Recent reviews by Talio

I will likely revisit this title again in a year or two, and update my review at that time. My current review is based on the current state of the game at the end of 2024.

My current stance is that the game simply needs more time in the oven, so I can't truly recommend it in its current state unless you have disposable income and a desire to fund the potential future of the game.

It has all the bones in place to be a really good sandbox tactical RPG. If the developer continues working on it for another year or maybe two depending on how active they are, I have every reason to believe it'll become something really good that you can sink a ton of hours into if you enjoy games like Battle Brothers, Wartales, Iron Oath, or to a much lesser extent games like Kenshi or Mount & Blade.

The combat system is currently pretty straightforward and the "combos" such as they are mostly amount to applying a debuff that makes the enemy take more damage or morale loss and then dumping damage or morale attacks on them until the debuff expires or they die/surrender, rinse and repeat. There are some minor considerations for using Root, Stun, or Push/Pull abilities, though these currently just function as straightforward CC effects without any real combination or environmental effects to consider that I've seen so far.

Game is good. Getting punished because of technical problems on the side of the developers is not. I get disconnected at least once every 3 games during the loading screen. I've never had this sort of thing happen with any other online game, even other games from the same company, so it's fair to say this issue is very much specific to this game and however it is handling connections.
I've found a bizarre solution now thanks to a random thread on this issue, which is to use a VPN. It makes absolutely no sense. I can connect to a VPN hub in the exact same town I live in and it completely stops the random disconnects during game launch. But playing games over a VPN is not ideal, and I don't always remember to connect to a VPN before I run into a disconnect since I don't have to do so for literally any other game.

It always successfully reconnects on the first try when my slot is still open as well... And usually I can load in before the game is really under way... But it's a 50/50 if I even get the option to reconnect before it backfills my slot and then gives me a strike for disconnecting. If it knows I disconnected long enough for it to try backfilling, then why the heck I'm sitting at a loading screen for a full minute before it gives me the option to reconnect... I have no idea.

Punishing players who get disconnected before the game has even started when there is no pregame lobby and no way to know who you're matching with/against before the disconnect happens is also really dumb to begin with unless they never even attempt to reconnect, considering 99/100 times it's because of a technical issue outside of their control, not because the player was trying to be disruptive or because they were rage quitting. Doubly so when I immediately try to reconnect after I'm given the option, but can't because it already put another player in my slot, meaning I was replaced with another player before the match even started.

With patches or the release of their modding toolkit and more time for the modders to make it into a great game, this will likely switch to a recommend from me later in time.

In its current state, the game has some really big issues which killed the experience for me and forced me to seek out mods for the game on the first day of playing it. Most notably, how incredibly bullet spongy the mutants in the game are. There's already at least 4+ mods available just addressing the overtuned mutant HP.

The overtuned/bullet sponge mutants are likely a poorly thought out attempt to make the encounters more difficult since the AI and pathfinding on the mutants is... Not great.

Your character is also apparently an asthmatic who has to chug energy drinks every 20 feet if you want to move fast, for those who might find this to be a pain point. (Slight exaggeration here, the sprint duration is not completely terrible, but it does take a long time to recover stamina if you don't use consumables) There's mods to help with that too.

I haven't run into any major performance issues, but there are also a handful of mods to help with that for people who do.

The controls and UI (Looking at you, radial menu...) are probably fine if you're a console player, or play with a controller, but it's a little clunky for mouse and keyboard. This is a minor issue though, overall the controls are serviceable even on M&K.

The weapon balance is also a bit odd. 9mm pistol calibre MP5 clone having the same performance/damage as a 5.45x39mm intermediate cartridge, for example. There's also a debate to be had about the 9x18mm Makarov (basically a slightly underpowered 9mm) doing more damage than .45 ACP.

Edit to expand on the sketchy economy: At least in the early game, you're 100% reliant on finding things because buying ammo and consumables costs too much for how much you're making. Consumables are abundant so that's not an issue at least.
If you want to actually fight things that attack you during your outings... Good luck. If you fight mutants, you're just wasting money since you're just spending bullets and durability and consumables on fights that provide no loot at all. If you fight bandits or military or the like, it's a gamble if you'll actually break even or just lose money fighting them. Maybe you'll get lucky and find enough ammo on their bodies to make up for the bullets spent on shooting them... Maybe you'll find a couple weapons in good enough condition to sell to cover the cost of weapon/armor repairs... Or maybe you'll find a pitiful handful of bullets in a calibre you aren't using and nothing but Red durability guns that you can't sell.

In a world where fighting is often quite literally not worth the cost in bullets, and in fact results in a deficit, how do the bandits as a faction even exist? Aside from the anarchists who just want to be there to be free of rules and society, why would most STALKERs even waste their time and risk their lives when the end result is pay so meager that you might actually find yourself paying to do your incredibly dangerous "job"?

But these issues aren't really new to STALKER 2 either. Even in the older games, if you rub two brain cells together considering the economy of the game, it doesn't make sense. It's purely game logic for the sake of restricting your advancement rate, and creating a sense of scarcity for resources.

First and foremost, yes, you can still enjoy this game as a social activity with friends. Just like literally any activity can be entertaining with friends. Having a friend to sing and dance with while drinking, or singing mining songs together while digging can be amusing, but that's one of only two highlights the game has going for it. It also only lets you sing while mining to get the mining buff, and you can't sing again until the buff wears off, for shame.

The second highlight is that the game does have some interesting and pretty environments to explore.

The rest of the game is made up of a bunch of familiar mechanics and systems, but pretty much all of them feel undercooked. It's certainly not the worst game in the genre I've encountered, but it's not particularly great either.


Building mechanics: It has them. They are serviceable. You can make some neat looking things. But it's painful to work with due to the snap points being dodgy to connect with for walls and floors and such, and snap points/grids for decorations, furniture and crafting stations are non-existent, so lots of free form placement on that front. If you like having things lined up neatly, this will drive you crazy before long. I also ran into some issues with building roofing, and having it spontaneously collapse later while I was away from my base for no discernible reason even if I had supports going in a straight line from the ground to the section of the roof that collapsed.



Survival mechanics: It has a hunger bar, cooking, and a really basic farming mechanic (just put a plant/seed in a plot and wait for it to finish growing, no further interaction needed) but that's about it on this front. I will give props at least for them implementing a neat gimmick I haven't seen in other games in the form of each meal you make being assigned to be either a Breakfast, Lunch or Dinner type of meal, and eating it at the appropriate time of day will give you a temporary buff.

It also has random horde and base siege events where you have to fight off swarms of enemies, but this isn't a fun horde mechanic like L4D/Vermintide/Darktide, this is that kind of horde event that feels like an aggravating chore and a slog because of the combat mechanics.



Combat: This is is the lowest point of the game, and is the primary thing dragging it down to a non-recommend from me, since you have to fight a lot. The combat feels floaty and non-impactful (Enemies barely react to getting hit most of the time until you chain hits into them enough to stumble them), the animations are really not great for most enemies, and a lot of enemies have surprisingly fast attack animations with a very small windup that is hard to even recognize as the beginning of an attack animation until you see it a few times.

Most enemies are excessive HP sponges while being able to kill you in just a few good hits, as well. Even when you have level appropriate gear. There's also no passive health regen, even out of combat, so you have to progress the game a bit and then grind out a bunch of portable food items that provide healing to heal up without needing to set up a camp and sleep.

Enemies you aggro will also aggressively continue to follow you for long distances, so the only way to get away from fights is to climb or otherwise get them stuck on terrain. Though that's not exceptionally difficult. But it still ends up being impossible to really avoid them if you want to actually progress, because they borrowed the Deep Rock Galactic approach of putting dirt in the way of paths to new areas, meaning you have to get past the enemies and spend time digging your way through.

To make things worse, you're also undergeared at all times by design when entering new areas, and consequently, you'll find yourself spending obscene quantities of time just alternating between stabbing and blocking/dodgerolling to whittle enemies down. Again, this ends up feeling more like a chore than a fun or "epic" fight. This is at least partly because of the way this game approaches progression, but even with level appropriate gear, enemies still hit too hard while being too spongy.

And that's on Normal difficulty. I can only imagine the harder difficulties must be a combat experience like fighting really shoddily made Souls bosses every time you run into a run-of-the-mill Goblin. I don't need a 20 minute fight every time I run into a single patrol of orcs and goblins, personally.



Progression/Crafting: You learn some new recipes from finding new materials, some from crafting things you've learned to make, others you learn by repairing broken statues which give partial fragments of a weapon or armor recipe, finding mcguffins and delivering them to a sculpture collection or finding a ranger book that's missing pages and adding the missing pages that you've hopefully found along the way. The method of learning new things is a bit scattered all over the place, in short.
The grind to find gear materials and recipes in new areas is made worse by the fact that the gear required to effectively fight enemies in each new/more difficult area have to be acquired in the very same area where you encounter them. So advancing through the game is a slog during the combat sequences, because your character will complain every time that they need a better weapon... Which you can't make yet, either due to lack of materials or because you've not found and repaired all of the statues that give the multiple fragments of the recipe yet.

There's also no XP/Leveling mechanics, and enemies seldom drop anything genuinely worthwhile. They mostly just drop metal fragments(used mostly for repairing gear) or gold coins(used to make gold piles in your base for funsies), but they don't seem to drop the metals or other materials you need to create gear to fight them, which would logically beg the question of how they're still overcoming your fancy steel armor while using the same scrap weapons they've had since the beginning of the game...

And then you go to the next area, and you're back to square one. This progression mechanic makes it feel like you're just treading in place in a mud pile, you never feel like you're actually getting stronger unless you backtrack to a previous area and moving forward is just an incredible slog during the combat sequences because you have to tickle everything to death and barely get touched in return to survive.

But for what it's worth, you do find new materials to create fancier looking structures and furniture along the way, so you progress the swag of your base on a noticeable way as you progress.






All in all... I can say it's an OK game to kill some time with if you have a friend or three to play it with, but even then it's hard to say if everyone will find the $20 price tag worth it given the current state of the game. If you're looking for something to play solo, it'd be hard for me to recommend it even at a lower price point unless you just really, really like the idea of being a Dwarf running around singing and dancing by himself to stay sane, or if you have a fascination with spelunking into pretty caves.

If the combat mechanics were better, it'd be an easy recommend at $20 even with the other issues the game has, but it'd require a pretty major rework to get the combat system into a good/fun state, so I don't expect that to change even with future patches.

Updating my review after taking the time to research/look into the chatter and information about the Privacy Policy and such, much of which seems to be overblown if not outright incorrect.

The vast majority of the data collected that people might be concerned about (such as government ID, your real name and DOB, or your social media and instant messenger information) are optional voluntary data points and/or data that is required by law to be given in certain countries. I.E. the potentially concerning data collection is all information that, unless proven otherwise, is only collected when you make the choice to give them that information or your country mandates it by law to gain access this game and others like it.

Everything else in their terms and policies are pretty much what you're going to get from basically every other live service game on the market right now.

That out of the way, the game is decent enough. The base building is nice, and there's a lot of good QOL elements to the inventory management and crafting, such as having materials pulled from storage containers in your base when crafting, and having options for auto-stacking materials.

I haven't tried the PvP servers yet and can't speak to that experience, but my biggest issue so far is that the PVE needs work. There are some pretty cool enemies and such in the game, but every combat encounter is ruined by the same thing: Really, really basic and stupid AI.

And of course, it is also still a FTP game at the end of the day. Meaning it's got battlepasses and microtransactions, uses crappy things like gacha mechanics to acquire some things, and has an annoying number of different currencies. Not to mention pushing the usual FOMO nonsense by gating certain things into seasonal content. Annoying and sometimes unethical, but it's pretty stock standard for a current FTP game these days.

Even without spending any real world cash though, it's easily a game you can waste some time on for a week or so and get some kicks out of, especially if you have a couple friends to run around with. Tentatively I'll put this as a recommend purely as a game to mess around in with friends for a bit.

There are still some rough edges, and some of the Warbonds objectively do not offer the same value despite having the same price tag, but I'm changing my review to a recommend since there have been a good number of patches working towards making more gear viable.
There are still a good number of downright garbage weapon and strategem options, but they've made enough good changes and buffs to restore my faith a bit after the abysmal state of the game in patch 01.000.100, so we can look forward to a good game getting better instead of worse.

Also, Sony appears to have backed off of their hard third party PSN requirement, which is nice. We'll see if they try to pull any other stunts in the future, though.

There are some potentially interesting RPG mechanics here, but that's about the limit of the good I can see in it as of yet. The gameplay/combat itself is the stock standard "Click on things repeatedly until they die" style of combat, but it doesn't generate any of the excitement you'd normally expect in an ARPG of this style.

I've played less than an hour and been in half a dozen fights, yet the combat already feels like a dull, repetitive chore. It somehow feels like playing a decade old browser game trying to imitate Diablo with a tiny splash of Mount & Blade, but I can't even fully explain how it manages to pull off that feeling.

Currently on the fence if I want to refund the game, or gamble on it getting better (or at least less of a chore) after you build up a bigger group and engage in bigger fights.

There is a lot of potential in this title, but being able to become something great hinges heavily on the direction the developers take it, and there's no indication yet that it will go in a good direction purely based on how the combat encounters are currently designed. I've been burned by more than a few Early Access titles that failed to realize their hypothetical potential, and I can't recommend this game at face value.

The combat difficulty is largely artificial at the time of this review. Basically every fight forces you to split up your team to be intermingled in nonsensical ways with the enemy forces and you are almost always outnumbered. Even if you successfully ambush an enemy, you start almost every fight with your team fractured and typically surrounded. Not to mention the weird arbitrary traps and such in every fight which barely accomplish more than being an incredibly minor boon at best, and a negligible annoyance at worst.

Of course, the arbitrary and artificial combat setups seem like a shoddy attempt to make the combat actually challenging, as the AI is currently incredibly basic and predictable.
Generally speaking fights come down to a grind of numbers, meaning you typically only lose fights because the enemy simply overwhelms you with sheer numbers and/or having vastly superior gear/levels, which is generally only an issue if you're trying to tackle the higher difficulty contracts too soon.
I'd hope that this approach to setting up fights is discarded (maybe with the exception of cases where your group actually gets ambushed) after more work is done on the AI, but it remains to be seen how much the developer insists on arbitrarily forcing you into disadvantageous arrangements for your troops.

The current economy of the game is also a bit... Questionable. The power level of the enemies you face in higher contracts jumps up dramatically if you try to take on a Hard contract, but the reward for the contract doesn't seem to match the increased danger involved. You can just take on Easy contracts and still get paid about 1/2 what a Hard contract pays for dramatically less effort, and in general a lot of the payment for contracts feels arbitrary and not particularly tied to the difficulty of the task.
It also tends to be the case that you earn as much or even more money just from random looted trinkets and money from defeated enemies than whatever contract you're on pays, though that's unreliable income based on RNG. It seems a bit odd that random loot would factor in as such a big portion of your income compared to your payment for taking on dangerous work, but spoils of war as a supplement to direct coin payment isn't exactly unheard of, so it's hard to say this is really an issue.

The Trade skill and Knowledge systems seem very promising, at least. They only need to expand them with more content, but even in their current state they are great secondary systems for expanding the abilities of your troop, upgrading gear, provisioning, even making extra money if you acquire excess resources.

I've binged this game many times, returning to it once or twice a year when I need a tactical RPG fix, but I can't in good conscience recommend this game. I don't even know why I keep expecting it to be different every time I dust it off.

The warning at the start of the game is accurate that "losing and coming back is part of the game", and losing because you made mistakes or picked a fight with enemies you weren't prepared for is fine, but it's hard to continue enjoying the "challenge" when it goes into the realm of fighting the RNG rather than just dealing with the unique threats of a particular enemy.

It has many of the parts which make for an excellent turn based tactical game, and it has a lot of interesting and fun gameplay and concepts around operating a mercenary company... but every single time my enjoyment is ruined by Xcom syndrome. Many enemies are extremely dangerous to fight and have blatantly "unfair" abilities like stuns that can't be blocked/dodged or line attacks that basically ignore armor, and as a result require careful planning and tactics and often specific weapon choices to counter them... But all of your best plans and tactics inevitably fail because your "highly skilled veterans" go through a whole battle landing 30% of their attacks despite having supposedly an 80%+ hit chance.

It also has some questionable design/balance choices mixed in, namely artificial difficulty added by allowing enemy groups to straight up have more fighters on the field than you. This makes some sense in the case of enemies like Goblins or Webknechts or the zombies who are individually weak, but basically all enemy types can have groups greatly exceeding the 12 limit placed on the player, including other groups of humans.

If you want a tactical RPG that is challenging without feeling like you're being unfairly punished by the RNG consistently deciding that you just aren't allowed to succeed, my two recommendations would be Darkest Dungeon and The Last Spell (though with the disclaimer that The Last Spell is currently in Early Access).

Sometimes frustrating due to RNG going entirely wrong for you in a particular run to the point of being unwinnable, but one of the greatest joys comes from salvaging a bad run by adapting your tactics to whatever RNG threw at you even if it forces you to play in a horribly sub-optimal fashion. Definitely in the style of/inspired by Slay the Spire, but I would say this is a significantly more enjoyable game, and it is certainly one I've sunk more hours into playing.

The only problem I've had is that the more you ramp up the difficulty, the more likely it is that your success hinges less on your tactics/knowledge of the game and more on RNG giving you the cards you need to succeed(or even just drawing your cards in the right order). There is always an element of player tactics and knowledge, but after beating Covenant 25 I can say it often felt like my success or failure was 30% me and 70% RNG at the highest difficulties.