Recent reviews by yewnyx

absolute cinema

BattlEye is compatible with Steam Deck but R* doesn't enable it. That's fine I guess, but the FAQ redirects people to the Steam Deck support forum, which is a tad dishonest, and I can't get behind that.

This game is good for 10 hours of fun, but I deeply wish it would be good for 100 or 1000. It's promising, and I want to like this game, but it is in massive need of a VERY drastic rebalance. It nails a fun early game, but doesn't know what it wants to be.

- It demands timely completion of missions but wastes an INSANE amount of time on unfun grinding in the late-game tech trees. Tier 3 and 4 progression is nonsensical, grindy, and painful.
- It has a diversity of map objectives, but none of them on the same drop. No persistence between drops so there's no point in teching up or building a home anything more than basically functional unless you have to for the map objective.
- It has a capable building system, none of which will last longer than the length of the mission, which even at its longest is still a couple of hours of fun early game followed by mind-numbing resource gathering and crafting. It forces you to play even when you would prefer to take your time with the rest of your out-of-game life.
- It encourages teamwork with different leveling trees, but doesn't tell you ahead of time that literally anybody can hunt and you don't need any hunting perks at all, at any point in the game - but there's no forgiveness mechanic to let you "forget" all your skills and re-level. Then again, XP is so imbalanced that you'd be best off spending half a day shooting arrows into desert wildlife to get yourself back to level 30.
- In the early game, the simplest crafting of basic tools is impossible, but as soon as you get a couple of levels, you can easily spend the rest of the game with 50+ unallocated blueprint points that you only spend as needed, and because there's no skill reset mechanic, and because wildlife is easily killable at all levels, you'll probably also hold off on allocating those, too.
- Wildlife spawning is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes there are only two or three animal spawns per 30 minutes, sometimes you're roleplaying as DoomGuy, chewing up animals down left and right so fast you can't even afford to stop to skin them.

It's a beautiful game (that sometimes brings even a 5950x+3090FE to its knees), and fun for a little bit, but definitely wait and see - if the core gameplay loop gets overhauled and the resource costs and move speeds are significantly rebalanced, this could easily turn into one of my favorite games.

In its current state though, it's more work than play and you should skip it for something that is more consistently rewarding and fun.

Game is generally addicting and fun, but scripting bugs in the bathhouse level kept on triggering an impossible situation, and I couldn't complete the game. Each level can take hours to complete, so this was pretty frustrating. To make matters worse, this is apparently a known issue whose fixhas remained unreleased, which is even more frustrating.