what is usually a freewriting exercise that I just do in one go and then lightly edit turned into a sprawling mess that I re-ordered like way too many times, so if something seems horribly out of place or super poorly edited... that's why... thanks.

TLDR: I guess I'm liking it a little more than I thought? But there's really no possible way to give the game the thumbs up. Even if you might have a good time with it for a bit, it will probably bite you in the end.

The First Descendant (FD) unmistakably is the unholy spawn of Black Desert, Warframe and Destiny 2 (also any F2P Korean MMO)... unfortunately FD doesn't really do any of the things that those games do better, or even as well, FD is clearly worse across every front, but if you're done with those other games I could see liking FD for a bit, or at least messing around with it casually if (HUGE IF) you can force yourself to ignore the IAP and battle pass FOMO.

I haven't spent any money yet but everyone should be extremely careful about what you spend your money on because FD uses every trick in the book to make you spend real money.

Everything in FD has a "speed up", "unlock early", "+1 slot" or "purchase" button, even things that you really don't need to buy because you'll get them just by playing long enough or grinding or farming/repeating missions and bosses.

FD does also have quite a bit of the old drug dealer trick to let you "have a taste" to get you hooked on needing an item, only for you to then realize you need to craft more, which requires grinding for the materials and real time spent "researching"... or you could just spend premium currency to speed up or premium currency to get the mats or just outright buy the finished item... with premium currency.

As far as I have seen you cannot earn ANY premium currency by playing the game F2P, you do however earn some premium currency by leveling up the premium battle pass, but at a deficit. While I'm talking about the battle pass I'll just say: The battle pass seems really unimpressive and extremely time consuming (unless I'm missing something entirely), so I really don't want to buy the premium. This is actually a good thing I guess? It's one purchase I'm not even considering! HA.

There is some very questionable marketing with tagging IAPs like "Top Seller" or "POPULAR". I really doubt that the 100 dollar premium version of one of the starting characters is actually a top seller. Tags like this have been banned in other places because of how deceptive this trick is.

Additionally their response to early purchasing problems was: "Too many people buying at once." That has got to be the best spin on store issues I have ever heard. It implies that things are selling like hot cakes and you should join in! ROFL. Yeah, sure. Right.

You do get 1 character free out of a choice of 3 and I have to say do NOT pick the grenade guy, his skills are terrible compared to the others. The only thing he's good for is early access to fire abilities, which is not worth much at all.

Then you do very quickly get access to a 2nd and 3rd character just by doing quests, and maybe its more than that but that's as far as I am... and they do each play very differently... but also seem wildly unbalanced.

Right now I think I'm just doing the typical "beat the F2P game by not doing any IAPs"... which is always fun for a bit, but usually the advertising wears me down and I buy something, then enjoy it for 2 seconds then regret it entirely and then usually stop playing cold turkey... so it might just come down to what Stanley and Flynn have taught us: the only real way to win is to not play?

First Survivor game I've liked besides Vampire Survivors (VS).

It's still EA and there are some bugs, crashes, typos and some jank, but I've already played over 7 hours and had only 2 crashes and really no other performance issues. I've played AAAAA (lol Ubisoft) games that have way more problems, especially in EA or beta.

FatalZone has all the regular survivor stuff like ranking up weapons as you level during a run, bosses that drop chests that based on luck can have 1-5 items, evolving weapons (with a chest opening) when you get the right combos, re-rolling, revives... all that stuff.

Unlike VS, you have a base with several buildings that you want to upgrade with loot you find from crates or events during a raid (what the game calls a run). These upgrades get you all kinds of things like more characters to hire, more extraction opportunities (which also comes with free chests and heals), more upgrades to starting gear, access to deeper talent tree levels, debuff removal and healing (more on this later), and access to different maps.

In raids you gain infection points, every 1000 points you get stat decreases and a mutation, mutations range from very bad debuffs to very powerful buffs for that character, you can remove any mutations you don't want with gold but healing off those decreases means that merc is unavailable for 1 raid. Characters also gain exp during a raid which gives talent points as they level up from 1 to 10.

Should a character die in a raid, they are dead and gone, its not a huge deal (it only takes a few runs to decently level up a character) but its still enough to make you think twice about risking losing someone.

Also during a raid there can be little events that lead to extra chests, or resources, it kind of creates this choice between farming exp like you normally would or being less efficient with your exp gains to try to collect resources to level up your base's buildings. I find this very interesting because it at least gives the player something to think about other than just worrying about exp.

Overall I think its already a good game, and hopefully with a little more development it could become even better.

When you look at Against the Storm (AtS) on its store page... it looks like a standard city builder.
The videos and screenshots look like a normal city builder.
I'm pretty sure it has the city builder tag.

It's not really a regular city builder at all... maybe city builder lite, in the sense that you are building roads and placing buildings...

It's really hard to describe what this game actually is, because it is incredibly unique. I've played thousands of different games and I've never seen anything like it. Bits and pieces of things sure like sim city, frostpunk, several RTS games... but what it really resembles is a cult classic board game: Food Chain Magnate, in which you carefully micro manage every aspect of your Fast Food Empire, in AtS it just happens to be a settlement. Towns do operate much like companies, after all. It's a loose example but its the best I can come up with.

You'll constantly be looking at where your workers are, what season it is, wheres the trader, do I need more grain, where are those planks at, we need one less woodcutter and two more farmers asap, we need to get on that event before it expires, I'm not sure if I should burn this to the ground or fix it up... and a lot more.

Normally, I (and I'm pretty sure a lot of people) wouldn't think of "micro managing" as a positive... but in AtS it somehow is! The best way I can describe this is that almost every single thing the game throws at you has a counter move, or a way to mitigate the negatives, of course those counter moves are often a double edged sword as well, but I find myself extremely impressed with the design of the game to contain so much randomness, yet still give you a winning chance.

Each run of the game has you trying to make a settlement that has enough resolve (worker happiness) and ability to complete orders from the Queen, before that same Queen runs out of patience and declares you a failure. You also have to constantly contend with the land or Forest (although its not always a forest of trees) which gets more and more angry as you cut into it and its secrets. All of this is of course on top of the normal stuff like keeping your people fed, warm, and housed (among like 11 other things as well).

Each run is wildly different based on location modifiers, resources the map has, events, orders, what races your workers are, what blueprints you unlock during that run. You hopefully win and get some upgrade materials for the main city where the queen lives, unlocking or powering up your ability to do better next time, eventually you run out of time and all the settlements are wiped away in THE STORM, but not your upgrades or upgrade materials, and you set out again, hopefully getting further than you did last time, but of course more distance leads to more challenges.

This probably sounds like waaaaay to much to handle, but by god I don't think I've ever seen a strategy game that is so good at having information available to you to read and learn how to play as AtS. Between tutorials, tooltips, graphs, charts, info tabs and an encyclopedia of everything, all the knowledge is there and it works super, super well. YOU CAN DO EEET.

This doesn't mean its easy by any means, and I don't fault people who don't "get it" or don't want to put in the time to learn, I'm just now getting to the Viceroy difficulty (lowest needed to "beat" the game)... but you can earn materials for upgrades even on the lowest settings (it'll just be less materials at a time), and most importantly when you do start to "get it" it's like constant moments of that last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, or beating a boss in a souls game, it is extremely satisfying.

Highly recommend this game to anyone who kinda likes city builders, but more so likes mulling over choices and then being flexible with your strategies when those choices fall flat and then juggling several spinning plates while the clock ticks away.

There's probably hundreds of things about this game I should also be saying, but I'll wrap it up here with:

TLDR: An actual unique game where you are given everything you need to succeed but still need to make a huge number of choices and then re-evaluate those choices and make more choices, you are never blocked from victory but its not easy, when you do get there: wonderfully satisfying.

An amazing diamond in the rough.

A Super Cute JRPG with lite Life Sim mechanics, tons of polish and smart design choices. Wonderful art style, graphics, animations. Japanese voice work is high quality and amazing, English subtitles are localized better than anything I've ever read, practically zero errors in any of the game's dialog.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll laugh some more throughout a fantastic story. You'll do training mini-games, collect rare materials, craft, customize spells, collect pets, upgrade, evolve, enhance, farm optional bosses, grind stats.

You'll completely destroy fantastic looking monsters of all types with both sword and magic with a surprisingly deep combat system. You'll hunt for secrets, solve some light puzzles, do optional side-quests, and eat a ton of delicious pies.

Multiple difficulties to suit anyone, NG+... the list goes on and on.

I can't highly recommend this game enough to anyone who likes Anime, Life Sims, JRPGs... but even more so to someone who would like the combination of all those in one highly polished, well written, perfectly localized, package.

Starfield is an Odd Duck. That's for sure.
Lets make a list in no discernible order:

• You got the overall look and feel of a Bethesda RPG like Skyrim but with only skills, no attributes which makes character progression feel weird and flat. Not to mention that to advance a skill you have to complete a very arbitrary feeling "challenge", and that each skill only has 4 ranks, each only costing 1 skill point, and that the skill tree is tiered with points spent pre-reqs sometimes forcing you to take a skill or four you don't want to access a skill you do want.
  
• Even worse Melee mechanics than Skyrim (wouldn't have thought this could be possible).
  
• Surprisingly Much better (than Fallout 4/76) gunplay mechanics.
  
• The absolute horse caca gear rolls basically copy and pasted from Fallout 4/76 (I hate this, very very much).
  
• Typical Bethesda eyeroll dialog with the occasional gem and with typical mixed bag Bethesda quality Voice Acting.
  
• Typical Bethesda "probably-much-shorter-than-advertised" main quest campaign.
  
• So many random events you actually wish they would stop for one ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ second.
  
• Typical Bethesda really, really fantastic Side Quests.
  
• You do basically fast-travel (via menu) with 1 to 3 unskippable immersion breaking cutscenes, everywhere.
  
• Ship flight obviously copied from Elite Dangerous but with no-where near its depth.
  
• Bits and pieces of No's Man's Sky
  
• Way too many systems and mechanics copy and pasted from Fallout 4/76 (Side note: I'm really not so sure what took so long to make this game, it feels about 75% copied from other games.
  
• Randomized Mission terminals with missions that are sometimes mere seconds long. Click, click, fast-travel, done.
  
• Some amazingly good looking vistas with jam-packed interesting cities, and a huge amount of barren landscapes.
  
• You literally cannot walk through a populated area without picking up some side quests.
  
• You can, very early on, just go off and do your own thing, completely ignoring the main quest.

I'm gonna stop there even though there's a lot more I could or probably should list... both positive and negative but those are the things that stand out the most in my mind. Now you might look at that list and see it as mostly negative, and it might be, but it seems impossible to not be, with the hype and expectations of a game the likes of Starfield. Obviously an overall thought that I keep having is just how much of the mechanics and systems are straight copied or extremely heavily derived from other games, and not always in a good way. A lot of times I look at big games lately and I can see what took so long to develop the game, Starfield on the other hand, aside from some of its bigger areas, feels like it could have been done rather quickly, again it just feels odd.

All of that said and completely ignoring the fact that many many people seem to be having technical issues and optimization problems (the game runs wonderful for me, personally)... I am having a lot of fun with the game. Everything is either just good enough or not quite bad enough or ignore-able enough with a large amount of freedom and things to do that like other Bethesda games... that it feels like a world (or rather galaxy) to be a character and live in. The "world" feels alive and full of freedom. Be a smuggler, be a trader, be a pirate, be a do-gooder, be anything in-between, join factions, build outposts, build ships, advance your skills in and out of combat, interact with all the systems you want, and ignore many that you don't want.

TLDR: Is it the perfect game, no. Is it a superior Bethesda product? no. Is it Skyrim in space? no. Does it borrow too heavily from other very established space games? Probably. Is there way too much fast-traveling with un-skippable cutscenes? Absolutely. Do you spend too much time navigating menus? Absolutely. Can it be incredibly immersive with a staggering amount of open-world freedom? Absolutely. However, the game is riddled with bugs and crashes, which, if you're affected, can make the game feel miserable.

TLDR: Less about fishing and more about inventory management and grinding even just a handful of hours in.

***UPDATE DEV RESPONSE:***
"Dennis_FP [developer] Posted: Sep 5 @ 3:40am
Hi, Thank you for your report. We need to clarify that we do not force you to spend money. You have the possibility to gain in-game money by fishing and use all free possibility for qualified fishing, you need to pay only if you want to use advanced and unique products."

***MY RESPONSE TO DEV RESPONSE:***
I need to clarify that I said trick not force. Also your entire community knows basic licences are USELESS because not only are they incredibly limiting as to what fish you can keep but you can get penalties in the THOUSANDS of in-game money by catching the wrong fish with only a basic licence. So you are either 100% out of touch with reality or intentionally being less than honest, neither is good. Advanced or Unique Products? Hardly. For example Emerald lake unlocks at level 3, but you don't get a good enough fish keeper for Emerald Lake until level 15. UNLESS you pay premium currency to get there earlier. That isn't unique. Another Example: Barbless hooks. This is a straight up PAY for more EXP. Not Unique other than the item has a different name, it functions exactly the same, it just gives more exp. The "pay for early access" also applies to rods, reels, lines, tackle, terminal tackle, lures, bait. Unless you are willing to pay, you need to very carefully grind out money and exp to access items. A lake might unlock at level 5, but without spending real money a player might not go to that lake until level 30. If they do pay... heck they could go at level 1. Also one last example about the trick, if your in-game money dips under 1k, even if you do know what your doing the game, at every single opportunity, gives you pop ups ask if you want to PAY for more in-game money. Whomever put this "feature" in knows exactly what they were doing. Again all of these things are just one or two examples out of... dozens of possible examples I could make.

NOW DON"T GET ME WRONG. I am still playing the game and I haven't spent any real money and I plan to continue to play and maybe some day the constant popups to buy things for real money will get to me, maybe they won't. NOTICE I didn't call it a bad game, or a fraudulent game, I just said I wouldn't RECOMMEND the game to others and listed my reasons why. I did also list reasons as to WHY people might WANT to play the game.

***END OF RESPONSE TO DEV RESPONSE.***

Can't recommend this game because of a lot of its systems are obviously designed to almost trick you into needing to put in real money. Things like house storage, personal storage, fish storage (which you need to make any money from actual caught fish) fees, licences, penalties for some fish you want to take, penalties for some fish you want to put back, penalties sometimes just for catching specific fish. Things that you need a low levels being premium currency only, premium items that can only be repaired with more premium currency. Needing to pay to remove your "cooldown" before you can advance the time of day (to sell fish or get to a better fishing time). The list continues WAY past this, this is just a SMALL sample, but I will say even the first lake (which thankfully does have a free basic license (the advanced license for the first lake is NOT free however) and no travel cost (of course is populated with very low value fish) has things like penalties, fees and licence costs.

Also can't really recommend this game because very quickly it moves away from the fun and relaxation of fishing into turning it into a logistical and financial simulator. More than fishing you spend your time planning your fishing trips and grinding money to pay for licenses and "travel" from location to location. It is very easy in this game to paint yourself into a corner and be broke and nearly un-able to fish. A dead giveaway of a problem? The game has a daily login reward of in-game money. Just like a "free" slot machine app, they know you're gonna go broke and then possibly not be able to play so they'll dole out just enough that you think you can get back out of the hole. Again the list continues WAY past this, this is just a SMALL sample.

Level 1 the game is great, you're leveling up fast which gives a good amount of in-game currency each time, and there's some very easy missions and challenges with rewards or money or exp. But after a couple days and maybe around level 10 or so. You realize the nightmare as you have to manage making trips to other lakes; this is riddled with several unnecessary mechanics like travel expenses, licenses fees, fish storage, gear storage, gear durability, the fact that you can't access your home storage OR most of the shop without leaving the lake and then needing to pay the travel cost again to come back to the lake. Again, again the list continues WAY past this, this is just a SMALL sample.

Now don't get me wrong, all of these flaws really could appeal to some people who want their fishing game to be more like... actually being an amateur pro fisherman without a dayjob and a yt or twich account , if (big if without spending a good mount time watching/reading about grinding strats) you can learn or grind out the system well enough you can "win" and successfully play the game 100% free. I honestly think I could do these things, plan everything out, follow someone's guide on grinding, or figuring it out on my own. I just don't think any of that sounds particularly fun.

The game is extremely unapologetic to mistakes or sub-optimal gaming, too grindy, too long, too logistical, and not worth most people's time or money. Another dead giveaway... When people talk about this game they most often talk about the most efficient xp and money grind strategies. Not the gameplay or the graphics or the joy of fishing... no, just the grinding.

Lastly and maybe more importantly I can't really recommend this game because the basic fight (when you're reeling in a hooked fish) mechanics seem quite broken. Often how hard a fish will fight you in this game seems random and aside from tiny pan fish the rest of the fist never tire or only tire for a few seconds at a time. One fish I had recently was literally twitching in the water like a strobe light toggling from fight to rest several times a second. They just updated the games "fight" mechanics, but the only change was to make it harder to use a max drag setup, trying to slow down high level players who have figured out how to quickly pull fish out of the water with overpowered setups, often literally sending the fish flying. As a result fights are a random slog that are too random to be instructive or fun, and that's how I feel about the game as a whole.

The new update says that now a good time to jump in for new or returning players... but nothing could be further from the truth.

Something like 6-7 years ago I was in the endgame content.
Now coming back in, I tried both options for how the game "starts" and its an absolute mess.
Even once you figure out how to actual get a level to play (shockingly hard)... there's still never any direction as far as actual game play strategy or how to set and reach goals for yourself.

Here's a quick Warframe breakdown: you need to spend 100s or 1000s of hours grinding out currency and rare item drops all the while constantly switching characters and equipment, to level things up, and micromanaging a horrible marketplace/trading and crafting systems. Keep in mind this whole time the game does almost nothing to tell you about any of this or where or how or why or when you should be doing anything or making plans or anything at all really.

Also the best part of the game is also the worst part of the game, and that is how you completely break it. It starts off (for a fresh account) as a shooter with some weird abilities on cool downs. However once you are a few dozen hours into the game it becomes pretty much everything but a shooter as you are almost forced to focus more on spamming abilities or running around at the speed of sound to finish levels before the AI can activate, or doing crazy ninja jumps that cancel boss phases. The problem with all of that is the the gun play is alright, the rest of the gameplay and controls (and maybe this is just me) feel too loose or unresponsive and many abilities have long animations that you can't cancel out of.

YMMV but for me, even if I do pour hours into relearning the game I know that the more I play the game the more it will move away from the things that I want to be playing it for... not exactly the best design for something that requires so much grinding.

Lastly, you might have guessed by now the game requires a lot of grinding but not just any grinding, as soon you'll realize there's actually only a very very small number of missions even worth replaying to get almost anything done. So at first I was actually excited to hear about an all new way to play... but then it was revealed that a core concept in the new content is... replaying the same levels over and over and over. Wow.

Exactly what the game already has in huge abundance, they've decided to double down and ad even more of it. Not super impressive.

If you're a brand new player and you absolutely have zero dollars to spend on a new video game, then sure try it out and you'll maybe get 100 or so hours out of it if you stick with it. Maybe 200-300 if you do some of the grind, but most people are going to burnout long before you get any where, let alone in to the endgame (which is like triple the grind, surprise!).

You might be better off finding something else to do with your time.

I like the idea of extraction games... but they have some obvious pitfalls.

If enough players are not doing PvE activities and only camping extraction zones, players will either quit the game or become campers themselves.

If enough players are KOSing players who may be open to working together, then those players will either quit or become KOS players themselves.

If nothing is done to penalize (or if they are rewarded) these behaviors spread more and more and that's just not really something I like.

I think there's a lot of ways things could be penalized or rewarded to balance things out a bit but as the game is already going into its third season and has opted to go the route of better arming casual/new players (which will only create more camping and KOS situations) I doubt I'm ever going to like this game despite enjoying the visuals, setting, looting, crafting, faction system, quests, apartment upgrading... pretty much everything except the gank or be ganked heart of the game, which again, only seems to be growing stronger with support from both the community and the developer.

I will say if I was more of a fan of stealthing around and patiently waiting for unsuspecting victims to shoot in the back of the head... I would probably play this game 24/7. so I'm sure some people will really like it. I mean that honestly. If you lean more towards shoot first and ask questions later already, and you have pretty good aim, this could be the game for you.

Just as a disclosure I did not spend any real money on this game and would caution others from doing so, everything except cosmetic items (which have almost no effect in a FPS game) can be lost permanently at pretty much anytime... or looted from other's corpses if your lucky, so be careful what your money is actually going towards.