Recent reviews by Goddamn Superhero

Edit:
Season 4 started. They brought back ranked cashout. There are some other decisions I'm not a fan of but the developers brought some data to justify the decision and I can atleast understand why they made them. Would recommend at this point people jump back in.
Pros:
-Added ranked cashout back
-improved spawning systems & cashout balancing settings to encourage multiple cashout points at once
Cons:
-Contract system is still a mess, causing most game modes besides ranked filled with people attempting to farm contracts. This causes players to not focus on objectives.
-Unsuredness about how the classes are supposed to be played. Lots of nerfing the heavy/healer by weakening defensive/support options. Light class has never found its place in cashout but its just dagger/knife spam in other game modes. Too many game modes with different objectives that it doesn't seem like the devs can balance it all.

This game intense action with lots of variability due to the nature of destructive maps. It has a unique game mode which allows for many ways to handle a scenario so most matches feel completely unique. The high moments are amazing, and on the lows you'll hate your brain rotted teammate who's nose crayon leached toxic chemicals into their nervous system and caused them to make every wrong decision possible.
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OLD REVIEW for season 3:

I love this game, but Season 3 killed their game and its currently not worth playing. I wouldn't recommend someone to play this game until September when season 4 drops where I'll consider changing my review.

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Pre season 3
Why this game is good.
Dynamic fast pace combat, with destructible environments. Its chaotic and messy and its always exciting. 3v3v3v3 game mode where you have to defend a cashout that you brought money to, but the environment is going to change as you get attacked. Or you breaching and you can breach any way you want. Its amazing.
Amazing visuals, one of the best looking shooters in terms of style (besides the characters faces to be honest, everyone looks weird but you got masks and ♥♥♥♥ to cover it)
Every game is unique, and fun, and with the tournament arc there are stakes on the line and its tense.

My only critique is that no one uses voice, and when the only time you don't have fun is when you get braindead teammates because this is a team game. one bad teammate can ruin your lobby

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Season 3
Main game mode switched to a SnD clone which is poorly balanced. Instead of 2 bad teammates, now you can have 4. Everyone plays snipers because they broke the balance. They took out ranked tournament and added a casual tournament, so now you can play the same game you love but everyone is stupid and there are no stakes. I played enough terminal attack (the new mode) to get a rank which is atleast 5 hours because of all the match disconnects, but i can say im not having fun. I played this nearly daily before and was top 3300 in Season 2.

I believe this is nexon ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ since they full own embark now. Its a shame they killed the most unique shooter on the market. Season 1 to season 2 they added alot of cool features, and when they added Terminal attack it was not my cup of tea but i played it and it was ok. They just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ the balance, and then said this is the new game mode now.

Can Embark Make it back to the Finals please?

If you need a game to play with a friend this isn't bad, but I don't recommend it.
I got to the end game and gave it a shot.

You'll know how you feel about the game the first portal beyond where they let you build your base. The game is very similar after that

The game looks great, and the concept for the worlds look cool. Building with the lighting makes for nice bases, although at my point there isn't much you can do to make your base too nice looking.

The combat is serviceable. attacks cost stamina which run out quickly. its kind of a walk backwards and swing game. AI is brain dead and they spawn the same zombieish characters at you. As you go deeper there are more enemy variety it doesn't require you to change your strat. Your gear either puts you way to strong and you just melee the ♥♥♥♥ out of stuff or your undergeared and get two shot. I just got to the point of the enchantments and its like minor buffs so far like 10% less damage or 10% stealth so can't speak to if this system is fun either.

The Puzzles are pretty braindead as well, either combat shrines, or hit pylons in order. if they didnt call it a "puzzle" i'd be fine but its barely a puzzle, and its only challenging when its dark, there are 7 pylons behind destructible walls and you can't keep them all in your vision. You can skip them and just buy all the items so they really provide incentive to not do them.

There is alot of waiting as well. The game is always online, even single player. Opening a portal is a load, with a little fight that starts after 45 seconds, then you wait for another minute or two. Then you load as you literally load the map up which takes a few more minutes. The quests required us to go back to our base to upgrade or build something. You can either upgrade your base or give up 4-8 minutes every time you need to travel there and back.

Procedural generation has its issues. There are points of interest with nothing there, areas where you can get stuck, and sometimes areas where like ceiling spawns too low so statues are halfway through them. But the game makes up in graphics so if you like atmosphere this is a wash.

Crafting is overwhelming, but not because you can make cool things like dwarf fortress. The game is a "have items in your inventory, craft at table game" but there are varietn of each item. Prey leather 1 is made from prey hide 1. gives a different perk than predator hide. There are a billion tables to make one item at a time, your inventory gets full, and items don't even have icons at times so when you are searching for whatever nameless widget you made theres no icon to tell either.

End game dungeons are group dungeons with your party or randoms... enemy spam and bad procedural generation. Our dungeon had a guy spawn underneath the world (you can see him the the telescope) which made it unplayable. Its just re-used dungeons though ( as far as I got before my group decided we were done with this).

Unfortunately this doesn't feel like a "wait for an update kind of game to fix". The core of the game is not good and won't be redone. Load times could be fixed & procedural generation can be fixed too but if you are ok with grinding and building and can ignore the combat issues, this game could be for you.

Support Tuxedo labs but agree with most of the sentiment of the reviews. I purchased the Pass so I'm in for the ride.

It is a short DLC, i beat it in 2 hours.
One of the new items, gunpowder barrel, is insanely finicky and doesn't reliably work over slopes (even single voxel differences like a door frame)

Great mechanics with lots of new ideas thrown at you.
It is relatively short, i beat it in a sitting (3 hrs without collecting everything or listening to dialogue... i just cared about puzzles)
Id say the challenge is relatively low, but unlike most easy puzzle games you often get "aha" moments very quickly. The concept is intuitive and you find yourself naturally understanding how to apply the concept to the puzzle which Is a great feeling.
I'd recommend this game, very fun concept. I'd love to see the developers add more levels with greater challenge.

Watermelon level stumped me for a little while, NGL

[Updated as of 3/6/2024 at the bottom]

I'm excited for the future of this game, but I can't recommend this to people in its current state. Developers push updates, which break the game in worse ways to the point where I don't want to play it anymore. This is a game about collecting loot, and surviving tense gunfights but item interactions are janky, your guns randomly get deleted mid raid, and the meshes for the floors start moving and block your vision (but not for your enemies). It used to be you'd sometimes lose items when you close the game or leave a raid, but over 50% of my runs now have some sort of game breaking bug which makes me lose any progress i've gotten.

The Pros:
Its Tarkov VR, you and up to 11 other players are put in the same map. You have to collect loot and escape with it.
-Sound travels very well, so you can always keep a beat on your enemies if your quiet
-Satisfying when you come across a group and beat them
- Guns feel pretty good, with the scopes being good as well for long range combat.
- Crossplay with questies so you find matches quickly.

The Cons:
- The developers constantly introduce new bugs which are more than annoying, the defeat the point of the gameplay.
- The interactions with items is jankey. Trying to get your backpack off takes off your armor most of the time. Its realy easy to grab the wrong thing. You spend most of your time collecting loot so you small annoyances will add up.
- The developers have focused on additional ways to pay for a game that I've already purchased while breaking the game
- The economy is kinda broken, you effectively can't buy any guns from the market cuz it takes so long to level up (unless you look on youtube for easy ways to level), but its really easy to find good stuff anyways in chests so theres no real point?
- Armor is kinda pointless. It only defends the area it covers, and the helmets don't cover part of your head/neck. I got instant killed out of nowhere from an AI out of sound range in a single shot while in the best armor.
- This one is less an issue with the game, but the player base. there is a relatively high percent chance you'll have someone come up to hands up... Easy kills but feels like so many players wants to be a youtube roleplayer.

I'll update this as I try further patches of the game. I understand game development is hard and i bought into an early access, but the game is in a worse state than it was in the open beta. The concept is fun, but with so many game breaking bugs its hard to care about progression when Its so easy to lose your progress. If you still want to play, treat it as a battle royale. don't bother bringing loot in/out, just try to acquire on site and kill as many people as possible.

[Update]

Improvements
-- guns no longer disapearing
-- did not encounter visual glitches that block line of sight
-- improved UI

Negative gameplay changes
-- 30% of the boxes you encounter are empty
-- Health is now separated between bandages / healing, never saw any healing, bandages fix bleeding instead.
-- never seeing players. I found 2 players in 2 hours of play. One was roleplaying by himself at a bus stop 10pm EST on a tuesday. They added a system to drop you in incrementally instead of all at once.
-- can't escape until a timer is reached. If i found players this would be fine (im running and being loud looking for them) but it basically means your locked into wandering until they show up even if you find ok items.
-- locked ammo making/most storage behind progression ( i assume, the doors are barred up)... no where to store my loot :S

I want to like this game but i can't justify waiting that long just to encounter players. Ghost town of Tabor.

Just beat it, pretty fun. Has the best longevity of any idle game i've played.
Would recommend.