Recent reviews by The One And Only Thodd

So my review will be all on the games mechanics and not the optimisation problems, I'll write as I come up with the points so there will be no specific order

I've thoroughly enjoyed my time in the game so far, gotten into high rank hunts and its been a blast co op with my partner.
Some things I really enjoy:

Karakuri building is fun and a really cool idea. You get to have up to 4 different combat Karakuri buildings, these range from simple cubes to springs to torches that light your weapons on fire and so on, then combining these basic combat buildings together build into complex combat buildings such as healing totems, fortress walls to block attacks, auto ballistas, fireworks launchers (akin to flash pods from MHW) and so on. There are 6 basic Karakuri buildings and you can have up to 4 so there's quite a lot of build diversity in the buildings alone. While there are no specific support weapons there are definitely support buildings that can be used

Dragon Karakuri are buildings that are used outside of combat, such as tents for fast travel, gathering stations and cooking/crafting stations, these buildings make your bases and you can place these bases anywhere on the map to make fast travel points as long as the terrain is flat enough, so you can make your own custom travel locations, or make ziplines to wherever you want, this was a fantastic idea imo as it gives the hunters ultimate freedom of where they want to make their fast travel points and short cuts

Weapons are cool and fluid, the movement in general feels amazing, slide dodging is great and unlike monster hunter where putting weapons away takes time, in Wild Hearts putting weapons away to start sprinting is fast and responsive and really promotes high mobility. Each weapon has a secondary morph by performing certain actions such as parrying with the umbrella weapon

Being able to rez teammates before they take a life is amazing and really helps with random teams, there's even armour to help rez faster, give more health to rezzed teammates, protect you while rezzing and buff you and allies after performing a rez

Food is more in your control, you can cook a variety of different foods that give different buffs and you have 100 points of hunger, each food item has X filling to it so you can combine to what you'd like

Co op is super smooth and streamlined, along with taking new missions and exploring, we barely ever go into the main hub unless we need to turn in or accept specific side quests, really enjoy the little downtime

Hunts don't take long to complete once you get your build and weapon going, me and my partner kill monsters in between 10-15 minutes as they seem to be very squishy but deal a ton of damage to hunters, so that's the balancing they seem to be going for

Less farming of mats for craftables and equipment so you don't have to grind nearly as much for a set of armour or for crafted items, most crafted items you can think of in something like MHW are build into Karakuri buildings, such as fireworks launcher (Flashpods) Harpoon traps (Pitfall traps) ect

Ranged weapons don't need to farm ammo, some ammo types are built into the weapons and charms provide other elemental effects such as poison and frost and so on.

Gems don't exist like in MHW, there innate skills on armour and weapons and charms so you really only need to farm the random charms

Crossssssssplaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay

Things I didn't like so much:

I don't like how some things really aren't explained and its easy to miss a simple tutorial on what something is and it leaves you completely in the dark

There seems to sometimes be some impute delay or impute deletion as on rare occasions Karakuri don't build in the right order and cause you to fail builds

Sometimes sloped surfaces can screw up Katakuri placement in battle, causing you to fumble your build

No shared inventory between players and stashes so you have to go back and forth between stashes and stations

Co op buildings don't transfer back to other players worlds, so if you co op and build stuff in the hosts world it doesn't follow you back to your own world.

Sometimes trees can get in the way of the camera while fighting especially with the claw and dagger as that weapon keeps you airborne above the monster

I'll add more things as I think of them

While this DLC has is positive qualities I honestly feel like it should of been in the base game, the changes to the world map make the over world a little more lively, making bandits/packs of animals roam the over world, I actually had to pay attention to my specialists while they roamed the world cause they could get into random engagements with wondering entities.

The overhaul to the other settlements make it feel like there's a little more to their politics other then green bar get bigger, which never really had an outcome as far as I seen in the base game

The things I didn't like about the DLC was the rival while very poorly introduced is whatever, really never posed any real threat to me, he took over a couple of my outposts every now and again but its so easy to 'defeat' him its actually laughable, I got to the point where I could make the federation before I even started building the doomsday bunker cause its so easy to become allied with settlements if you just simply juggle resources they want between each other, the science people can get like 100-200 rep if you simply buy their science points, plus the bonuses they give you are quite nice, like the military settlement giving your specialists +5 damage making my fighters basically unstoppable, 2 could basically take out anything on the map with ease.

I feel like the rival should of been a way more imposing presence on the map, cause he's basically this entity you never really see outside of some patrol groups labelled belongs to your rival, he could of sent attacks directly to your base, maybe even bypassing the gate to attack you directly so you actually have to use the guard towers or keep fighter specialists in the base

I also feel like the settlements should be interacting with each other more as well more then just the little caravans you see sometimes, sending parties out to attack each other or help each other depending on their rep between one another which would effect you depending on who you helped or ignored, or making their own outposts that you have to either deal with being there or get rid of them one way or another, the framework is all there really, they just needed some more put into it.

My only last gripe was how the new buildings to counter espionage was basically build the buildings and roll the dice, I don't know how they could make it more engaging then just roll dice to see if it happens or not but I really never had to deal with it, I didn't even build the secure labs, maybe its more crippling on harder difficulties then 100% but I never really felt like I was doing anything outside of checking boxes on a list.

TLDR DLC good, downvote cause its shouldn't be 17$ CDN for something that should of been in the base game

So I want to start by saying I enjoyed this game quite a lot over the hours I have spent in it, the ups outnumber the downs by far but lets tally some of the things together.

Starting story:
You are a doctor, specifically a surgeon, who left his home town at the request of your father to study abroad and get your degree, though a few years later you receive a cryptic letter from your father, asking you to return to your home town as things have gone south. Returning home you discover your town isn't what it used to be, people have changed, for better or for worse, and even worse there has been a murder, the first one in eons, on the day you arrive, the town is against you, you are suspect one, even sooner after that a mysterious disease rolls into the town and thick particles cling to the air. Your new task that you are thrown into is to keep the people safe, heal them, earn the trust of them once more. Learn the past of the town, the darkest parts and the lightest sides, who to trust and who will lie to you, not everyone is your friend, but not everyone is your enemy either, learn, adapt, overcome, try not to die while doing it.


Pros:
Story is pretty good, I found myself getting to know a lot of the characters of the story, not everyone is a angle, no one is really, but they are trying their best, or worst, depending on how you look at it, and I found myself wanting to keep them alive at all costs, even though the game revels in the fact that they will die and there's (almost) nothing you can do about it. (there are a few hiccups in the story here and there that I raised a brow for but it wasn't overwhelming)

Music was great as well, every district state has its own theme, they are all very unique and give you a sense of whats happening in the different areas. Though it does kinda startle you (at least for me) when you don't expect music changes, like I was gathering a key item for the main story and all the sudden it played triumphant orchestra music, it actually startled me at first cause I thought someone was trying to rip my head off so I ended up taking out my weapons and doing like 5 360 turns trying to see something that wasn't there.

Atmosphere was pretty spot on, tied with the music and the visuals you have a real sense of dread and futility but also calm and relaxing to triumphant, from the start you get a feeling of how the game wants to push your emotions in certain ways, going into infected houses is dead quiet, you can hear your own footsteps, you get a feeling of dread in them, outside coughing can be heard, crying and desperation, people sick on the street and infected people begging you for help.

The general game play was good too, survive, adapt or die, should you hoard, or give, supplies will be scarce as you find out the best ways to get them, you can only do so much, and you can only give so much before you have nothing for yourself, you have to be sparing with what you have, do what you must, and you must live.

indifferences

The game is a walking simulator, while the destinations are great the game will be spent a lot of time walking from point A to point B, at first you might be a little lost, and will wander to different locations as exploring can be very rewarding, you have little time to waste and when you walk somewhere only to find nothing can be a little disheartening and you might be tempted to reload saves to restore time.

Combat is pretty jank, I found most fights could be solved so easily by use of a gun, the combat is either trivial or unfair, there's really no in between, and there are times where you make choices and you can get surrounded by people for it and end up dying, and in a game where dying is punished like it is in this one, you can't afford to do it. I was fighting on a stairway with no railing with someone down and someone up, both coming at me, and when you try to turn and run from someone they will grab you and pull you back towards them which blurs your screen heavily and yanks your screen about, I ended up falling and dying cause I couldn't see at all and just stepped off the ledge. There are other times like if you try to shoot at an enemy, but someone important is behind them, like a story character, your gun will jam, as the game doesn't want you to shoot the story character, which is fair, but now I'm getting my face kicked in for it. All in all its not terrible, but its not groundbreaking either.

Stamina is a little bit low, you can throw some good punches or run a few good steps but then you are out of energy and have to wait for that bar to fill back up, I ended up purposely getting into combat because when you block in combat your stamina regens much faster, so I would get into combat and run then block then run then block, then try to get into combat again with someone else to do it all over again.

Cons
Bugs bugs bugs, some small some large, some break the game, some make bodies spaz out, its pretty wonky sometimes. Like you have a journal of thoughts to do for the day, but if you do those things out of the order the game wants you to it can seriously break the journal and leave markers on the map or leave you lost cause the game wont update them as you do them. There's also a play you can watch at the end of every day but if you enter the play too fast it will break, locking you in the theater and forcing you to load, sometimes npcs wont spawn, leaving you unable to go forward, or unable to make a choice you want to make cause you simply cannot talk to the required people, tldr save often.

While the thought of you being lost in what to do and having to learn as you go is great in theory, having it in practice for a game that's potentially as long as this one is can be very compromising to the game, sometimes you have to talk to people in very specific orders to trigger things properly, and you'd have no real way to know that, which is fine usually but there's no learning if you do it wrong, and they die, well you don't know why, were you not fast enough? did you talk to the wrong people? what did you do wrong, it just encourages save abusing or online research which is terrible for a game like this that encourages you to play it start to finish in one string.

The game stability is pretty low, game freezes a lot, stutters and general loss of frames, even the quality of the game going to crap for several seconds at times can really pull you out of the experience sometimes.


All in all its a solid game and I'd give it a thumbs up, its slow at times, but that is fine for me, the game focuses heavily on being unfair, but its only unfair the first time you play it, if you play it again its easy cause you know where to go and what to look for, what to save and what to give away and what to trade to whom and when. which isn't something I can dock points for

With slow/none existant content updates and hostile devs I cannot recommend this game in its current state, alpha 17 has been in development for almost a year. Lazy Devs.

Devs are insanely incompetent with balancing, and the customer relations are non existent to negative. please do not give them anymore money

Pros:
fun with friends, scavenging and exploring the open world with them can be very fun for hours on end while on the way you can battle larger creatures with your dinky little starter knife, even if you die to the overpowered monsters its oddly fun

loads of creative features that are in and are to be added, the buidling system is very nice, and I like it, build a home anyway you want to and build the tools to build your home, even build the guns and swords you use to defend said home with the creative system that lets you make them however you want

A very nice looking game, specially when gliding in places like the desert when there are canyons and other natural formations

Cons:
buggy to hell sometimes (it is in its earlier stages of devolopment after all)

can't move away from friends when they are doing tasks such as digging or else it wont appear for you, had a friend dig into the ground while I was away and on returning he was 100 feet under solid ground for me.

bad starting placement, sometimes spawning you in the middle of the ocean or a canyon you can't get out of

sometimes enemies are just weirdly overpowered and do way too much damage at the stages you find them, making the little thing on the ground you think you can kill, one shot you, this is much more noticeable in co-op where it seems there is no barrier from letting you walk 10 feet to find a giant and get 2 shotted

Final thoughts:
I think its a very good game and worth the money as its boasting a large selection of features even in the current state along with its wonderful looks and fun with friends, but if you don't like the bugs that are in a early access game I say wait for the full game to come out