Recent reviews by Ganondorf McStreetfighter

As a long time player of the DayZ mod I was obviously excited about the standalone. As of now I have clocked about 70 hours in standalone and would like to provide some informative feedback for people looking into the game.

Pros:
* Fundamentally the same game as Dayz mod (this is a good thing.)
* Art assets have been expanded and improved (the map is more detailed and there is a large variety of clothing)
* More mechanical depth (blood types, improvised equipment, hunting etc.)
* Can now survive off the land by hunting animals and cooking them

Cons:
* Hackers (will speak about this later...)
* The engine sucks ass. The Arma II engine is great graphically but it is a pile of crap in every other regard:
* Melee is awful. It is basically 'simulated' by skinning a short range, high damage ballistic weapon with a melee model.
As a result it can be extremely difficult to land melee hits. Most of the time they won't even register. I suspect this is a fundamental limitation of the engine and 'true' melee won't ever be added.
* Animations are even worse than the melee system. Almost every action in the game requires a fixed animation cycle. What this means is that if you want to take out your weapon you have to enter an animation cycle. Once you enter this animation you can't do anything else. If you are running when you commence the animation you will keep running until it's complete. Jumping (yes, jumping) is also an animation. As a result, jumping is something I try to avoid like the plague. What else is one of these horrible animation cycles? Eating, drinking, attacking with a melee weapon, getting into a car, climbing a ladder etc. etc. Basically this is the only game you will ever play where your in game character will feel less physically capable than your RL self.
* There are memory leaks up the wazoo. The fact that servers typically need to be restarted after a few hours is symptomatic of this (again, this may be a fundamental issue with the engine that will never be fixed).
* The netcode sucks ass. I'm a software engineer and I haven't looked at the source code but I suspect it is sucky. They recently added a vehicle after much waiting. It is just as prone to desyncs as the mod... (the server cannot update the position of the vehicle quickly enough and it rubber bands everywhere)
* AI. Wow. I suspect again this is a fundamental limitation of the engine. Arma II AI was meant to simulate troops who typically take cover and make precise, slow movements across open terrain. When they tried to adapt this to zombies in the mod the results were awful. Zombies are just a joke. They glitch through walls. They run erratically so are next to impossible to hit. They also use the delightful melee system except clearly have what are effectively aimbots.
OK enough bashing on the engine. You get the idea. Hmm, what else:
* The updates are a joke. They think releasing a high poly model of a gun is an update. Bug fixes seem to just fix ridiculous shoddy coding errors that they introduced (mainly item dupes or other highly unexpected behaviour). They never fix actual limitations in the engine.

Oh yeah my special section about hackers. This game is full of them. Me and my friend have agreed not to play it until they sort this issue out. Every single time we join a high population server, within 10 minutes we are dead from speedhacking/aimbotting/teleporting/godmode hackers. It's your choice, either join a low pop server and lootwhore all day or join a high pop server for some actual action and 'get rekt' by 14 year old kids with £10 hack tools.

Conclusion: Do not buy this steaming pile of ♥♥♥♥. It has been in development for quite a while now and progress is glacial. As I mentioned above, I suspect inherent limitations in the engine mean this game will never feel polished. They will just keep adding more art assets. In one year I predict this game will be just as full of hackers and annoying engine features (read bugs) as it is now. I'm not fugging surprised Rocket bailed on the dev team (I also suspect he isn't skilled enough to actually develop a standalone game as opposed to a novel but fairly trivial arma II mod).

EDIT: In the space of time it took me to move my mouse button to the 'edit' button I thought of about three dozen other ♥♥♥♥♥♥ things about this game.

4/10 avoid unless money isn't an issue