Note that I haven't finished the game completely!

What I was thinking before starting playing the game couldn't be more wrong. What I thought was that the game is pretty simple, sandboxy like Minecraft and that you can chill there for the whole game. Yep, couldn't be more wrong. It took me couple of games to get into effectivelly collecting enough resources so I don't die the third day of the game. Took me even more tries to reach the winter.

• Game is pretty hard
  
• If you want to dodge this bullet, do your research at least on YouTube

I don't really want to tell you what you should and shouldn't pick, but what I can recommend you from personal experience is that you try every character that is avaible to you. Firstly you'll find the character that feels fun to play to you, secondly you'll find what is and what is not efficient in certain situations, find the flaws and such things, and thirdly you'll be able to make good team when you get to the coop part of the game.

• Study characters, make use of the knowledge

Getting to the starving together part, you will probably want to play with more than one of your friend. It's not bad, but not good either. Also from personal experience it's not easy to play in full party every evening when you're playing in party of 4-5 people. On the other side, more people are more effective, easier to kill big monsters.
First things first, you want to make your team as much effective as possible. You want to make character combos for gathering or fighting and decide what each person should do in the world. Let me tell you, you really don't want to spend all nights sitting at firepit, that's a lot of time wasted.
Another thing that I've noticed when playing with new players as me (who did the reseach), a lot of people is afraid of addons. Don't be scared of adding few, quality of life isn't a deadly sin.

• If you're up to an amazing adventure, gather as much people as you can
  
• Team comps, system in gathering and fighting
  
• Use your time in the game
  
• Addons aren't cheating

I don't know what I was thinking back then, but I really didn't expect this amount of fighting. What I've been thinking was that I will do boss encounter whenever I want and that's it, no more fighting. Nope, wrong again.
Until your first summer you're completely fine, only thing you should fear is going too near to spider dens when exploring, but everything else is okay. Once you hit that summer you will encounter doggies which are spooky and bite a lot in big groups. From that summer you will get raided by them a lot.
But that's not all, even before you can encounter this miniboss that appears when you cut down a lot of trees without planting new saplings. Basically from the time you get raided by those doggies you will be encountering more and more new mobs that will want to ruin your life.
Well, that's a lot of problems, you might think it requires a lot of skill to kill all those mobs and.. it doesn't! Kinda, in a way. What you need to learn are attack/move patterns of mobs that attack you and count on the attackspeed of your character. For example what I was doing is that I let the dog do the attack animation, dodged that attack, hit him two times and repeat.

• Be aware of more and more enemies
  
• Attack patterns

If you read all this, I'm glad that you did. Still, you might be asking why is this more of a guide how to play instead of normal review. Well, from my perspective, I couldn't enjoy the game without knowing all of this. This felt to me like a game where you need to have wiki opened on the second monitor to progress. I was lucky to play with a guy that knew what he was doing and guided us for maybe 150 days.

7.5/10