Category Archives: Impressions
Impressions: Vintage Story
Vintage Story is a ponderous, “realistic” survival crafting sandbox in the style of Minecraft. Pretty much the exact style of Minecraft, in fact, although it supposedly has a different codebase that allows it to do some interesting things. How interesting those things are will greatly depend on how slow and methodical you like your gaming.
As with most survival games, you start out with just the clothes on your back. From there, you collect flint or some other hard rock to make tools. In Vintage Story though, you literally make the tools: you place the flint down on the ground, and use another piece of flint to “knapp” (e.g. chip) the other piece according to a voxel pattern. Combine the knife head (etc) with a stick in your Minecraft menu and voila, a flint knife. This will allow you to collect things like reeds to be turned into baskets or dry grass to help start a fire. You can’t just punch everything to get the proper resources here.
At this point, Vintage Story doubles-down on the intentionality. Flint tools are fine, but you really need clay to get to the next stage of development. Search far and wide for clay deposits, dig up a bunch, and then place some on the ground. You now have the option to create various clay vessels, like bowls, cooking pots, storage vessels, jugs, and so on. Crucially, you will also need tool molds, such as for a pickaxe and hammer. All of these things have to be sculpted, voxel-by-voxel, which is equal parts tedious and zen. Once completed, congratulations… you have still have raw, wet clay. Now you need to dig a hole, fill with dry grass, sticks, and firewood, light it on fire, and then wait 24ish hours for the pieces to harden. Oh, and make sure it’s covered from the rain and also away from flammable material.
Next comes copper. While traveling the overworld, you may come across a few pieces of copper nuggets on the surface. You can collect these – and mark your map since there is ore underground there – but will likely have to pan sand/gravel for additional nuggets. Once you have ~40 copper nuggets, you can begin the smelting process. Which requires charcoal, because firewood cannot hit the necessary temperature. Making charcoal involves digging holes, filling it to the brim with firewood, building a fire on top of that, lighting it, and then covering the whole thing up. A day later, you have charcoal. Go back and heat up the nuggets in a (fired) clay crucible, and using some wooden tongs – can’t have molten copper in your bare hands, of course – pour the copper into the (fired) clay tool molds… and wait. Once it cools, you have a copper pickaxe.
And now, finally, you can dig rocks!
I typed all that out because that is the type of game Vintage Story is. Mostly. Cooked food spoils at a reduced rate inside a clay Storage Vessel, and at an even further reduced rate in a cellar, and at an even more reduced rate if the food itself is stored in a clay Crock Pot sealed with animal fat. Neat. Meanwhile, you can construct your house and cellar by punching dirt blocks and placing them ala vanilla Minecraft. Making flint knives and other tools is a cool process, but the blade and handle are just magically connected somehow. I bring this up because the process of making a bow meanwhile requires twine, made of flax fiber, collected from flax (or looted from Drifters). Getting the first “tier” of armor above basically nothing requires Resin, which only comes from Pine trees at world creation, and only at an extremely limited chance. Like… why? We can hold molten copper in wooden tongs but can’t get some pine resin from pine trees?
This sort of strained duality extends elsewhere. Wolves and bears are dangerous and will kill you in 1-2 hits. You can avoid them though by using a nerdpole, e.g. quickly placing blocks underneath yourself while jumping. Ore deposits are “realistic” in that they follow veins in specific sort of shapes. Getting to them can be sped up by either digging straight down and nerdpoling your way out, or creating an infinite waterfall via bucket and swimming straight up like in Minecraft. Crops take ages to grow – sometimes more than 1-2 in-game months – but animals generally spawn everywhere. Pemmican doesn’t exist, and not every animal has fat. And so on.
Those design choices are one thing, but the one that’s a bit more unforgivable (IMO) is the back-loading of content. The “real” game doesn’t really start until you can make wooden boards, which requires a copper saw, which requires a copper anvil, which requires enough copper nuggets gained from mining with the copper pickaxe. How do you get copper nuggets to make a copper pickaxe you ask? Panning sand, basically. Anyway, wood boards give you a ton of building and storage options, but the big ones are buckets and barrels, which then allow you to process things into leather, pickle food, and basically… everything. I understand that perhaps the intention was a sort of “congratulations on surviving until the Copper Age!” but that doesn’t mean the early game should be less interesting.
Vintage Story also suffers in the “now what” department. Surviving the first winter with limited resources is a massive struggle. After that? Farms will provide all your caloric needs rather easily. You can eventually craft some windmills and other mechanical tools to automate some tasks too. There are caves to explore and Drifters to fight and teleporter devices that can send you to far distance places. But… that’s it. I’m not saying other survival games do not have a similar endgame issue – there’s no “point” to 7 Days to Die or ARK – but the crucial difference is that playing these other games is, well, fun. They have good moment-to-moment gameplay, they have character progression mechanics that make you want to reach the next level, and so on.
That sort of thing is missing here. Once I finally got my Copper pickaxe and then realized how difficult it was going to be to find copper nodes, I was basically done. Plus, you know, if you lose your Copper Pickaxe somewhere (either by dying in a deep hole or via durability) you have to literally start all over.
Having said all that, Vintage Story is definitely a novel approach to the more traditional survival crafting genre. It is not in early access, still gets beefy updates, and was built from the ground up for mods. Indeed, there are supposedly a lot of mods out there that tackle many of the fundamental issues that I have brought up. I may end up rolling a new world with some of these mods installed and see if that smooths out the experience and make it more interesting.
Which, for the record, it was for a time. Just not enough. For now.
Impressions: Abiotic Factor
Short version: Highly impressive survival crafting game in Early Access.
The overall vibe Abiotic Factor has going for it is the original Half-Life (complete with polygon counts from 1998) from the perspective of the scientists. You play as a new recruit to a secret Australian (?) underground laboratory doing SCIENCE… on things from another dimension. Something happens literally during your first day of orientation, the base goes on lockdown, and you are basically on your own to escape.
One thing I loved immediately was the novelty of the survival experience. Playing this game reminded me of playing Subnautica for the first time when none of my “punch trees” experience applied. Sure, the wooden crates give wood, but you’re mostly in an office setting at first, and wood isn’t even really what you need to craft the basic items. You might not think slinking through cubicles, snatching keyboards and breaking monitors for their sweet, sweet coils while hiding from alien monsters would be fun… or maybe you would. Because it is. There was some primal pillow fort energy when I set up my base in the gym area, hiding in terror from the rampaging night bots, and then making forays into the break rooms for literal supplies – including buying food from the vending machines to tide me over! – while getting my in-game bearings.
Are there some rough edges? Sure. One of those edges is, in fact, somewhat systemic: being a survival crafting game at all in a relatively linear, plot-driven narrative. While you can possibly spend in-game weeks in the first area, the fact of the matter is that you need to specifically craft X using resources from Y to open the next area Z. Once in that new area, you will encounter new obstacles, new crafting material, and new things to take into account, which is good. What wasn’t immediately clear to me though is that I should have packed up everything I built in the first zone and carted it with me rather than starting from scratch in the new zone. It certainly feels lame leaving an upgraded workbench that can auto-heal and warm you by proximity and going somewhere with a dearth of the more basic building materials. It especially felt super lame when I got locked into an extended journey sequence that resulted in my entire plant farm dying from lack of water while I was gone. So much for utilizing the more advanced cooking options, eh?
Aside from those sour grapes though, Abiotic Factor nevertheless gets high marks from me. While most workbenches require power and thus need to be located near power outlets, everything else can be placed just about anywhere. Which includes literal ramps and platforms that allow you to skip certain areas entirely. Now, whether you actually want to skip any opportunity to hoard bundles of pens, deconstructed file cabinets, and other debris is up to you. Personally, I tend to steal everything not nailed down and sometimes even that stuff too. You just never know what may come in handy.
What I do know is that I liked Abiotic Factor enough to stop playing, so the devs can finish cooking.
Impressions: Icarus
TL;DR: Empty wildlife murder simulator.
To understand what Icarus is all about, you need to know what it was about. At release, Icarus was intended to be a sort of survival roguelike, where you are dropped off at a location, fulfill a mission before the timer expired, and then bailed on the world (including anything you built) within a few days. In fact, it was originally so hardcore that if the timer expired before you left – and it counted down even with the game turned off! – your character would straight-up be deleted. Successful missions granted you a currency that could be used to both research and then later buy items that you could then bring with you planetside in the future. For example, instead of starting at zero every time, you could start with an upgraded spacesuit, a backpack with bonuses, weapons, etc.
As you may imagine, that novel approach didn’t sit well with many people. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine a worse genre mashup… although I suppose 7 Days to Die somewhat pulls it off (e.g. eventually enemies get too tough). But generally, the beginning stages of punching trees is the least interesting part of survival games, and losing progress is the worst. Icarus had both. The developers suddenly had to pivot, and so they eventually released a more traditional open-world survival mode.
The pivot has taken some time, although the developers have sustained a weekly update schedule for over two years now, which is impressive. Or would be, if the game was fun or interesting at all.
The fundamental issue with Icarus is that there isn’t much going on. There is a relatively solid survival crafting framework in place, with XP and levels and recipe unlocks and talent points and such. The world is gorgeous and thick with trees, bushes, rocks. There is even a semi-voxel thing going, with fallen trees being satisfyingly split into logs, and ore/rock nodes deforming exactly where you are hitting them. All of which will sustain genre fans for a few hours past the refund window.
But after a while, you start to realize what you have in Icarus is basically the window dressing of other games. A forest with deer, rabbits, wolves, goats, moas, bears? A desert with hyenas and scorpions? Snow biome with polar bears and mammoths? Other titles like 7 Days to Die, The Forest, ARK, etc, have those things… aaaaand the rest of the game game. Without the parameters (and timers) of Missions, the Open World aspect falls flat. Technically, you can craft a radio that opens up both short and longer-form Missions even in the Open World, but you still run into the issue of “why.”
“Why do anything at all in any game, eh?” Because shooting zombies and looting things is fun? Because delving into caves and uncovering mysteries while running from mutants is (supposedly) fun? Because dinosaurs are fun? With Icarus, what you see is literally what you get. Kill thousands of animals to farm XP and unlock more crafting benches so you can kill more animals efficiently. Or build a quaint little abode in the woods. Which is fine for the people that want to do that, but you can also do that in (cheaper!) games that have more meat than potatoes.
In an effort to be totally fair, I did go ahead and run a few Missions, e.g. the way the game was designed to be played, once the open-world lost its luster. And… it was pretty much as bad as it seemed. After the tutorial one, the next Mission was to collect up meat and vegetables into two different drop pods. Cool. What they neglected to mention was the fact it was going to be like 150 Pumpkins, 200 Carrots, and so on. The only possible way of gathering that much was going to be setting up a farm, and then hanging out for a while. Which I did. Next was the meat, which was something absurd like 300 meat, 400 hide, and 300 fur or whatever. I got about halfway through murdering literally every single mammal that moved before the tedium overtook me and I uninstalled.
Having said all that… is there anything good going on in Icarus? Sure. Although it is a limiting factor, the existence of oxygen as a necessary meter to watch gave texture to the survival experience. It helps that Oxite Ore is in most places, so you aren’t as constrained as in, say, Breathedge. The storms in Icarus are also interesting. Staying outside in one fills up an Exposure meter that begins hurting you when full, and the storms themselves do damage to most buildings. Now, you usually just spend the storm inside your base running around and smack-repairing things with a hammer, but it elevated “weather” from a pure, ambiance detail in most games to one that you must account for. And you do have to account for it: your walls will collapse if they take too much damage from the weather or anything else.
That’s about it, though. Part of me feels bad for the devs since they likely had to scrap a lot of their post-release plans when they pivoted to a more traditional open-world structure. But then I look at how much they are charging for the game + DLCs in its current state and those feeling go away.
Impressions: Once Human
Once Human is an open-world survival crafting MMO whose Beta details I mostly received filtered through the amusing lens of Bhagpuss. Based on those posts, I wishlisted the game and promptly forgot all about it. Then Tuesday came along and now its officially released. I played for almost six hours straight on that first evening, and not because it was, as my 5-year old terms it, a “stay day.”
Nor, incidentally, because the game necessarily deserves it.
Let’s start with the Pros, I guess. First, the game is free to play and not obnoxious about it. By that I mean I did not seem to get prompted to buy the Battle Pass every time I opened a menu, or had a red exclamation mark on my UI until I opened the shop, or the myriad of similar design disasters. Indeed, there is a Wish lottery mechanic (for cosmetics) somewhere in the game, but I was not actually able to find it. Maybe it unlocks later? I found a few vendors who require obscure currencies for vague items, but near as I can tell, none of them were extra bag slots, carrying capacity, or the like.
Second, Once Human does seem to support a rather robust survival crafting experience. You are encouraged to build a base immediately once out of the tutorial, and you can do so almost anywhere not already occupied by other players and/or the pre-existing set pieces. I also really appreciated the ability to go into “flight” mode when building, rather than having to awkwardly maneuver your character every which way. Collecting resources from trees/ore nodes is not too onerous at this early point, and you are overall encouraged to revisit points of interest to collect junk items that you then break down into smaller components to craft new items.
Then it struck me: Once Human is basically Asian Fallout 76.
Viewed from that lens, the veneer started to peel. Is the base-building better than Fallout 76? Absolutely not. Crafting? No. Quests? Nope. Environmental storytelling? Nonexistent thus far. The feeling of collecting and hoarding resources? Not even close. Both are post-apocalyptic, both have cryptids, and Sanity is basically Radiation – both reduce your maximum HP until healed and, hilariously, grant you special abilities if you accumulate too much (Whim vs Mutation).
I originally didn’t want to complain about the Once Human combat system in these early stages – tutorials going to tutorial – but it’s… trivial. Every creature died to 2-3 hits with a torch, and having access to guns makes it even more ridiculous. Presumably mobs will sponge more bullets later on, and there is a dodge-roll button, but the fact that Once Human will be releasing on mobile phones in two months does not inspire confidence. The boss (or mini-boss?) fights were more interesting, and seem to be where the devs spent most of their imagination capital. Not saying that Fallout 76’s combat system is groundbreaking or anything, but it nevertheless has a heft to it even early on that is definitely lacking in Once Human.
Again, it’s possible this is all a bit unfair this early in the experience. The map looks huge, they give you a motorcycle within the first few quests, the Deviation (pet-ish) mechanic seems akin to Pals from Palworld, which could be interesting. The notion of Seasonal world resets and ever-changing “scenarios” is fairly unique in the survival space, and could go a long way in keeping the experience fresh. Time will tell.
Time will also tell if I don’t just end up reinstalling Fallout 76 and playing that instead.
Impressions: Keplerth
Not going to lie, the name “Keplerth” was both intriguing and ultimately accurate.
Keplerth is a top-down survival crafting game reminiscent of Terraria, with art assets straight stolen from RimWorld. Other reviews mention this as being a post-apocalypse knock-off of Necesse, if you know of that one. You will punch trees, create crafting benches, craft gear, and then tackle bosses to unlock the next tier of equipment, resources, and mobs. Rinse and repeat.
There are some interesting innovations to the formula though. For example, there is no XP here. Instead, you unlock new genes based on special resources that drop from basically everything in the game, e.g. plants, mobs, minerals, etc. The genes start simple, with stuff like +5% Evasion or +10% Attack Speed. Towards the beginning of the game, you have plenty of room to “equip” every gene you unlock; later on, you have to choose amongst them and their potential synergies.
I also appreciated how equipment bonuses work. Essentially, each piece of gear has a random set bonus and a random set bonus score (+0 through +3). So, the leg armor you craft might have bonuses to +Defense or +Pet Attack instead of the +Melee you were looking for. And even if it does have +Melee, the final set bonus may only trigger when you have 7/7 equipped and the piece you rolled grants +0. While random can be frustrating sometimes, many survival games are kind of rote in that Iron armor is Iron armor, and thus you only need 22 Iron ingots total to kit yourself out on that tier. This at least means you need to collect a buffer amount of resources. Later on, you get the ability to spend other resources to “reroll” the tier bonuses, so it is not too frustrating for long.
Where Keplerth struggles is… kinda everywhere else.
A lot of the mechanics feel half-baked. One of the early tutorial quests involves you attracting other survivors to your base with a communications tower. What the game doesn’t tell you is that the survivors… don’t really do anything. There is an entire elaborate construction station to create fancy furniture, but ultimately the survivors need 1 (one) recreation item (hot tub) and their heart meter will eventually fill and you click on them for money. That’s it. They do not defend your base, work the fields, or anything. You can also have farm animals like cows, chicken, horses, etc, and they will reproduce asexually as soon as their food meter hits 100%. Cooked food does require a variety of meat and plants for pretty useful buffs, so there is a point to all this, but it doesn’t always make that much sense. Like why have Horse Meat in the game when eggs are really the limiting factor for advanced food?
The special material mechanic I praised earlier is also a bit uneven. A lot of it felt natural at the time, as you just pick up all the things and new stuff seemed to unlock every 5 minutes or so. Eventually though, once your gene grid fills up and you start needing to examine what’s left, you start to realize that 5-6 of the missing genes require Thorns or Apples or some early-game stuff. Luckily the grind isn’t too bad since you can chop most everything down and replant it near your base to more quickly get additional chances when harvesting it – as opposed to having to wander around for more natural-occurring spawns – but the amount of things tagged to Thorns specifically is a bit odd.
What kind of broke the game for me though was one of the mid-tier boss drop weapons. Up to that point, you may have some melee weapons, bow and arrows, some early guns, and so on. Even with guns, there were some trade-offs with damage versus shooting speed. Then you get a 100% drop of an energy beam gun that deals constant damage with zero ammo. While it technically is out-classed in DPS later on, the utility of being able to trigger knockback, certain genes (“each hit adds X effect”), and the lack of ammo makes everything else feel dumb to use in comparison.
Later bosses also get into SHMUP/bullet-hell territory, which forces you to turtle up with your genes and equipment, which makes the fight last ages because you are no longer specced for damage.
Having said all that, I did end up playing the game for ~25 hours or so, somewhat obsessively. Keplerth definitely hit a stride for me after about the 2nd boss, once you unlocked the ability to tame battle pets, get some better weapons, better genes, and start finding other human settlements to spend money at. It is unfortunate how that petered out in the endgame, but what else can you do?
Play something else, I guess.
V Rising: All Done
I’m done with V Rising after about 56 hours.
I technically did not “beat” the game, but I am done. All bosses have been defeated aside from the last two: Adam and Dracula. I have maxed my gear and spells, acquired a Legendary weapon, and was otherwise facing down 5-6 additional hours of “gitting gud” before seeing… I don’t think there’s even credits screen here. There have been tough bosses leading up to this point, but these last two have multiple phases and Adam even requires the crafting of a special consumable to even access him for an hour. I think I could eventually take down Adam by investing in crafting a different endgame weapon, or swapping out spells during a fight transition, but honestly fuck that.
Overall, I stand by my earlier assessment of the game, e.g. it’s OK. I did develop a deeper appreciation of the visuals though and the overall art direction. Running around the map during daytime became an interesting game unto itself, as you tried collecting resources or fighting mobs only to have the shading tree collapse from an errand attack. The sound that accompanied increasing exposure to sunlight was also very satisfying (if not deadly). The moment-to-moment gameplay was satisfying.
What is less satisfying is the grind on the macro level. As stated before, there is no XP here, and mobs themselves rarely drop anything of value, so there’s really no point to combat. The whole vampire fantasy takes a bit of a hit when you rush from house to house rummaging through dressers for bits of cloth and paper. A lot of that has to do with some of the absurd recipes.
Here is an example of what I’m taking about. I need Power Cores to craft an item. Crafting them requires 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries for 2 Power Cores. I’m just going to ignore the Charged Batteries, because you basically just farm Depleted Batteries from certain enemies and then have to juice them up out in the world. The Radium Bars on the other hand… oh boy.
- Power Core x2 = 18 Radium Bars + 9 Charged Batteries
- Radium Bars x4 = 135 Tech Scrap + 9 Sulfur + 3 Sludge-Filled Container
- Tech Scrap = mob drop and/or mining resource
- Sulfur x1 = Sulfur Ore x45
- Sludge-Filled Container x1 = 9 Glass + 9 Mutant Grease + 3 Iron Ingot
- Glass x1 = 45 Quartz
- Mutant Grease = mob drop*
- Iron Ingot x1 = 45 Iron Ore
- Radium Bars x4 = 135 Tech Scrap + 9 Sulfur + 3 Sludge-Filled Container
Again, all of that for two (2) Power Cores. You need 9 Power Cores to craft the highest tier of necklace. So that’s 90 Radium Bars. Which might not have been as bad as it felt if there was a reliable way of farming for Radium Bars directly. Instead, at best you are running around 1-2 areas breaking all the boxes in a desperate hope that you can get 5-10 Radium Bars from drops. That shit immediately reminded me of Warframe, and it feels outrageously dumb for the same reasons. I can sorta maybe get behind mining for ore as a fledgling vampire, but endgame Dracula-esque vampire overlord reduced to breaking open boxes for loot is too much. Farming enemies? Good. Breaking background clutter? Bad.
One thing that made it better/worse were servants. These are people you capture and then turn into vampires, who then can be sent on resource-gathering missions. While it takes a bit to set them up – they have to basically be equipped with the same gear you have, which means grinding some more – they can return fantastic amounts of resources on a real-time basis. To a point. There are several time increments you can dispatch servants on, such as 4h, 8h, 16h, and 24h, but the difference between 8h and 16h is not 2x the loot. Which means you are better off logging on, dispatching servants for 4h or 8h, then logging off. Sometimes they get injured, so they cannot be immediately be sent back out.
So, anyway, there I was, logging onto V Rising three times a day to dispatch servants because I no longer wanted to spend time manually farm resources. And remember, I’m already on +100% global loot. Once I realized that I could only play more of the parts of the game I enjoyed by playing it less… I did so. And then discovered that the other games I was playing instead were actually kind of fun and rewarded me for playing them more. Imagine that!
Arguably, none of this is how V Rising is “meant” to be played in the first place. You’re supposed to be out in the world with your chums, farming some mobs, attacking (or being attacked by) other vampires and stealing their loot, defending your castle from destruction, and so on. Theoretically, it would feel like less of a grind if there was more grind, insofar as you wouldn’t be hitting the endgame wall as early. Or something. But by the time I got there, I kept asking myself: why this over Diablo 4 or whatever? At least there I had something to potentially look forward to from killing all these random mobs.
That’s V Rising. I give it props for melding the survival crafting and ARPG genres in an innovative way, and overall being a very slick game. I can see how other people might play it for hundreds of hours with friends and/or internet strangers. But it doesn’t really deliver a better experience in any individual one of the categories compared to other offerings. And while it does offer most of the trappings of a good vampire fantasy, it shrivels up in the sweaty heat of an unnecessarily grindy endgame.
Impressions: V Rising
V Rising is a hybrid ARPG with survival-crafting elements, sorta like Diablo meets Age of Conan. The approach is pretty novel, but there are some awkward elements that diminish the experience a little bit.
To start, I am playing solo on a “private server,” which is basically just single-player (like with ARK, Conan, etc). However, it is very, very obvious that the game is centered around and balanced on a more public, multiplayer and even PvP experience. For example, by default, you cannot use any of the Waypoint portals if you have ANY resources in your inventory. This option can mercifully be changed in the server settings, but the map itself consists of lanes, specific camps of NPCs, and then dozens and dozens of nondescript castle areas. Which is great for multiplayer servers (options!) and PvP (lanes forces players into channels for encounters), sure. But there really aren’t any exploration aspects, no map secrets, no particular reason to go to out of the way areas. Unless, of course, you were hiding from/laying in wait for other players.
The progression system is also a bit weird. First, there is no XP. Instead, your character’s power is based on Gear Score – you deal/receive damage based on the difference in Gear Score between you and your foe. Increasing one’s Gear Score is achieved by unlocking technology via killing bosses and consuming their “V Blood.” This is not necessarily a linear process though. Killing the boss that gives you a Workbench to craft better weapons results in a huge power boost. Other bosses might just give you ability to turn into spider, or upgrade gems into better ones, or similar. You can tackle the bosses in any order (provided you have a decent Gear Score), but nevertheless there are times when things end up… uneven. For example, I just upgraded all my armor and now find myself ~10 Gear Score higher than like eight bosses I have yet to kill. And none of those bosses will see me improve my Gear Score at all.
Progression-wise, it is also worth mentioning that there is a recipe/research component as well. You can unlock Copper weapons by killing the appropriate boss, but getting the next “Merciless Copper” tier requires the recipe to drop from random loot. Sometimes you can purchase the recipe from a vendor’s random stock, and other times you can randomly learn it by consuming Paper or whatever at a Research Desk. So, random, but with grindable guardrails.
Having said all that, is the game even fun?
I guess. I mean… probably? Sure.
At the time of this writing, I show ~22 hours /played. My solo server has loot bumped up 2x, item stacks 3x, Waypoint access on, Durability and Castle decay basically turned off (25% of normal). I don’t feel “bad” about these custom settings because, just like with my time with ARK, the “normal” settings are absurd nonsense. You can dispatch vampire servants to collect resources for you, but they take real-world hours (2h min, 24h max) to return. Considering you have to grind resources to craft equipment for them to wear so they can… err… help you skip grinding resources, they are of questionable merit. Of course, the servants could help defend your castle from other players trying to break it down and steal your resources, if you were into that sort of thing.
From a strict, gameplay-only sense, V Rising is OK. It’s a kind of Diablo-lite where you can hotswap weapons to mix and match abilities (which share cooldowns), while also tailoring your two spell slots and one ultimate move to your preferences and/or the boss’ tactics. Enemies are fairly straight-forward where I’m at in the game, but the environmental factors add layers to strategy. For example, there are patrols of NPCs not just within each camp, but also throughout the lanes in the world. These patrols can include bosses, sometimes ones way beyond the difficulty of the area too. This brings opportunities as well though, as sometimes patrols can be lured into attacking other factions or even having two bosses attack each other! This makes the world feel a lot more interesting than what I normally see in the genre.
Anyway, I’m still playing V Rising and have every expectation to keep playing for now. Whether that is due to the underlying gameplay being better than I am giving it credit for, or because I am starved for new survival-crafting experiences, I cannot say. What I can say is that if you expect a Diablo experience, you will be disappointed. I definitely spend more time hitting rocks with a mace than I do hitting enemies for loot. But don’t expect something akin to Terraria/Starbound either, because the crafting is prescriptive and environment static. So… yeah. V Rising is its own thing and it’s fun enough for now.
Impressions: Palworld
In case you haven’t heard the news, Palworld is doing gangbusters: 2 million copies sold in the first 24 hours. And now 4 million within three days. It even hit a peak concurrent player rate of 1.2 million players on Steam, which leapfrogged it past Cyberpunk 2077 and into the top 5 of all time.
That is insanely impressive considering it’s also on Game Pass and Epic Game Store, so that’s just a fraction of its total reach.
Palworld’s tagline is “Pokemon with guns,” which is basically just S-Tier marketing and nothing else. The reality is that it’s “ARK with Pokemon”… like completely. Each time you level up, you get Engram Technology points which you spend to unlock specific recipes on specific tiers. You also get Attribute points to level up one of your base stats like carry weight, attack damage, Stamina, etc. Even the building mechanism via the menu wheel feels identical. Which isn’t to say it’s all bad, just that “Pokemon with guns” is exploiting an information gap in the promotional materials that becomes apparent right away in the gameplay.
Having said that, Palworld does indeed make some good innovations in the general ARK formula. The biggest thing you notice right away is that Pals can be set to work in your camp. The work that Pals can complete differs based on their type – Lamballs hang around Ranches to self-groom their wool, Cattivas will work in your Quarries – but most of them can do basic stuff like wandering around and moving supplies to chests. The fact that they do anything at all beyond staying stock-still waiting for an mistaken Follow-All whistle makes Pals miles better than the dinosaurs of ARK.
Unfortunately, I cannot comment much further impression-wise because Palworld started to crash to desktop in 5-minute increments for me. Some Early Access releases are basically soft-launches of fully playable games (Against the Storm, etc), but Palworld is very Early Access in… let’s say, the more traditional sense. It’s been a while since I played something that lacked the ability to Exit the game. Like, you literally have to Alt-F4 to turn the game off.
…unless you are playing the Steam (or non-Game Pass) version. There has already been a patch v0.1.2 release to address various bugs, including some that cause crashes and also a bug that causes ambient sounds to not play. Which is a big deal, as the silence when running around is a bit conspicuous. Also, Steam players get an Exit button on the menu. For the Game Pass plebs like myself, such a patch has to go through Microsoft’s certification process, and who knows when that will go live. For how much Microsoft pays to have Day 1 releases on Game Pass, it’s a pretty big limiting factor for these Early Access titles.
Honestly, it almost makes me want to just buy the game on Steam. Almost.
As it stands, I’m pretty conflicted about playing Palworld further at the moment. The crashes to desktop notwithstanding, there are other elements to the game that are very early Early Access. Your base can be raided by AI, for example, but the two times I got the notification, the enemies spawned down a hill and never moved even when I started attacking them. One of the v0.1.2 patch notes mentions how the arrows recipe went from 1:1 to 3:1, which is significant reduction in terms of resources you have to grind – I have not yet found a Pal that cuts trees, so I’m still manually doing that. While the EA dilemma is something you always have to consider, it’s been a while since I had to weigh it against really basic functionality like this.
Of course, the fact that the scales had to come out at all is indicative that Palworld is on to something. Is it ground-breaking innovation? Nope. I described it as “ARK with Pokemon” before and it still really feels that way. But ARK peaked at less than 250k concurrent players on Steam, ever. Sometimes the derivatives end up being better than the original. Or maybe devs should be selling their games for $30.
Impressions: Dead Island 2
Sometimes I use “Impressions” posts as a sort of “review of a game I stopped playing halfway,” but this one is legit just some first impressions. I’m still playing! For now.
To start, I loved the original Dead Island. Some people were tired of the zombie genre, even 12 years (!!!) ago, but I don’t mind it. What’s the actual difference between the hundreds of mobs you kill being zombies, mutants, nightmares, animals, dinosaurs, or other people? I guess zombie tropes can make some of the experience kind of rote, but at the end of the day what matters is if the gameplay loop is fun for you.
So, Dead Island 2. Thus far, I’m kind of… concerned?
It’s been a while since the first game, but everything in DI2 feels cramped. The location is Bel-Air, so that may be accurate, but this definitely feels a lot more like a corridor shooter minus the guns. There are very specific routes you have to take to get around the map, and most of them run through the same houses and yards each time. Not sure if the later game opens up or not, but I have my doubts.
I also hate the environmental improvisations. Specifically, there are water jugs, cans of gasoline, car batteries, and other similar items strewn about everywhere. You can use these items to engineer environmental traps, such as dumping water in a big puddle, throwing a zombie-attracting item in it, and then starting a generator to electrocute them all. OK, cool.
The problem is that Dead Island 2 takes after the original in that zombies scale to your level such that even a few standard zombies can kill you if you’re not careful. The cramped areas in which you encounter zombies also makes it difficult (or outright dangerous) to run away if you get in over your head, especially once the special zombies start showing up. The end result is that I am thus incentivized to start lugging around car batteries or gas cans wherever I go, so as to have the materials for environmental shenanigans at the ready. There very well may be such items available in each area, but it’s hard to find them while getting swarmed.
So, yeah, instead of focusing on the one thing the series is excellent at – the meaty and satisfying melee game – I am running around one-shotting zombies by throwing car batteries at them. If the devs wanted to lean into traps-based combat ala Horizon: Zero Dawn, then do that. Preferably under a different title.
Another thing that is really irking me is how punished you are for what limited exploration is available. You will find locked shit all over the place, but you will never really know if its even possible to retrieve the key yet. See, keys are held by special zombies, and specific special zombies only start spawning after you encounter the “first” one, typically via Story quest. Before the first boss, for example, no Crusher zombies will spawn; that means the locked military chest you found at the beginning of the zone cannot be unlocked, because the key-holder is a Crusher zombie. But you won’t know that ahead of time, so you might be combing every room for a hidden key that doesn’t exist.
Plus, inexplicably, the devs allows for “skull-level” zombies to roam about. Want to head down an alleyway and explore there instead of following a quest marker? Too bad! Zombies above your level will eat your face off within two hits. I honestly do not ever remember that being a thing in the original game. In principle, I can understand the game sort of “organically” directing players via deadly foes – this happens in Fallout: New Vegas and Dark Souls and many places inbetween – but it just feels bad here. And, of course, contributes to the claustrophobia of an already-limited map.
Also, it’s funny how much the FLESH system was hyped. For the uninitiated:
“This cutting-edge technology has been designed to deliver the most gruesome zombie experience ever seen in a video game. Anatomically correct layers of skin fat and muscle can be ripped away with machete point accuracy to reveal breakable bones and internal organs that are individually destructible,” Dead Island 2’s developers said during the introductory presentation.
“Blunt weapons allow players to shatter skulls, detach eyeballs and even punch holes through the undead. Sharp weapons can dismember heads or limbs at any point and slice torsos clean in half, utilising advanced fluid and soft body physics,” they continued.
(source)
Is the game gory AF? Yep. Does it matter even a little bit? Nope. The specific problem is that there are so many zombies attacking you at any given time that you are unlikely to appreciate the fact that their eyeball is swinging outside its socket in a realistic fashion or whatever. There’s no mechanical benefit either, as even a zombie bereft of both arms will still try to headbutt/bite you. Dead Space this ain’t. I suppose this does contribute to the weight behind melee attacks and how satisfying it feels, but honestly, I would trade all of it in a heartbeat for more ragdoll-esque physics instead. Zombies tripping over each other, falling on couches, bumping into walls, etc, is infinitely more immersive to me than their jaw hanging half off or ribs flying everywhere. I saw that in Fallout 3 death animations in 2008.
If it sounds like I’m pretty down on Dead Island 2 so far, well, you’re not wrong. The game is absolutely gorgeous running at max settings, and there are insane details in every throw-away room that you manage to find. But I’m kinda concerned that perhaps the level of detail added was exactly the cause for how closed up the game is. If I wanted to kill zombies in corridors, I would play Dead Space or Resident Evil or Silent Hill or practically any of the other games in this whole genre. What made the original Dead Island stand out was the open-world nature of the map, at least in the first two Acts. Thus far, the sequel seems to me leaning more into the Dead Rising goofiness minus its openness, which isn’t all that great of a trade.
Here’s to hoping that things improve.
Impressions: My Time at Sandrock
Seeing My Time at Sandrock in the latest Epic Games sale, I decided to snatch it up and get to scratching the itch. The result is about what you would expect: relief… followed by some abrasion.
My Time at Sandrock is a sort of “sequel” to My Time at Portia, continuing the general world progress but in a different area and with new characters. This has so far included the same tonal whiplash where everything is jolly and cartoonish but you discover journals from people who sank into depression and ultimately starved to death in the apocalypse’s immediate aftermath. Originally intended to be a DLC to the first game, the devs apparently felt limited by Portia’ game engine and decided to formally release it as a different game. Or, perhaps, you know… they did it for other rea$on$.
The game engine changes were noticeable immediately, and not necessarily in a good way. The camera swings around with a bit too much gusto, the lock-on mechanic for fighting enemies is very useless when there is more than one in the area, and resource gathering is unsatisfying.
Actually, let me clarify that last bit. The act of chopping trees and smashing rocks is extremely satisfying; I cannot exactly articulate why, but your character really gets into the smashing/chopping and it feels great. Then the resources pop out around you as tiny, spinning polygons and sloooooooowly absorb into your person. So slow, in fact, that you can almost outrun them on your way to the next node. And they legit have to be absorbed before appearing on the left-side of the screen and into your inventory. Like… why? If I could turn that part off and just have the resources appear in my backpack like every other game, my enjoyment would literally increase two times, minimum.
As for the rest of the game thus far, I can’t help but compare it to my, er, time with Portia. And Sandrock, concerningly, is coming up a bit short. The game’s overall flow is beat-for-beat the same: you’re a new Builder, meet the townsfolk, take commissions from the job board, research new technology, gather relics while digging in Abandoned Ruins, fight some monsters in the overworld and/or in dungeons, complete world/town quests that unlock new areas and improve the town. And that’s all fine – in fact, that is kinda what you want in a sequel to a game you spent 108 hours playing.
The problem is that Sandrock as a location is kinda boring. It’s a desert town with a Wild West motif. I can appreciate the uniqueness of not being able to chop trees for wood (it’s against the law!), and having to worry about water for your machines, and the bizarre “sandfishing” analog to regular fishing. But Portia felt… bigger, more interesting. It’s possible that was due to Portia simply having more empty space, although that’s kinda how that works. More concerningly from the whole cozy life-sim angle though, is how I don’t really like the people. They’re fine, but mostly Wild West caricatures. There is still time for me to be surprised – barely anyone is past two hearts at the moment – but relying on the hope of something getting better doesn’t really cut it in 2023.
So, yeah. I’m going to stick with Sandrock for a bit longer because the same gameplay/planning bits that were compelling in Portia are still compelling here. However, when Portia became less compelling as a result of my completion of the tech tree, I was able to fall back on the relatively interesting world story and neighbor relationships. With Sandrock, I don’t even know if I want to romance any of the options. Not a particularly great situation to be in for this genre.
In An Age 