Recent reviews by Zephyr

Mainly worth playing for the Kaiserreich mod.

Since I only played the single player, this is going to be a fairly limited review.

I really enjoyed this game. If only because RTS is a fairly dead genre, it felt extremely satisfying to play a fresh take on it. The people calling this a MOBA have probably never actually played a MOBA, let alone an RTS besides DOW before. This game is similar to Warcraft 3. Your armies are lead by heroes. They're strong enough that it behooves the player to micro them properly, but not so strong that they can't be overwhelmed by other units. Units have abilities that are actually useful, and army composition is something important to think about. Unit micro and control is emphasised a lot, so if you felt intimidated by SC2's macro and economy focus as a lot of players did you might find this game interesting.

The story was ass and overall the gameplay wasn't quite up there with SC2's campaign, but I liked it for what it was. I played through on hard and it felt reasonably challenging. Unfortunately it's just a little bit short, I would've liked at least a few more missions to try out more heroes.

For some reason people are butthurt that this game has limited base building, and has a huge focus on actual combat instead. Perhaps sim city would be a more appropriate game for you? I would say that the focus on small scale skirmishes and battles is more true to the 40k franchise, it seems mainly DOW1 fans who don't appreciate this.

Would I reccomend it for it's current price? Probably not, I did receive it in the humble bundle and for that price it was certainly worth it. But if you're a fan of Warcraft 3's campaign or tabletop 40k I'd definitely give it a go. Unfortunately the multiplayer is pretty much dead which is a shame because I really would've liked to give that a try.

The Long Dark does atmosphere very well. The interior of buildings feel creepy and abandoned, the weather outside is a real obstacle and threat, and as the player you have a haunting sense of destitution as you cling to survival. Ammo and materials are scarce and it's very easy to die if you make a wrong or greedy decision.

But this is a game for very patient people, and there's a good reason it's been labeled a walking simulator. Overall there just isn't that much variety to the gameplay here: you loot some buildings, look for animals to eat and... that's about it. There's really no goals in this game, and there's really not even goals for the player to make themselves, other than just survival. Exploring was very exciting at first, but quickly becomes repetitive as the maps are all premade, and there's not really a great variety in loot. Crafting is fairly limited, and I suppose that's down to the realistic theme Hinterland are going for. Then again, for some reason eating 1kg of venison gives you roughly half the amount of calories it should...Almost like they're willing to backtrack on that philosophy if it creates more difficulty for the player!

So many aspects of this game really tested the limits of my patience. Movement is slow and tedious (as you want to conserve calories), and as most of the game consists of walking from one area to another this can be an exercise in frustration. There's a lot of other really bizzare design choices in this game, like having to tediously wait for your fire to start up, staying indoors for too long literally giving you a cabin fever debuff that can kill you, and a constant chance to get parasites from meat that's cooked. Animals basically kill you on site, I didn't mind this really but I did find it amusing that they remind you that this is for gameplay reasons every time you boot the game.

The story mode was reasonably interesting for me, but again on the whole still pretty simplistic. You're mainly given a few fetch quests which feel a lot like padding just to give you something to do. Hopefully it picks up a bit when the rest of the story episodes are released. Overall there's definitely a certain kind of person who could get a lot of enjoyment out of this game but for me it feels seriously lacking in features.

Summary
+ Great atmosphere
+ Fairly unique concept and take on the survival genre
- Repetitive, tedious gameplay
- Some questionable design choices