Nylige anmeldelser av ManPac

Cool as

ADVENTURE AWAITS!

Crashes every time you try to upgrade a dinosaur.

The most disappointing party for me is that I've played more immersive city management games that WEREN'T in first person. This game does just enough of everything to feel feature-complete but it lacks so much magic. I don't feel connected to my villagers, I don't feel connected to my village, and I don't feel connected to the world.

The NPCs have zero dynamism, merely expressing their needs through dialogie and UI until they drop below an arbitrary threshold and simply walk away. Not even a hint of uncooperativeness until they leave. They don't actually hunt, they don't actually chop down trees, the former is merely an ambient animation and the latter isn't even depicted. It's trying to be a boots-on-the-ground village builder but I'm not wearing the same boots as the characters I'm walking with? The player character is an all-powerful being compared to the one-track minds of the games inhabitants. I can chop down trees, I can hunt, but not them. It just makes me feel like I'm playing Minecraft.

The village building process is fine. It's not really pushing the envelope when it comes to the actual method you construct your base but the customisation is so off in so many ways. There's a beautiful array of decorations to use but they don't contribute to villager happiness or anything that would incentivise making your village actually nice to look at instead of perfectly gridded buildings with no aesthetic value. The buildings are always the same shape and size, so all you can decide is which walls will be windows and where you would like your singular door per building to go. Any paths you draw along the terrain will have no affect on the shape or form of the terrain. You're just painting a texture over it. There are no options to smooth out or raise up terrain to depict interesting or realistic village formations, so if your main road happens to go over the bumpiest part of the map well that's just how your village looks now.

The world just feels empty. Thankfully not lifeless as there are plenty of animal species littering the landscape and they are dynamic enough that they make for interesting hunts and dangerous threats. the game is also quite gorgeous at times with certain views or the way the light will break through a maple tree. If you aren't in one of the world's villages or your own, you're in the wild which feels the same everywhere in every part of the map. The appearance of bandits is nice and I got a good spook from them because for once I wasn't the only human in-game with their own initiative. But alas, it's one of the few games I felt like I had to resort to fast travel because I couldn't suffer the tedium of feeling zero adventure leaving the safety of village walls.

I believe this game could become something worth more of my time in the future. The devs are clearly hard workers and passionate, but it just doesn't feel like this game is doing any one thing well enough that I wouldn't have more fun engaging with in similar titles. I would leave a positive review out of good-faith but I don't feel the 90% positive review score the game currently has accurately reflects the consistent quality of the game.

Release an update or DLC, damn it. This is one of my all-time favourite games and I would steal candy from a baby to play more of it.

This game is incredible. Not only is it absolutely gorgeous in both graphical fidelity and animation quality, but the shooting feels super responsive and the progression system felt extremely well balanced. On top of all of that, it absolutely nails the horror elements. The soundtrack itself is also a stand out example of something that doesn't ask for attention but enhances the atmosphere tenfold. I am passionately in love with this game!

It does exactly what it says on the tin.

While the main draw of the game (the vehicle combat) is impressive and a lot of fun, the means of experiencing it in the game is totally bogged down by some of the industries worst open-world filler habits. The story and overall writing was as bare bones and typical as it could get, and also dips into so many predictable tropes that it almost compromises the bleak tone it otherwise successfully creates. I spent my first 50 hours completing as many side objectives as possible and I was disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that this would make up the majority of my hours, as the rest of the story only took a few more hours to complete. My one major design gripe with the game is how the game's open world becomes less chaotic and dangerous as you progress. The story opens with setup for this as Max is searching for "the plains of silence" but my god, you don't need to be a genius to understand why this makes for a terrible setting for a Mad Max video game. This is the same reason why some of the game's more exciting action sequences rely on narrative-driven set pieces to excite you enough to finish the game. The on-food combat is the tried-and-true Batman: Arkham formula and has just enough depth and cinematic quality to make it fun but not quite enough to stimulate my imagination. A small nitpick of mine is the inconsistency with the game's setting: all the nameless npc's, Max, and a pair of other characters have aussie accents and the game makes references to Australia but the majority of the minor characters all have american accents and the game also alludes to it being set in the US.

In summary:
Game's overall draw is the good on-foot combat and great vehicle combat but the mediocre narrative, lazy world-building, and absolutely arbitrary grind for completing the open world means all this game is good for is a handful of hours experimenting and soaking in the tone before switching it off and never playing it again. Might be worth some dedication if you snag it on sale.

It has a lot of potential!
The good stuff: visuals, level design, music, enemy design. weapon variety, puzzles.
Room for improvement: combat depth, movement, story, hitboxes.

I had originally written a more expanded review but then the steam page refreshed and it was wipes so I will re-review the game at a later date :)

My film buff friends would love this.