Recent reviews by Angry Trash

You have no agency in this game between saves, until they fix that, it's not worth any amount of money because the game ultimately plays itself.

Upon reloading the morning after release, I saw all of my rides were their default color, default name, 3x the price they originally were (which is higher than the default it recommended at creation too). You cannot select impossification reliably, if you select number 4 on the manual list, it'll pick 2 or 3 or 7. All staff costumes were reset to default. Unlocked modules were changed to different ones. Names will glitch out and EVERYTHING (people, buildings, rides, trash cans) will become something like "1 Group -449 objects". These are just the changes I noticed within ten minutes of launching again, because it was such an absolute migraine to fix I shut the game down entirely.

I quit the game without saving after my 12th accident in 30 cycles. It's arbitrary, completely unpreventable, and a mechanic which forces a death spiral (which this game has several of, such as the ability to construct new space ships and some kind of quantum slip drive but not be permanently able to repair your ship causing increasing bleed rates each chapter).

Let me give you some quick math. Chapter 1 started, for me, with 199 people. Each accident loses you between 2-5 workers on average, sometimes they die but that doesn't truly matter because you'll wish the ones who didn't did anyways. Accidents can, and do, trigger when you have : No shortage of materials, an abundance of workers meaning optimal working conditions, a nearly perfect hull, no power difficulties. An accident triggers, on average, every 1.5 cycles. Accidents often are explosive, which means they will damage the surrounding buildings, if you build optimally this means two/three accidents per major malfunction, so 4/6-10/15 losses. So let's take the most conservative average, 12 * 5 = 60 that is 30% of my workforce gone. Consider then, that it takes 8-15 cycles for someone to heal from an accident, and each worker you're short of your optimal workload increases the risk and severity of accidents. Hospitals, naturally, need doctors and with 3 accidents filling up a single hospital, you increase your worker shortage by another 20%. Well golly gee, that means that I literally cannot avoid dying.

This needs to be fixed it is absolutely insane and makes the game so abhorrently tedious and arbitrary I regret having made it over the 2 hour threshold.

It's a nice management game, even if your guests are so absolutely pants on head that they'll toss a soda cup on the floor then complain the aquarium is dirty rather than walk an additional step to the trashcan. A few of the interactions are a little disappointing (primarily sea horses and jelly fish not being allowed into aquariums with soft corals and gorgonians when irl numerous species of both interact with them) but the devs respond positively to the feedback and I do have some optimism that a better implementation may happen eventually.

The Tank mission shouldn't have passed QA, it's got people complaining about it from release on lists going miles long.

Edit : Updated, after 32 tries on that mission, which is literally how many it took me to beat it by getting lucky with the AI not knowing how to handle a suicide ram into them when they spawned. Later in the mission two half tracks attack you while defending a position. You have a rocket launcher. You can blow up the first, but if you hit the second when it parks (it is invincible while driving unlike the first one) you fail for committing friendly fire. This should obviously not happen, as the Germans aren't your friend, and this is very easy to replicate which indicates very little testing of this chapter.

In the next chapter, there's a stealth achievement. I made it through the entire area undetected.. only for the AI teammate to bust out of the bunker and shoot one man which triggered his alert and meant I needed to redo THE ENTIRE MISSION to get the achievement because his spawning triggers a checkpoint.

Mission after that? You pilot a plane. But uh oh if you have to restart for some reason from the checkpoint you literally can't control it and keep spiraling to your death at low altitude.

The game presents itself as bearing moral problems. The issue is that many of its problems aren't. It's not even the classic moral philosophy issue of "well what if you choose wrong because you don't know all of the facts" - the questions that are most blatantly wrong and judgmental are ones where we know the facts clearly and in some cases the developer also manages to choose an option that NEVER EXISTED.

The two earliest examples come in the form of the Dead Dog and the Vaccine Mandate.

In the Dead Dog, you are given two options : "Do you ignore the sick dog and leave it to die, miserable, cold, and alone" OR "Kill the dog yourself to spare any suffering." Yet oddly the Developer credits themselves as having chosen to save the dog. That's not how absolutes work. In this choice system, we know, absolutely, for 100% certain that both of these outcomes end in death for the dog. Otherwise it would be "You see a sickly looking dog on the track, you know no trains will come today, do you ignore it or kill it?" By expanding the information, you guarantee to the player that there is no outcome in which the dog lives or can be saved.

In the Vaccine Mandate, you are told that the vaccine with leave 20% of the children MUCH sicker than the virus would ever make them. From this we immediately know that the virus doesn't kill or cripple most people infected with it, let alone half. You can't get MUCH sicker than dead or having loss of organ/limb.. But then we are antivaxxers and directly responsible for the children getting sick from a virus we know clearly isn't that serious.

These aren't moral questions, and they fail to even be virtue signalling. These are bait and switches.

Update 3: the offline mode doesn’t work and thinks you’re on first launch even with 10+ hours in game. That means this is always online, in 2022 you can’t play a single player action rpg without internet. Until they fix this don’t even humor buying it.

I'm going to preface this with a rebuttal to the people who's common response to a negative review is "You're still playing it so you must like it", I'm playing it because I need to justify having spent my money in some capacity even if it is an abysmal mistake I've made.

This game just feels bad, it looks bad, it plays bad. It is worse in pretty much all aspects to its predecessor.

Gameplay :
Stealth doesn't work most of the time, even if you have no lights on and are creep crouching behind zombies they look over their shoulders constantly like they're an old lady clutching their purse walking to their car in a Walmart parking lot at 9pm. Hiding spots don't work, because when you break line of sight during a pursuit, zombies still know where you are. I spent 7 minutes with a zombie pinwheeling on top of a vent about twelve yards away from where I entered it because it could clip through the metal and see me the entire time I was crawling despite the entirety of the vent being a hiding spot and it having no line of sight on me after I entered. Takedowns don't work, because if you are a lower level than your opponent (which you can only know if you keep the gamey healthbars on as they also have the level indicator on them) you don't do anything to them, get shoved off, and if they're a zombie they instantly enter a grapple on you for 40-80 health damage.

Combat is atrocious. 7/10 times I don't get a perfect block despite not changing my timing, I get the CLANG of a block, but take damage even before the swing is completed. Their hits stagger you, but yours don't do the same. Their blocks stagger you, but yours don't do the same. It is very difficult to find decent weapons that are able to be modified unless you buy them, I have only found two in my 11 hours in this game, everything else I own is a throw away white weapon. It is just a button mashing game, and you move slower than most things. Not to mention, once the sun goes up, certain infected retain their combat abilities but become invincible. I had a howler constantly screaming at me when the sun came up because I tried to kill it in the daylight. Even when I successfully parry I don't get to vault kick because I just jump over a guy, even when I look at the next enemy and press the kick button I just land behind my vault target and then proceed to get a pipe across the back of my skull for my troubles. They took away the ability to throw your weapons, and to repair them (though they do get some durability back when you modify them) which was frankly just unnecessary of them because throwing weapons was a great way to buy yourself a distraction or to get one last hurrah out of a nearly broken weapon.

I also really dislike the fact that there are only two guns in game, not really because it impacts the gameplay (in DL1 you didn't get guns until a fair bit into the game, I'm not far enough to feel it's warranted though a ranged weapon is desperately desired with how wonky melee is), but because the reasoning is just so atrocious. A guy went crazy in the city, started shooting people, this happened I think 7-9 years before the game start, so the military (which no longer exists) decided to take every single gun and round of ammunition in the city and lock them up and throw away the key.. Problem is, improvised guns are exceptionally easy to make, people seem to think you can only use a gun if it is military or commercial spec but it's not. A steel pipe and end cap, a handful of screws, and charcoal dust plus innocent house cleaner and you have a single "clear every zombie about to grab me so I can run to safety" card. Even if they made these a single use, limited carry at one time option it would be worlds better than what we have. Hell, craftsmasters exist in lore to research new ways to fight the zombies and yet everyone forgot rudimentary chemistry and crafting? It's an insult to player intelligence at its very best take. Not to mention, your character was a pilgrim, someone who traveled the country outside of the military controlled city and literally exists as an easy "please smuggle pistol and boolet into this place danke" card.

Movement is fairly hit or miss, I acknowledge that a lot of stuff is unlocked later on, but the fact that you're always sprinting and can't walk makes it seem like it's weirdly two dimensional. It's worse than DL1, but better than modern Assassin's Creed games.

Update : The "Minigames"/Challenges are broken too, such as Ultimate Fury Cricket, which doesn't appropriately track how many zombies you ring out so it's proven literally impossible for me to even get the WORST time as most of the zombies I knock out of the ring don't count as having been knocked out of the ring.

Update 2 : Things are worse the more I play. You can't turn off aim assist, so my knives curve like I'm the batman because the game thinks i prioritize hitting a zombie in the back of the head for a measly 10 damage versus hitting a propane tank for 40-60 damage. I got killed because you don't stagger enemies proportional to how they stagger you, so the air drop attack animation doesn't finish until you already get hit even if it's by the biggest slowest special infected.

Most of the issues I have with this can be patched out, they are glaring things (Like voice lines skipping their last three words, immediately progressing to the next sentence, or the fact that keybinding hardly works and some actions are hardbound to keys), and if they were patched out I would recommend this game if it was on sale because then it would just be sort of the generic grey action RPG we have become accustom to as a consumer base.

I really want to like this, but like other people in the forums the movement system (falling especially) is just heinously unforgiving. When plenty of your achievements involve not dying (and don't even pop properly when you do them), and you have finite lives for the player, you owe it to the player to have a decent movement system and a protagonist who's bones aren't made of toothpicks under the same tension as the Russia-Ukraine border.

I died five times on the sprint jump part of the tutorial, mechanically nothing was different in timing for when I actually pressed to jump versus my successful attempts. It was just a crapshoot, and I end up bypassing it every time now with the grappling hook which you're not supposed to learn about for another few sprints. Sometimes when you jump OFF of your rope you dead drop, and don't actually jump, mostly this happens because of how the game handles aiming/turning your character around. I had my feet touching a ledge and then died because the game decided Murphy was suddenly looking 180 degrees behind him and so his feet were no longer on solid ground.

The slightest bit of horizontal velocity turns a drop not even half your height into a lethal fall, when a jump your height is already usually fatal in game (There's the argument about combat equipment shattering your knees when you drop 3ft, it's a dumb argument for the early game as you're a scout who's carrying exactly three bandages, a leather thong, a grappling gun, and a pistol with four magazines.)

If you're going to buy it before they fix the motion system to maybe at least do fall damage instead of instantly gib you and then run to your house and smack your wife and kids around with what was once probably your kidney but is now indistinguishable from Fancy Feast, I'd recommend that you play on easy mode where death doesn't matter and just begrudgingly accept like me that even if you do everything right you still probably won't get achievements when you should.

Edit : The reason it shows edited is because steam has a quirky little issue posting reviews past an arbitrary length for some store pages. Had to post a sentence then paste the real review.

I played the demo when it was originally available. I really enjoyed it, and was looking forward to this game. Fast forward to the actual release though, and when it starts me on chapter 2 its original tutorial style is completely gone and it doesn't even quarter-introduce a new concept to you before telling you to deal with it on your own without any teaching or additional input.

It's a shame that the rest of the game is so inaccessible compared to the demo, but until they decide to retroactively go back and fix how they introduce concepts past chapter 1 I would save your money, at least until the players post more information and guides.

I kind of like this game, it has a few horrible bugs that make it a strain to play but I would still have recommended it if it wasn't for the fact that the people who manage the bug report aspect of Frontier's support have proven malicious or just painfully incompetent and not giving a ♥♥♥♥ about valid complaints - including closing a report as a duplicate for a literal 1.2% similarity to another report.

I really recommend this game, for nostalgic purposes it is my favorite RPG series of all time. That said, I would only recommend its DLC if you want to support the developer, as people have pointed out that a lot of it is disjointed and missing some crucial secrets that are what they expected from it.

I first played Geneforge 1 and Geneforge 2 as demos on the WildTangent Games launcher during Hurricane Ike and they were some of my first RPGs. If you're a fan of classic isometric RPGs they still hold up, and Mutagen has some quality of life improvements such as removing encumbrance from your backpack and offering a junk bag for you to mark excess loot for sale. It also removed the "Too dumb to control" feature for creations, which might be divisive since some people found the inefficient but also effortless ability to just send out a pack of wild fire breathing raptors to be much easier on them than deliberate controlled moves in combat. It's conceptually unique, as well. You play as a(n) (apprentice) Shaper, part of a magic sect that controls the world and has the power to mold life itself from base ingredients in a wide array of forms and purposes, who ends up stranded on an island that was secretly quarantined for being too much for these Lifeshapers who consider themselves Gods to handle.

I don't like that they took away our ability to switch our robe colors though, I miss being blue.