Recente recensies door Aidy

A good game for early access. There's plenty to do - I'm 6-ish hours into playing and haven't exhausted the available content yet whilst I know that if I had gone and picked up one of the millions of other early access games I'd have cleared everything in under an hour.

The short of it is that this is a pretty unique game that has you hunting for the paranormal, but it's not some weird spooky haunted mansion rubbish you'd see on TV with a bunch of 'scientists' running around with tin foil on their heads, it's a whole society of hard guys, fast guys, swindlers and more putting an aggressive stop to the spooky nasties entering into our world. Plus, it's full of Australians - the 'c' word is dropped in the first minute of dialogue, so it's pretty damn realistic if you ask me.

In all seriousness though this is a pretty good game for what it is right now. I'm looking forward to the coming content updates, whatever they may be, as I'm pretty invested in this.

So a quick pros/cons list (I'm going to avoid the 'I know it's early access' standard complaints such as performance and placeholders because it's obviously early access, if you don't expect that then you shouldn't be buying into EA).

Pros:
+ Unique take on ghost hunting games. There really aren't many ghost games that I can think of, the only two springing to mind as I write this being Fatal Frame and Ghost Master, both of which are also very different takes on ghosts.

+ Isn't awkward to control. It's a twin-stick, and on mouse & keyboard they're generally pretty difficult to control. As far as I know, controller support isn't implemented yet, so this is a definite plus whilst we wait for that.

+ Classes provide pretty different gameplay starts. Whilst the overall gameplay loop remains the same, choosing a class that's more oriented towards investigation over combat allows you to find significantly more valuable clues early on, whilst the other way round means that you'll be able to take on creatures such as ghouls quite quickly.

+ Skills aren't bound by class. This is a huge plus for me. I really enjoy all manners of RPGs but one of the things that tends to frustrate me is a skill being locked behind a class when it doesn't need to be. HellSign doesn't do that, this game lets you pick whatever skill you want, and that's pretty neat.

+ The artwork in the journals is very nicely done. They're still a work-in-progress and will only improve. I'm a sucker for art like this.

+ The overall atmosphere just feels great. It's difficult to get that kind of atmosphere right, especially in games because the pacing can be all over the place because, well, it's controlled by the player (for the most part). But in this it feels just right.

+ The idea of going into different realms is awesome. I'm really looking forward to doing it. I don't know if you can or not in the current release, but I'm gonna go mess up some ghosties when I do.

Cons:
- The combat is awkward, critters can move awfully fast and with how aiming works currently it can be really difficult, frustrating even, to hit them. It might be intentional, but it isn't particularly enjoyable. The hitboxes are really tight which, whilst is usually a good thing as it provides more challenge, in a game like this it feels better to have something that's a bit easier to hit, especially if it's moving at such a high speed at the start of the game.

- Investigations, whilst a great idea, are a little broken. You have to use a blacklight to follow trails sometimes - often they'll lead to an object you can investigate to get something, but I've noticed that more and more will just stop or will lead me into walls with no way of knowing where they've gone.

- The one environment has gotten a bit boring now. That being said, it's a very nicely done environment so it's not a negative thing. I implore the devs to get some more variation in the environment in as soon as possible - whether it's through a more procedural means with the one envrionment set right now (I've noticed that it's the same building, just rotated for each level), or whether it's another handcrafted level that's more industrial or commercial or something. Spooky ghost games are great, but the cliché of haunted houses gets a bit boring - with how the devs have handled the atmosphere so far, though, I've a lot of faith that they can manage to maintain that through into whatever environments come next.

- Dialogue can be a bit cringy at times. There's a lot of written accent and slang - it's cool that there's that level of character building, but being a child of the Commonwealth I hear a lot of this talk a lot so it just bothers me a little bit. I do like the more adult take, though, there's plenty of naughty words to really emphasise that this is an adult game.

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Performance is something I'll acknowledge, just not in pros and cons. It's not bad, but it's not fantastic. I do get a good, solid 60 for the most part and it dips down to about 45 at the very worst. My fans barely need to kick in and my temperatures average at around 60 degrees Celsius.

GPU: MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X 6gb
CPU: Intel i5-3570k OC'd @ 4.3 ghz
RAM: 16gb Crucial

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Should you get it?

If you're not afraid of early access then absolutely you should. This is one of those EA games I have a great feeling about - I had the same for Prison Architect and Rimworld and look how they came out.

Update:

As of today's patch (27th Oct) I can say that most of my gripes with the game are gone. I really, really, really recommend playing this game - you won't be disappointed!

Original:

I wish that Steam would offer a better rating system then 'yes' and 'no'.

I really love this game, I've been following it since I first noticed it a while ago and I've been looking forward to its release. I bought it as soon as it came out and I played it a fair bit, it's a lot like FTL but with - in my opinion - far better pacing to a certain extent.

I'll start with the bad, because there isn't really much that I dislike. In terms of things that matter, I think the balancing could do with a bit of work. Your plane gets really, really messed up really quickly by aces and large groups of enemy fighters which is to be expected, but the frequency at which those planes appear can be really difficult to manage. It's not so bad if you manage to somehow keep the same plane all the way through because you'll be able to easily upgrade its components to handle that, and your crew will be experienced enough to take down planes in just a few bursts.

If, however, you lose your plane then you're in for a pretty rough ride. The same can be said for your crew - the worst case scenario is losing both. When your crew dies you'll have to hire new ones to replace them, the game kindly gives them a rank before you hire them (i.e. they'll be level 3 in navigation) so you don't have to start over from the very beginning but to be honest it might be better to start a new game anyway, as the grind is punishingly difficult. Going out on missions where aces appear almost constantly with a crew that has little-to-no armour or experience is a waste of a plane, but those missions are the only ones that give you enough money to get anywhere unless you want to grind the short and easy missions which, if you're unlucky, also might have an ace.

I realise that writing that I make the game sound far worse than it is - it IS a roguelike and it IS meant to be hard, I totally understand that and losing my crew and my plane should punish me for sure, but I think that the sheer amount of hostile planes and the money you get from doing missions in combination with losing all the gear and some plane upgrades is pretty tough to handle. Ideally, I'd prefer to start over if that's the case and I know that some others will agree with me.

The other thing I don't like too much is the lack of missions to do, you'll find yourself running the same 3 missions apart from the critical missions (which you can attempt as many times as you want, but if you succeed then you can't replay it). More missions would be really cool, performing missions with other AI planes such as fighter escorts or even other bombers would be pretty fun as well, I think.

In terms of things that don't matter, I think there could be more liveries or the ability to paint our own liveries. You can create your own wing and nose paints which is awesome, though, so here's hoping we can paint our planes ourselves later on!

Now, with the bad out of the way, I can guarantee that everthing else is great - it plays well, it's fun, you're never just sitting there just watching things happen, the upgrades feel very different to one another, the aesthetic is lovely and I really enjoy how chaotic everything can get in just a matter of seconds.


tl;dr things to take away:

- The game is very harsh with its punishments. It's like playing FTL on hard except you can't tone it down.
- There isn't a lot of variation in missions except for the unique critical missions, which you can only successfully complete once.
- If you don't plan on restarting after you lose your plane and/or crew, then you're in for one hell of a grind.
- Taking the bad things into account, the game is still really fun and really enjoyable to play. The upgrades are rewarding, dropping bombs is fun as hell, and watching as your gunners tear apart enemy planes is really nice.
- Also the damage models are beautifully done.



Overall: the game is fun, but I think that it could do with some balance adjustments for those who lose their plane and crew. I'd give it a 7/10, if Steam would allow more than 2 recommendation options.

Bloody good game, well worth the money, especially if you're a fan of point-and-click games. I love the references and I love the humour.

I can't wait to see more from this game and the studio!

hosted a random bank heist job on overkill

i can do this heist in my sleep but was bored and wanted something easy to do

3 infamy pubs joined

we failed because someone decided to bring a bag of gold (they're heavy) to the van which was next to a turret in the middle of an assault, but that wasn't the worst part

2 people went outside with bags of gold and WENT DOWN IN THE SAME ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ SPOT

this game has one of the worst communities ever and i hate everyone in it so much

10/10

Alright so this is more of a first impressions kind of thing. I'm not going to talk about any technical issues because whining about the tech issues that the game has currently (such as the audio bug) all have fixes available, and if you take that or take the advice of someone who's PC doesn't match specs who says that this game is bad because they can't read or research then I'm afraid you're easily misled.

Anyway, moving on. I would write a full-blown review but I haven't played it for anywhere near as long as I would like to so I'll hold off on that for now and just briefly describe what I like and dislike.

Pros:
- Building and managing cities is sigificantly more challenging and strategy is more heavily involved. Gone are the days where you can build as much as you wanted with ease, as well as the days where you could have 1 or 2 cities but still have literally every building and unit in the game due to ridiculously high production.

- The soundtrack is astoundingly good. Christopher Tin and Geoff Knorr have done it again, every piece of music is beautifully crafted and thus easily surpasses any other soundtrack released this year. Doom, Mankind Divided, Shadow Warrior 2 - they all had good soundtracks but anything with Christopher Tin's touch is automatically skyrocketed into the realms of god-tier music.

- The aesthetic is pretty. It doesn't look overly cartoony and it's a nice lick of fresh paint for the game. I absolutely adore the fog of war too, the map doesn't go dark and foggy when your units move around; instead the map looks more like.. well, a map. There's some wonderful post-processing and I think that the textures look magnificent. You have to bare in mind that Civ is NOT intended to compete with games like Crysis 3 or Battlefield 1, the game is meant to set new standards for 4X games and those games have never been about visual fidelity or how pretty a polygon looks. But saying that the game is really, really good looking, there's great details that I continue to discover as I play.

- The UI isn't as dire as everyone says it is. To say that it's a chore to use or that it's ugly would imply that it's in the realms of Beyond Earth's UI which truly was awful. The UI in Civ VI is closer to Civ V but it does lack some key information (such as eras). However, most of the information that you'll need is presented to you - the research screen tells you how far you are in comparison to other empires that you have met, as well as what research you need and what it'll allow you to do (as expected).

- Builders are no longer overpowered. They - as well as other great people - are limited use. Great people were always limited use but they act similarly to builders in that some of them have 2 or 3 people within the 'unit'. That will allow you 2 or 3 uses of said unit, builders can build 3 improvements until they're all used up which will prompt you to either build more or focus on districts to try to capitalise on housing and production.

- Culture researching is a welcome addition. Culture isn't as limited as it was in Civ V (it was pretty good, but Civ VI does it better). It allows you to change your government and policies, which will allow you to shape your empire into something different every time - so long as you're the kind of player who enjoys experimenting, rather than going for the policies and tactics which are always going to win.

- There's lots of pros to this game, but the last one I'll point out are envoys. You can no longer just infinitely pay a city state to like you, envoys replace that. The more envoys you have, the more benefits you unlock. Simple! Envoys can also be sent to other great empires in order to improve relations and act as spies, they'll relay important information back to you.

Cons:

- Diplomacy is a bit silly. The system feels REALLY nice, it's much better than it was in Civ V, however the diplomacy AI seems to randomly denounce you without much reason. Not only that, but I feel as though some of their demands (such as Kongo's demand of religion) are quite hard to meet as they have ridiculously short deadlines, especially if you meet them early on in the game. It's very inconsistent, and is kind of annoying. That being said there is multiplayer and mods will be on their way soon (which I am looking forward to).

- As I mentioned, the UI does forget to mention some information which can be key or useful. The notifications are quite fiddly, and the icons for housing and amenities look exactly the same on a quick glance. More of a variation between the two could be useful.

- This is more nitpicky than anything else, but you can't rename cities or units. I'm only putting it in cons so I can try to fill it out a bit more, but I really don't care too much about not being able to re-name Sheffield as something rude that Steam'll block if I write it out here.

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I'll be waiting until mod support comes out as well as the first few patches before updating the review. I'm sure that Firaxis are aware of the problems with the game, but there are no outright issues which make the game unplayable.

If you're a long-time Civ player and you're very particular about how the game plays then I'd suggest waiting. If you're like me and you love Civ, but don't let the game be ruined by a couple of issues then get it. I'd also suggest getting it if you're new to Civ, but pick up IV and V too as they're both superb games!

TO SAVE OUR MOTHER EARTH FROM ANY ALIEN ATTACK
FROM VICIOUS GIANT INSECTS WHO HAVE ONCE AGAIN COME BACK
WE'LL UNLEASH ALL OUR FORCES WE WON'T CUT THEM ANY SLACK
THE EDF DEPLOYS

OUR SOLDIERS ARE PREPARED FOR ANY ALIEN THREATS
THE NAVY LAUNCHES SHIPS, THE AIR FORCE SENDS THEIR JETS
AND NOTHING CAN WITHSTAND OUR FIXED BAYONETS
THE EDF DEPLOYS

OUR FORCES HAVE NOT DWINDLED AND WE PULL BACK TO REGROUP
THE ENEMY HAS MULTIPLIED AND FORMED A MASSIVE GROUP
WE BETTER BEAT THESE BUGS BEFORE WE'RE ALL TURNED TO SOUP
THE EDF DEPLOYS


i mean, you get to sing with your allies non-stop whilst you kill bugs and aliens

what the ♥♥♥♥ else do you want

♥♥♥♥ yeah humanity

i died at the start then fell through some rocks

10/10

**UPDATE 2023**

It's way better now. It's a lot more fun, a lot of the issues I had have been fixed. The game runs fantastically for me, the animations and movement are nice and smooth, and the amount of mods and community servers available keep the game nice and healthy. Failing that, there're always ways to play it alone if you're the antisocial type but it does detract from the experience.

There're plenty of toxic people in it, but it's a multiplayer game with a large PVP element so that's to be expected. To balance it, there're just as many if not more people willing to talk, mess around, team up, or are just generally friendly and won't fight you if you don't fight them, so it keeps things nice and interesting.

**UPDATE 2016**

tl;dr DO NOT BUY THIS GAME

Previously this game ran pretty well, for what it was. I could maintain a relatively stable framerate consistently which kept me pretty happy. Despite the previous lack of loot and features to actually use, the game was fun. However, since the more recent updates over the past few months, the game has gone to utter ♥♥♥♥. My framerate has dipped so ridiculously low that it's literally impossible to play the game. I get barely 30fps in fields and roads, and it dips to 10 or less in towns.

Honestly, that's unacceptable. Especially when I can launch Arma 2 and get 60+ fps almost all the time. I have a friend who has very high end gear and he gets terrible framerates too, so it isn't an isolated issue. The more recent update that claims to improve FPS (0.59) didn't improve my FPS at all. Update 0.60 claims to increase FPS even further but I have my doubts.

This has been in early access for too long, games which were put into early access around the same time and after have since been released, and I would honestly suggest you go and play one of those instead. If you want a survival game, go check out Escape From Tarkov - it's a good looking game and it probably won't suffer the same horrific performance issues as DayZ.

I'm sorry to say that this game has gone from something relatively decent to utter trash. Avoid it like the plague.


**ORIGINAL REVIEW**


A man took my trousers off and force fed me rotten bananas

But asides from that, I've had a good time. I was skeptical after having an awful time on the mod, what with the abundance of KoS and just a generally unfriendly atmosphere. I was also one of the veteran Arma players who gave it a go, so my knowledge of Arma's mechanics paid off when I decided I wanted to turn the tables. I got bored of doing that after a few hours or so anyway.

The standalone - I have to say - is a thousand times better than the mod, the community so far has been wonderful. Even the aforementioned bandit and other encounters were actually really polite (I'm not saying I'll take my pants off for you if you say please, I'm not a slut :c). I've been helped out by fellow survivors as a new spawn, and in return I helped out other new spawns, as well as the people who helped me if I came across them later on.

The game is hard, even on the regular servers. If you come across even a single zombie when you're unarmed it's best to just run as far as you can and hope it loses interest. If you start bleeding, you're gunna have to sacrifice your shirt to bandage yourself. You'll need to make more decisions as to what you want to carry around with you, inventory management is much more important now. You also have to be ready to lose that gear if you come across a bandit or two who have the advantage.

Naturally, there are lots of bugs, some of which are incredibly irritating, but when you pay for an early access game you have to expect that, so you can't complain about it. It's annoying when you lose your character, or when loot never spawns, or when zombies walk through walls, but they'll get fixed.

So overall, I can't complain. Whilst the game is in this state, I can't tell you what is bad and what isn't, only the very core mechanics have been implemented and even then they aren't fully completed yet, my advice would be to wait. £20 (or however much it is in your region) is a lot of money to spend on an early access game, especially if you're unsure about it. As the days go by, Bohemia will be adding in vehicles, more loot, zombies that abide by the laws of physics and so on. It's best to wait the game has more depth before you make a final decision.

I'm glad I bought it though, it's a damn good game and the developers deserve my money. I also met Dean Hall at Rezzed last year, he's a lovely guy and works really hard on his projects, if any indie developer deserves your money, it's him.

Probably one of the best zombie games around, usually they're bland, boring, uninteractive and just the same thing over and over. Not to mention completely and horribly broken with poor voice acting, animations, movement, controls and optimisation (I'm looking at you, Dead Island)

This, however, is the opposite. It's not only got a bit of uniqueness to it but it's actually good. Rather than write a wall of text I guess I'll do a list of pros and cons.

Pros:
- Well optimised
- Nice, balanced combat
- Not a zombie game that concentrates on firearms, rather a sensible mix of both melee and ranged
- Makes the player use their brain, strategy is important in this game, going scavenging without a plan is a death wish
- The AI is actually helpful
- Pretty nice graphics and sound
- RPG-like elements which're good for levelling each of your combat-able survivors at camp for different roles
- Always something going on to keep you busy
- There's other survivors in the world that you can get friendly with, the friendlier you are the more likely they are to help
- No intrusive HUD, leaves the screen wide open for players to see everything they need
- 3rd person games aren't usually terrifying, however this is. If you're stuck alone outside at night with hordes surrounding you, you'll be scared to move just in case they hear you.
- The survivor you're playing as gets tired as they explore, or they get injured the more fights they get into, it adds realism to the game
- Building on the above pro, character switching is seamless and easy.
- It's just an awesome game

Cons:
- Voice acting isn't fantastic, but it isn't as bad as some. You'll hear everything survivors say after a few lines of dialogue before they start repeating themselves. However, this is an indie game and the gameplay more than makes up for it
- An unfortunate lack of co-op play, I'm not sure whether or not the devs are looking into it for the 2nd expansion, I hope so because it would be a lot of fun!
- It seems as though you're made to play round the clock, as one survivors goes to rest or heal up, you have to play as another and go out to explore. Whilst it does add more gameplay value, I'd prefer to run around in daytime more often
- The addon - Breakdown - removes the storyline element from SoD, allowing you to do whatever you want to. You can do that in the base game, just don't complete the last story mission, however it's still worth getting
- Sometimes zombies like to get stuck under things, making it impossible to kill them. It's especially irritating when they're an enemy you need to kill for a mission.

I'm sure I've forgotten some things, but overall it's an awesome game, it's worth the £15 I paid for it.

I could say a lot of great things about this game, but that would take forever, so here's a condensed list:

Badass protagonist, swords, explosions, demons, bad guys getting their limbs sliced up, cheesy 1 liners, a remake that's actually good, really great graphics, really great performance, really good oldschool feeling, more swords, more explosions, guns, the ability to slam the ground and make enemies fly up in the air, the ability to make enemies expolde by squeezing hearts and so much more

Just buy the damn game