Recent reviews by Vysken

I wish I could give a perfectly neutral rating, but I can't. It's probably worth picking up on sale.

First thing: It's incredibly short content-wise. Without using any of the in-game speed ups (playing through completely on normal 1.0x speed), I'm finished with the campaign after 16.5 hours, with probably around 2-3 hours of that idle/AFK time. I just hoped for more... There's a free update coming in 2025 but don't expect more than a dozen hours of Story/Campaign content. Even less if you use the speed-up in game.

There's a few bugs knocking around that can be irritating, but overall I didn't experience anything game-breaking.

What I didn't like so much was the sheer inability to control certain things - despite trying to balance factions throughout the game, once you commit to a cornerstone everything seems to start going to ♥♥♥♥ when previously it was totally fine. You can pull it back but it immediately feels like things go from zero to 100 and you're about to be ousted.

Also, despite having one of the radical factions (opposition) at just 1-3% population, they managed to continually cause significant issues in the end-game, even as I was setting up their new home they'd cause riots! I felt like it just didn't matter if you made honourable or evil choices, they were going to be hard-coded to cause chaos either way, even when the city was thriving and all demands were met.

What worked well; it has a really nice thematic feel to it. It's actually completely different to Frostpunk 1 in most ways, but still has a underlying Frostpunk aesthetic. I like the differences personally; it shifts the game from 80% winter prep to about 20%, and the rest is basically managing the different factions and their opinions of you. Ultimately though, the game seems to force you to go all-in on one particular side. There may be a way to balance things but the things that happen (rioting, events, etc.) seem to be hard-coded to happen no matter the size of the opposition faction or how good your city currently is being managed.

Overall, worth buying on sale, it'll last you a few days of playtime and hopefully the update will be coming soon. I'd have been upset to pay full price for what feels like half a game though.

So far, so good!

It's been quite heavy on the cinematics, probably accounting for 60-70% of play time, but it really sets the tone and helps provide information on what's going on.

The combat is handled very well - the game allows you to balance the difficulty yourself by allowing you to equip up to 3 items which can 'automate' certain things such as healing or performing combos, but the best part is you can swap them out for other things such as defence or power boosts if you are confident enough to manage those yourself. As a result, the combat is fast-paced and rewarding from the get-go. I would say in the early stages it feels somewhat easy, but it has to cater to all players' abilities.

It's also been very linear so far. Again, absolutely fine for the 'introduction' part of a game of this series. I imagine/hope it will allow for some flexibility in the near future.

The voicelines, voice acting and casting all feel great too so far. The responses feel very natural and the characters don't come across as intellectually challenged - for example: When Clive first absorbs an Eikon's power, Cid immediately recognises and comments that he did that. Other games might have Cid be blissfully unaware what happened "Huh, I wonder why she can't suddenly cast her powers? I guess we'll never know..." and it feels like a complete insult to the 'obvious' event.

So overall, enjoying it very much. Will potentially update/re-write in future.

Game of the decade. So incredibly well put-together. What minor issues may have cropped up during gameplay were dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of brilliance that the game offers.

Amazing storyline, fantastic gameplay, great music, 10/10 voice acting and narration. Legitimately as close to a masterpiece as possible for a game of this depth.

For a long time, I was put off buying this game for a few reasons; I'm not that into Vampire-related things (Twilight ruined it all), other top-down games like this such as Cryofall really struggle with appropriate power-balancing between players in PvP, and I'm jaded from buying too many games which ultimately end up ruined for different issues.

That aside; V Rising does things very well. The game is incredibly well polished. Certain survival aspects are dealt with in a unique but not irritating way - for example "food/drink" for vampires is of course blood, so that's one thing you need to focus on. But by having different 'blood types' and within those types even a percentage of purity that gives more bonuses, that's a really awesome way to handle the whole thing.

The skills are very well balanced especially for PvP; with the (subjective of course) "best" ultimate skill being available at a very early stage, things like this help to give everyone at least a fair bit of balance rather than allowing the disparity between the highest levels and lower levels to be insane. A lot of games completely fall apart with this aspect.

To top off the character-based stuff, the building system also has a ton of uniqueness and quality of life aspects such as Waygates to teleport to pre-existing areas (managed by having certain items NOT teleportable so you do still have to risk a run back to base), and even now in-castle teleportation to help you move around your castle better.

It would be impossible to sum up the depth of V so far, at 48 hours I've just scratched the surface, but it's clearly so far a game that is ran by an extremely competent game developer, and it's getting to be a rarity nowadays.

Hats off to Stunlock for their work so far, looking forward to future updates.

Others have put things much more eloquently than I can commit the time to explaining. The constant stream of game-breaking bugs is just too much to cope with. This isn't mis-aligned buttons, this is age-old methods for duplicating gold and items which have been known since the early days of online multiplayer games. Each patch brought to fix an issue brings with it 3-5 new bugs and methods of exploiting the game. The entire economy is ruined because these bugs, and AGS took far too long in responding to those issues, sometimes waiting days whilst there were video guides on how to duplicate your gold circulating around.

It's a new game, bugs are expected, but the response to those bugs is what we can judge them on, and the response so far has been abysmal.

I think this is just another attempt at a 'redemption launch' like No Mans Sky - seems to be a recurring theme these days to launch a game as a failure, and then turn it around into a success story (I guess they say no publicity is bad publicity). Either that or a massive social experiment on how much players are willing to put up with. I'm not sure.

Either way, stay clear of this game until they fix most bugs, stop simply making the game a time-sink grind, stop sucking off Strength-based builds, reset all servers and economies, and add some actual content for the late-game.

A solid release that feels close enough to the legendary AoE2, but different in many aspects - each civilisation has a good degree of variation to play-style.

Research all technologies for free but slowly with the Abbassid Dynasty, or be able to literally pack up and move every building as the Mongols (a stone-boosted economy that can only gather stone by a unique building), or play more standardised build techniques with the English/French. If you enjoy killing all the animals on the map, then Rus is for you since you get bonuses for the amount of animals you kill! (you sociopath)

Lots of little intricacies to learn, but overall the game is playable with limited RTS knowledge right off the bat.

I can see this taking over the competetive AoE scene given enough attention, based on the reactions of the top AoE2 players.

This game is definitely worth a purchase, the overall concept is strong and it's a more relaxed management-style game that rewards forward-planning and careful decision making. Towards the later game it feels very heavily weighted towards the automatic route management system.

There are definitely some things that need improvement, and just in case Devs read the reviews I'll post here:

Things the game vitally needs:
- Show the pathing that the character will take before right-clicking. It's not always clear which route the character will take, sometimes it looks like there's a backstreet where there's not.
- Have a way to 'remember' things such as who is hireable from where (or better yet, a list you can access of potential hire-ees as long as you've visited a place once)
- A clearer vision of what each 'Upgrade' will provide - it's not clear that you might LOSE production in one area by 'upgrading' to another.
- A way to cancel 'missions' that you accepted, at a loss of reputation or something.
- A way to ensure a specific mission won't come up again (I keep getting asked to drop off 20 of X and 10 of Y, but I don't have and cannot make enough Y).

Other improvements I would recommend:
- Add an option for routes to include 'Overall Actions' that would collect any fronts/bottles along the route.
- Generally a more intuitive routing system without having to add a bunch of steps on the end and move them up (also number the steps visibly on the map).
- A way to completely skip parts of a route depending on conditions.
- Make legitimate produce items sellable. Make illegal products purchasable from rivals.
- Option/mission to have a delivery company that will deliver from stores for an extra amount (will allow players to choose to focus on management of businesses or self-assigned delivery drivers).
- Make dialogue options clearer about what they will do (local groups
- If a location will/won't offer to be a front, once you ask remove the dialogue option and instead add a marker.
- Make 'drop-off'/'pick-up' actions complete at the end of turns (currently they will arrive at a place with X inventory, but only drop it off at the start of their next turn when they have movement back).

- Potential bug: I have bottles appearing in my main/first operation but no drop-offs routed for this place.

With a few improvements this could be a super strong replayable game - potentially a good candidate for online multiplayer too.

Unable to recommend this game in its current state.

I play multiplayer, and for various reasons the latest build isn't being released in MP format, despite the old build sucking balls, so I can only really review the existing build under MP.

Having to spend the first X number of days reading skill books and watching TV so you don't miss valuable skills sucks. Especially on Multiplayer where you can't control the time.

Learning skills is monotonously tedious. It takes far too long to be able to build even a simple door levelling up carpentry.

Zombies immediately start to group together in unmanageable group sizes from the start. Very difficult to shake them whilst avoiding new groups and keep them away from your home long enough to read the damned books/watch TV shows you need to watch.

Guns are completely redundant early game, unless you specifically want to broadcast your location to all zombies in a town and have them bee-line right for you.

Sounding a car horn has the exact same effect. Trying to lure zombies away from your house/friends does the exact opposite as they come from ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MILES away, overrunning your house anyway.

When you finally do get to a stage where you can sit down and up your skills/read the books to increase your multipliers, you just sit around and do nothing while that happens except try to manage your hunger, thirst, boredom, anxiety and potentially any wounds.

Oh, and if you got zombie-infected, it doesn't tell you. You just start to feel ill. Then get worse slowly over a couple of days, and die. No way to prevent it. No actual indication that you're going to be dying to zombie-ness, or if your character is feeling sick due to a fever or something, nothing. At that point you start slowly losing health with no injuries at all. It gets worse, and you die. It means there's zero point in progressing the character at all at that point, the game's over for you, and you've lost all your skills.

After the above, you might want to start again and get back to your team - but now you have to start over with all the skills/books and likely the power has now gone, so there's no TV programs to watch any more, and so levelling up is much more difficult.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, but I find it impossible in its current state. Will review again if the patch ever does get released properly.

This is the most lonely "Open World MMO RPG" I've ever played.

There's no in-game chat - so you can't ask questions or look for a team, and in 20+ hours I've not encountered anyone using the in-game voice chat. Probably due to the fact that you're put into an instanced map like GTA V / Red Dead Online where you randomly join a server, meaning there's players of all levels and usually none of them are at the same quest-stage as you.

There are 'public' parties you can join, but it's not clear as to their purpose beyond 'being in them' to get the party bonus (INT/CHA/experience for doing certain quests, etc.). It's just a grind of silence so far for me, where you join one and then continue what you were doing alone anyway.

There seems to be little-to-no NPC towns either. I encountered one small (2-3 buildings) settlement outside of the vault at the start, but then everywhere else has been barren, Scorched zombie-infested places for 20 levels. I think I've seen maybe 15 NPCs total in that time, and most of them you can't interact with.

Encumbrance is rife - again you're pushed to pick up and scrap as much stuff as possible, just like Fallout 4, except here you will fill up your bags so quickly which then severely limits your ability to move (normal movement depletes stamina when encumbered, meaning you can no longer re-position from that pack of Super Mutants that just turned up, and you can't jump). Of course, this is solved by spending Atoms on Scrap Boxes that will send your scrap back to your little base instantly! (Atoms are acquired extremely slowly via gameplay, or you can buy them of course)

The UI and Menu is just not intuitive at all. Trying to switch between Weapons/Armour/Meds/Notes/Holos/Misc/Junk in real-time is tricky. The 'favourites' list doesn't seem editable once done, you have to 'unfavourite' things then re-favourite them in the right order to get them on the hotkeys you want (or the actual way to do it isn't clear). The menus for crafting/scrapping/modifying & repairing are also just as clunky, a different hotkey for each when first interacting with one of the crafting benches.

I'm level 21, I have level 1 hacking/picklocking, and it's not clear how to increase those since you need to add 'Perk' cards which says mine are max level already. Unsure how to progress without searching it up. I'd ask in-game, but there's no chat.

Overall, the game is clunky, lonely, grindy, and designed to irritate you just enough to keep buying Atoms to make your gameplay as smooth as it should be already. If it was Free to Play I'd accept that slightly, but even at 60% off it's still not worth a purchase for me.

Game's brutal.

You'll die, you'll get raided, you'll lose everything. If you're in the game then expect to be shot, even if you're naked and carrying nothing but a rock.

Change your perspective when playing Rust - the game plays more like a longer strategy game where you hone your skills getting set up and resisting death each reset. Expect that each time you start to play, it's to learn how to survive better next time. The server will wipe anyway, all your progress will be lost. A bit like EVE - don't undock what you can't afford to lose... but even if you leave it docked you'll probably lose it anyway.

When starting to learn Rust - look up how to make a simple starter base (Google "Rust Simple Starter Base").
Pick up Hemp plants, make some basic clothes. SOME clothing will guard against radiation poisoning which is almost guaranteed at any Point of Interest (where any decent loot crates will be).
Make Sleeping Bags with more cloth, put them down as you run. They have a cool-down timer when used and it's very useful to be able to re-spawn at different locations.
Barrels are okay. Crates are better.
Upgrade your roof. People can put ladders up your walls or 'boost' themselves on horses/other players.
You can 'research' most items you find if you craft a Research Table. If you find a cool item like a Garage Door or a Satchel Charge, you can research it for the cost of some scrap at a Research Table (which bypasses the skill-tree pre-requisites.) This destroys the original but ensures you can make it again in future.
There are Aim Practice Servers you can join to practice different guns. If you can't find any, search on Google and you can connect directly to their IP.

Don't leave any of your walls/foundations/ceilings as wood; I played a server wipe where I made a quick wooden base (first upgrade level after sticks), I logged off to let an electrician into the house and describe the problem (10-15 minutes MAXIMUM), came back and my roof was gone, I was naked, and my base was decaying. This is a 100% true story.

In my opinion, Rust isn't a casual game you can hop on for an hour or two with your friends; it's quite an intensive experience and something that takes many hours to learn and hone. However, it's still a blast with a friend or group that don't mind repeatedly dying.