Recent reviews by Kyru

Not at all what I expected. Much less "Pokemon with guns" and more "ARK with Pokemon-like creatures".

Biggest drawback is the building. Currently feels very bad to build, with a lot of snapping and placement issues.

Overall a good time, building out your village and finding good workers is a lot of fun. Servers could use a lot of work, but still playable and makes the world feel much more alive playing with many people.

Surprisingly fun game and good for the price if you can get on sale. Graphics aren't the greatest, but gameplay is generally smooth with a good variety of options. Also nice that microtransactions are completely unnecessary as in-game currency is very easy to come by.

Career is pretty straightforward and lets you choose how hard it is, but always something nice to relax with.

Casual provides options for Topgolf and a Fall Guys style battle royale. Both are fun, and are more of a test of how fast you can switch clubs and aim than anything, so anyone can play and have a chance.

Competitive is a bit lacking on the matchmaking balance, but still fun, especially with a friend.

Workshop maps and map creation itself is very easy to work with and gives an added bit of things to do when you get bored of everything else.

I want to be stranded on a raft forever I love it here

somehow still getting major updates every few months while letting you play the exact same way you did years ago if you want

i bought this in 2016, finally launched it last month, am happy boy

Most of the game is beautiful, fun, and exciting. The PvP people with 1000+ hours who repeatedly grief you and call you racial slurs in terrible "pirate" accents make you want to uninstall. Assuming you can avoid them, the game is fun times all around.

November 27th, 2024: I think the re-branding and re-launch has actually gone pretty well. There's still some things that are busted, but all together things haven't been as problematic as before. The bonus gold from random queues is nice, and being able to queue across servers for most activities has made actually doing things much easier. It feels a bit too easy now to reach max level and 250 in trade skills. That alone isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it also removes a lot of the early game progression that was enjoyable before. Most side quest rewards are obsolete by the time you do them, and the rate you level will generally outpace the rate you level trade skills, so you don't do as much crafting for yourself.

Fully random mutation order every week is a bit of a hell, getting the same mutation weeks in a row that you hate sucks. Lack of in-game explanation for the 10 man raids and what gear is needed also creates a large divide between those in-the-know and those who aren't.



June 9th, 2024: They still somehow have not learned to test patches before pushing them to live servers. It's become impossible to defend. Not sure if it's a money or time related issue, but something needs to be figured out.

The game still feels like it's in "Early Access", but they have done a good bit of polishing, and upcoming changes seem promising. They really need to stop recycling the same content over and over, a little more creativity would go a long way for seasonal events. I'm hoping that with the October release the game will finally leave the "Early Access" phase of its existence, though that's probably overly optimistic.



November 10th, 2022: I think the game is finally at a point where I can recommend it to friends. They still have a lot to do to get rid of all the bugs, balance issues, and general population issues. That said, the core gameplay is greatly improved, and they've been better about not releasing patches that come with massive game breaking bugs.

All of the quality of life changes this year have made playing the game at a base level much easier, with the increase in fast travel shrines, azoth changes, storage changes, group finder, and much more. Getting to 60 is nowhere near as much of a grind, and getting expertise up to 600 is significantly easier than ever before. Forcing many higher level named weapons to drop at 590 has also made the fresh 60 experience much less punishing. Being able to immediately grind out good named items and use them at full power instead of waiting until you've got your expertise removes a lot of frustration I previously had.

Hard to explain just how different everything feels, but I have been genuinely having fun with the game again, and for the first time since beta feel confident in AGS to guide this game somewhere positive.



September 30th, 2021: Good game. Imagine all of the server related issues will be worked out within the next two weeks. Should be smooth sailing from there.

February 1st, 2022: My below statements from over two months ago still hold very true. The developers and management have no respect for the game or players. Patches do not get tested at all before being pushed live to every single server. It is somewhat impressive how consistently their patches break more things than they fix.

November 20th, 2021: This game should be marked as early access

At launch, the game had plenty of bugs and issues, but this was to be expected. Games these days rarely launch perfect, and I already had a feel for the bugs from 100+ hours of playing the alphas and betas. I thought, with time, things would only get better.

This was not the case.

They have no respect for development environments and production environments. In almost every software place, you do endless testing and QA before you push something to production. We have no idea what Amazon's internal processes are like for this kinda stuff, but I assume it's not great. Every time they released a patch, there'd be a slew of new issues. Some were more hidden, so it's understandable they slipped through, whereas others were much more obvious and definitely should've been noticed.

When AGS introduced the Public Test Realm, everyone rejoiced, thinking that it would be used to test changes and get feedback before pushing things to the live servers. Technically, this is true, as they did test changes on the PTR, received feedback, and then pushed to live server. They just missed the implied part where you would fix the bugs and address the feedback you received.

The PTR ended up not at all being something for true testing, and instead just seems to be a way for AGS to demo all of the best parts of things they're working on and drum up hype. All of the god awful changes they rolled into the most recent patch were nowhere to be found in the PTR. None of the major bugs found in the PTR were fixed before being pushed to live. AGS didn't respond in a meaningful way to any of the feedback left about how things were in the current state of the PTR.

It just all feels so meaningless now.



The changes in the most recent update definitely demoralized me, but everything about their development process is what's truly driving me away. I hope that this is just a result of them desperately trying to push content to retain players, and that one day in the future the PTR will actually be a place for the public to test things, and AGS will take the time to read, understand, and address feedback, transparent with the community.

Meme game, but actually fun to learn the meta and get good at. Definitely better with friends to keep you company.

Basically time travel.

Leave your base to complete a 10 minute task, get back, check the clock, 2 real world hours have now passed.

Set out on a short expedition with your friends to pickup 20 more iron, return home, check clock, 4 real world hours have now passed.

Decide your're finally going to build your own base and stop living in your friends.
You don't want to put too much time into this, so you'll keep it simple.
After a short while, you complete your base and feel accomplished.
Your phone starts ringing.

It is now 2032.

You are late for your wedding, it's your dad calling.
You tell him you just need to put some stuff away and you'll be there.
You put all of your items into a single chest.
You shutdown the game.
You leave to get in your car, but there are no longer cars.

The year is 2047.

You get hit by a flying trolley while trying to figure out where you car is.

As you lay there dying, you reflect on your life, your last 20 years being spent exclusively inside of Valheim. You see beautiful mountains and hillsides. Logging in to see your favorite dog smiling back at you. All you friends fighting hoards of mobs together in the night. It was a life well lived.

My list of issues I have with this game are far greater than the list of things I enjoy about this game. That being said, I still think you can easily get your money's worth out of this game, thus making it a recommendation from me.

I have spent more time creating servers for this game than I have actually playing the game, so most of my complaints will come from the position of someone who runs servers.

• This game was not designed with private servers in mind, so support for private server owners is very minimal from the developers. The Github repos they provide us with come with very little information as to how you actually use the software, and instead make you rely on finding help online. Their Github repos have small Wiki sections that give little to no information, stating that there's "more coming soon", but that more doesn't seem to be coming.
  
• The overall manor of how cells are linked together in a grid is extremely clunky, and rough for players in-game crossing over into new cells. They have the system setup in a way such that they can run their full 15x15 grid across multiple machines, but there wasn't much thought put into helping support smaller grids that are run on a single machine. What would be nice to see is instead of forcing a player transfer every time they cross a cell, change it so that grids on a single machine can be tethered together more cleanly. Ideally, I'd like to see a world where I can run a 3x3 grid that either has no transfer time between cells, or has just a few seconds of transfer time. As it stands, transfer times can take anywhere from 5-30 seconds, which is a real problem when you're sailing. Many times, players will spawn in on the other grid running straight into a tornado, or SOTD, or crashing into an island put too close to the border. I would be fine with these transfer times when transferring across machines through the Redis, but it's extremely annoying when it's all going on in one machine, in one central directory.
  
• In general, everything with properly setting up a server is a complete headache. The tools provided are very mediocre and come with little information as to how to use them, the game has bugs and issues itself that make you think you did something wrong, when in reality it's just a bug or glitch. Many people's first time setting up a simple map, even just a 2x2 grid, will take them 10+ hours. The only situation where running a server in a remotely easy fashion is if you completely ignore custom spawns, spawn regions, and the quest line. Even then, you have to spend a while finding the right islands, building a cohesive map, getting your settings right, and finding the best way for you to run and update things.

• Official servers are damn near impossible unless you join a large crew, or bring along a ton of dedicated friends with you to the game. The claim system allows players to bully each other, even in PvE. The claim system in PvE will often lead to toxicity among players, resulting in the players finding PvE ways to kill the person they're mad at. Neighboring tribes can easily sink your ship through putting too much weight on it, as well as easily aggro animals near your base while your'e offline, killing you, your tames, and parts of you base. They can then raid anything you left unlocked.
  
• Ships don't render unless they're right in your face. This is a huge issue on PvP, where people can easily escape just by getting out of render distance. Or if you're a slower ship, you only have 3-5 seconds to react to seeing a ship before that ship can start shooting at you. Increasing the distance at which you can see other ships would help the gameplay a lot.
  
• Thousands of bugs and issues with the game and the dev kit, but the game is early access so I won't go too hard on them for those.
  
• Probably a bunch else that I'm forgetting, but those are the main things that have been upsetting me lately.

All that said, the game still has its fun moments. Its a great feeling being able to create a ship and then navigate to new, foreign lands. Going into the game blind, and not researching what islands have what adds a lot of adventure to everything. You enter a new grid, and can ask the locals of that grid what rare resources there are, and where you can get them, or who you have to fight to get them. Stumbling onto unclaimed islands, you get to have the fun of exploring, figuring out what all this island has to offer, and if you should be the one to claim it.

The $30 price tag might be a bit steep, given all of the bugs and issues, but you can still probably squeeze that value out of gameplay. I'd definitely suggest picking it up when it's $15, as that price point definitely gives you a real bang for your buck.