Recent reviews by hiTo

The concept is great. The gunplay is pretty good. The actual gameplay? Naaaah.

The circle, which you are supposed to reach, does not take into account any variables at all, like loot distribution, plane path, vehicle spawns or geography. This means that you all too often find yourself at the opposite side of the map, without a vehicle or a gun, having to run for miles just to get to the safe zone, only to be absolutely overrun by people who got lucky and found everything they needed in the first building they entered in the middle of the zone.

The random elements are far too many, and far too distracting to call this game "good". It has redeeming qualities, such as the fantastic gunplay, with weapon attachments and handling, but the core mechanics need a lot of polishing for this to be a game that people keep coming back to without feeling like they got screwed by no fault of their own.

The premise:
A worn down island ravaged by zombies is your home. You need to find supplies, deal with zombies as well as other people and the elements -- all of this just to survive another day.

The gameplay:
A third-person / first-person "zombie apocalypse simulator". Walk around a vast island filled with quaint villages and bigger vistas in search of meaningful interactions (and bigger guns.)

The reality:
A spawn-in-die-quick simulator in which you don't actually do anything but grab the first gun you can find and kill others with it. Sometimes, you do it in a group.

The sad reality is that this game, even though far from completion, can't become a meaningful game in the sense the developers want it to be (and what I want it to be.) You cannot just put players in a sandbox and hope they come up with stories to tell each other -- it just doesn't work.

Some players will be really into role playing, but most players won't be, including me. If there was some sort of common event on the island; a big crash to investigate, a siren going off, finding letters all over the island that speaks of a bunker... just... something to connect people to each other while having a common goal to achieve, then we would have a masterpiece on our hands. A narrative not hinged on shooting each other.

But speaking of being unfinished, I don't know what the developers were thinking on some of these following things, and they might just be placeholders, but I haven't found any evidence to support that theory.

• The buildings.
  Are we supposed to believe people live in 1 room houses? I don't think I've ever seen the likes of the buildings that are in this game. At first glance they look like they fit in, but after further review.. Who lives in a house without a kitchen? Or without a bathroom? Or without a bed? Or without furniture at all? That's not all that's wrong with this (don't get me started on "military buildings".) Everything just seems so VERY undersized. Haven't they been creating this game for years now? Shouldn't they have more models than when they started? Doesn't feel like it.
  
• The food system.
  Okay, so you get energy and water from eating and drinking. Makes sense, right? Sure, except you have to eat 5 whole cans of food to even get "full", and an additional 5 for it to be too much. That's 10 cans of food. Do you know how much that is? That's 2.5-3kg or roughly 5.5-6lbs. And you know what, it lasts about 15 minutes before you are running on an empty stomach again.
  
• The combat.
  It's clunky as hell, especially hand-to-hand combat. You never know where you are aiming (the aiming reticle is just there for the heck of it I guess.) The over-design of simple things such as handling ammo is just a really boring and tedious affair. There's a reason other games just use the 'r'-button to reload a gun. I get that they (the devs) want the player to be more involved, but I'm sorry, when it's harder and takes longer to do in your game than in reality, something is messed up.
  
• The engine.
  It's client-authorative server-client architecture. It's the dumbest crap to ever have grazed multiplayer gaming. Many of these bugs have been resolved BY REBUILDING PARTS OF THE ENGINE... That should tell you quite a bit.
  
  Desync is a big problem and the engine's way of predicting movement or resolving the issue is also pure crap. Their whole scripting engine should've been burnt at the stake in 2008. But these problems already existed in ArmA, they knew about them when they started the project. Building the engine from scratch, or better yet using another engine (UE comes to mind. Even Unity would have been better) would have been the obvious choice for anyone except the (in)famous Dean Hall.

But nevertheless, I enjoy the parts of the game that work. I enjoy hunting people down and distributing justice in the way of bullets to the face for camping the coast with guns or just being armed, really. The risk->reward cycle of looting high risk areas or moving in open fields for a faster travel is really fun and balanced (as long as the loot system is not f*ked up.) The satisfaction you get when you get that 500m headshot on someone who's running, or when you face off against 5 people all trying to kill you and you come out alive on the other end is hard to describe.

At the core of this game is the long search for gear, guns and ammo combined with the fact that it may be snatched away from you in a heartbeat if someone's aim is true. The intensity of the action that does happen is beyond compare, even though it's mostly in your head.

Even though the game is uncomplete, I've tried to not review the parts that are unfinished, but rather the general game idea and the things that will/won't work.

If I had to rate the current state of the game, I'd say it's 4/10. If I had to rate what I think it will be on release, it'd have to be something like 7/10. I don't think it'll live up to expectations, and i don't think the game design will hold up without a designed story, albeit a very loose one. I will say that I recommend this game, but this statement comes with a catch: the game is broken. All you do is run around, get guns and shoot people, and while it takes about 3 hours to do this cycle from start to finish you might only meet 1 or 2 guys along the way. It's up to you if that is good enough.