Barrett Chamberlain

I want to love this game and I gave it a thumbs up anyways for all the fun it gave me over the last few days, but there is just too much actual gameplay issues that get in the way of the game. I don't have the xbox S or X so this is a review from the base platform...maybe it performs better with the upgraded hardware. Nearly every menu I got into (especially when time-sensitive things like being attacked are going on) causes the game to completely freeze up for a second or two. At first, this isn't a big deal but when it keeps happening consistently it gets on your nerves. This can be alleviated slightly by removing any waypoints you don't need from the HUD, but it doesn't eliminate it and there are times where you need 5-10 waypoints being tracked (scanner room resource gathering). If you travel with something faster than the fins you end up in a guessing game of whether you're in open water or if the level is going to suddenly load, plowing your vehicle into an outcropping. I personally really hate the unintentional shock of getting hit out of nowhere and having your screen suddenly filled with brown. You end up worrying on long fast descents whether the seafloor will fail to load and you'll clip through the bottom of the map. The saving is atrocious and takes upwards of one to two minutes to complete but can definitely take much longer while you sit there and wonder if it's going to work. You learn not to move around and just pause the game while this is happening as the terrain seems to fail to load if you move while saving. The spawning features of the game stop working and in one case nearly completely broke which would've cost me hours and hours of progress. This game sorely needs a periodic autosave since I'm guessing the save is slow due to how much has to be accounted for. Thankfully I didn't try this game out a year ago since all I kept reading were stories of people's games failing to save to the tune of tens of hours lost (it's very easy to not think of while you're progressing in the game). The same goes for launching the game and actually getting to gameplay. Sometimes it just sits on loading level for 3-5 minutes before it even starts showing that it's loading assets. Your base can flood while the game saves or when quitting and entering the game as it seems to manipulate crush depth and base integrity while it's loading. It doesn't stop me from doing anything in the base but it's just another thing where it makes the game feel unfinished. When the game DOES intentionally do things to make you think "why's that happening? let's figure it out" you may be more inclined at that point to think "ah, what glitched out this time?" Moving about on the Aurora to get into the ship bombards you with tons of 2d textures and invisible walls that, again, not game breaking but make you feel like you're in an incomplete game. Partially the cost of having such a big environment to move around in, I suppose, but why not make it feel like the rest of the game? The saving doesn't work on an individual file basis, so if something goes disastrously wrong with the game you only have the option to continue. For me, that was being clipped through the level by a Reaper and managing to fall 3500 m in the prawn suit, a rather resource-intensive thing to rebuild with the upgrades you want. All this in a game that has already delivered DLC gives a good indication to me of how likely these things are to be fixed. I love the concept of this game and I'm a sucker for resource-and-blueprint kind of games, but I simply had too many setbacks to stay interested. This game either is in sore need of bugfixing or needs a better bandaid in the form of autosaving with the ability to load 10 and 30 minutes previous versions.

I liked the game, but too many bugs and descriptions on items that might be hints at what to do ended up being plain wrong (for example, the info on black ice saying it was used for making hardened steel). I wanted to try and figure out things (sometimes there are puzzles where you'll need to find out what to do) but no longer trusted the game to actually work in the way the solution was intended. Forum posts on certain parts of the game are bleak reads - just glad I got this game long after it came out. This changes the game from being "survival" to "look up what to do in the wiki". If they intended for that then why not just cut out the middle-man? Ymir's religion needs to be reworked as the requirements far outweigh the rewards. By the time you're killing enough people to get to the third tier you definitely have more powerful equipment that the game directly gives you through dead enemies' inventories than what the religion lets you produce. I didn't make it far enough to see the final weapons because when placing a structure I moved it across some thralls and they instantly died. Certainly not the only glitch I ran into in this game but the straw that broke the camel's back.