Recent reviews by Burner

The performance of the raytracer is not adequate and consequently you will be subjected to whatever upscaler technology your card, driver supports. It is true that some upscaler technologies look better than others, but I am in the boat where I would not prefer to look at them at all.

The developer has stated no interest in the use of a rasterizer, stating that it is not possible due to the technical requirements of their game.
It is not very clear to me what these technical requirements actually are, considering that I have been playing raster driven games of greater complexity and scope for decades (Shores of Hazeron most notably). One technical requirement appears to be dynamic shadows and reflections on user created content, which shores of hazeron solves by not doing that.
Regardless of the developers justification, they are hell bent on a pure raytraced game which is commendable but basically alienates everyone. Most people either don't have a supported card, or do but hate upscaling and taa, etc

There is a bit of disparity with this, personally I do not care how crude graphics are, so long as they possess visual clarity. The current trend appears to be the exact opposite, photorealistic graphics that turns into a blurry swamp or crawls around like you are on acid.
I will continue to fiddle with it and potentially get reasonable picture quality at a reasonable framerate that doesn't look blurry.
The technical aspects aside, the gameplay itself is a reasonably put together vehicular sandbox, with optional grinding for resources. I couldn't see it captivating my attention for hundreds of hours without some kind of exploration incentive or resource management and threats.

I played this years ago, it was pretty bad and rife with glitches.

Coming back years later, it is even worse with all of the same glitches still included. Plus a lot more attempts to get me to spend money.

No idea why this game got so much traction, it seems pretty bereft of depth

Bought this to play mods, haven't bothered to actually play through it, I already know it will be overpriced and mediocre just like all the other DLC for this game.


Tynan please stop updating rimworld and making DLC I am tired of having to spend days re-shuffling mods.

No I will not buy your book either

Interesting map generation gimmick, rest of the game is decidedly mediocre.

The game is more or less unplayable long term due to non renewable resource constraints. Once you have used up what is on the map that's it. There is no way to acquire bricks or metal beyond that point.

The gameplay does not facilitate most regions of the planet for this reason. There are a few cherry picked areas, with more present on the workshop. Sprawling metropolitan maps often come at a cost of performance, while regional areas you may not play at all. For instance I tried my home town and some neighbor towns all of which may not be played due to not having enough buildings. It should be feasible to play on a map with nothing at all, but the mechanics do not support this.


Unfortunately the accuracy of the generated maps is relatively poor, this is a case of garbage in - garbage out with the open street map data. There is no elevation, very little building variety, etc. Water is present but does not appear to serve any purpose at all as the zombies can simply swim.

Gameplay is otherwise very time gated (artificially slow), interspersed with annoying radio transmission events that I turned off after the first playthrough.
Unfortunately you have to manually accept every migrant wave, through the radio interface, some of which have different dialogue trees which is just tedious.

It should be noted that the game can be sped up vastly, enable cheats in the console and set the timescale to 100x. Once you stop idly waiting for events to transpire the lack of depth becomes very apparent.

Mechanically the game does a poor job of supporting the maps, the gameplay feels like an afterthought to the map generation itself. Squad management is a chore, you have to direct them manually to resupply ammo and heal. The equipment variety is incredibly basic and the combat is relatively one dimensional. Managing multiple squads is technically possible but poor due to strange UI choices. Keeping your squads alive is optional as the population increases rapidly and is very disposable. Build a big warehouse and squad HQ early, scavenge the entire map in one go. Your squads are now just mobile towers that you have to micromanage to heal and resupply.

Constructing and converting buildings is also tedious, there is a hotkey for deconstruction (u), but everything else is a manual operation for each construction. Walls and farms are the exception to this as they can be dragged for multiple instances.

Construction lacks depth and nuance, building your own structures is locked behind a tech tree and the resource investment is substantial. Research should present incremental improvements or alterations to your existing capabilities, instead it is just an artifical time gate to drip feed features that should be enabled from the start. Science requires no resources or thought other than housing and feeding scientists.

Population requirements and happiness is also entirely one dimensional. You either have enough houses, food, daycare, etc or you do not. Electricity, plumbing and other amenities are not present.

Defence is also really basic, walls and towers do not really serve a purpose beyond consuming your resources through repairs. Towers used to consume ammunition but that was removed at some point. Towers can use bows which is missing from squads. Just stack squads in perimeter buildings and call it a day.
You can't use walls to funnel hordes into a killzone for instance, they will just attack the nearest structure from what I can tell.

This is an interesting prototype that generates game maps from real world data, but the execution of the game part is insubstantial and bare bones. A lot of the features make no sense, are annoying or otherwise do not contribute to the experience in a meaningful way. They appear to be mandated for the sake of feature parity with other RTS zombie games.

I do not like this game it seems dumb. The car is dumb, the inventory is dumb, the crafting is dumb, fast travel is dumb, the setting is dumb, the anomalies are dumb, the exposition is dumb, the writing is dumb and the UI is dumb.

Why is the car dumb?
It is too simple, makes very little sense. It is an automatic with two selections, no handbrake. No alternator apparently. No fun to drive, no nuance.

Why is the inventory dumb?
Missed opportunity for visual model, in the car, on the character. Instead there is slot inventory, very creative.

Why is the crafting dumb?
It is stereotypical, nothing interesting. Copy of AAA material gathering slop. Use X tool on object Y, could be removed entirely. No interchange of structural parts? I see a good panel on a car, great I will grind it into chunks so I can reassemble again later? What ?


Why is fast travel dumb?
You have a car, premise of game is driving car. You drive the car to travel fast, long distance. Apparently the concept is baffling. Instead you drive using a menu. Bravo

Why is the setting and 'anomaly' dumb?
The developer played stalker, maybe even read roadside picnic. Very daring, original.. not.

Why is the writing and exposition dumb?
You get talked at, silent protagonist, no agency. Entire game is dump of exposition.

Why is the UI dumb?
Unclear if is developed for console or PC, enormous software cursor lagging everywhere. Please let me use system cursor.
Always holding some input to accomplish some action, why?

Performance acceptable, as running on proton with mesa drivers. No shader lagging, pre-compiled.

I do not understand why they would make the game like this, appears to be an independent studio. Premise seems fine, why did they execute AAA slop?

Edit:

Developer response on discord (muted for one week)

IW Blake
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Today at 12:33 PM
Yeah, that was a weird one - we deleted it.

It seemed super troll-y and also, what a wall of text


Adalaide
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Today at 12:34 PM
"The game UI was not creative. Very original"
meanwhile in an alternative world "The game UI was difficult to understand. Bad"

Adalaide
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Today at 12:35 PM
He really saw the one stalker type anomaly and said the whole game was unoriginal

Tentative yes.

The beta was absolutely shocking, the initial release was just as bad.
Now two years later the developers have had time to actually fix their game a bit.

The client performance is marginally improved, server performance is still bad.

Last week my aunt caught fire


The $50 mod-pack that trivialises base game achievements and arbitrarily locks base game tech behind planets.

What a perfect juxtaposition between my all time favourite games - Fallout 76, Escape from Tarkov and Roblox

I am a bit confused as to why it is called 'stalcraft' though, shouldn't it be called Escape from FallBlox ?