redhott

It is a 4/10 because it is not what a AAA company like PDX should be okay with. After all, 700 employees, not counting the freelancers. There is a high chance that this marks the end of PDX. Here's the problem (after 60 h), as many pointed out on Steam: Shallow economic gameplay. The economy system behind the gameplay is cool but the actual player experience is repetitive, boring, and micro hell. This is what you do most: Watching your building queue, and then check your building type config every 3 min. Just urgs. Horrible wargame mechanics. It is likely the worst wargame of all time. No tactics. Almost no strategy. All that matters is best equipment and the biggest army. Naval warfare is likely the upmost horrible I've ever seen. You do not sink ships anymore. You weaken their morale? You've built the newest navy in the world, to compete with UK? No problem. UK can switch its ship tech within a few weeks. And, if you manage to win all naval engagements... well, UK still has 100+ ships but this times the morale is 5 %? It will become a meme soon, I guess. Army and navy teleporting. So, warfare is all about teleporting. Within a few weeks to the other side of the world? No problem. In reality, in that time, a ship travel across from NY to SF (without Panama Canal) took 200 days. In this game, barely a few weeks. No real anti-blob mechanics. In this game, you can blob the world after a decades. Your allies will not anything about it, and your enemies do not care. Laws and government are, on the one hand, more interesting. On the other hand, it has never been easier to abolish slavery, serfdom, or to establish women's rights. You can abolish slavery as the US in 2 years. It destroys the last remaining national and cultural differences and challenges quite early on. Eventually, all govs and nations look and feel the same. Flavour and nations. They all play the same. All economies play the same. All governments too. So, if PDX was a small indie studio with inexperienced directors and designers, it'll be fine. But PDX is bigger, and more experienced. Granted, the folks in charge of this game seem to lack experience or talent. Maybe some folks who never were in charge before, who were newly promoted after being for years in the second row. Because how else did they come up with this mess? This game was clearly not designed nor managed by a talented management team. But even if we neglect that, this is by no means okay for a 700 or so employee company. Even Epic Games has 2,200 employees, works on much bigger and more complex titles, and yet manages them better than PDX. It means, PDX seems to be in deep internal trouble.

so, i've ignored the bad steam reviews, the negative comments, and wanted to give this game a try because it has "survival" in its name. after more than twenty hours, i have to say that ... it is one of the worst survival and crafting games in my recent memory. yes, highly subjective, i know. i've been wondering what the biggest issue is, and i think that it is not so much the lack of content, though this is a problem, but actually the bad ui and especially the horrible monkey npc controls and mechanics. the more i think about it, the more i believe that the survivalists has a game design issue that will be not solved easily, or any time. i mean, sometimes a bad game remains a bad game, no matter what you do. the survivalists could become in time such a bad game design example.

If you are wondering why Steam reviews are, currently, at 47 %, it is for gameplay and game mechanics reasons. It is not a bad game, only a bit average (at release) for a few good reasons. The game is a bit shallow. Paradox will likely fix it in 1 year, but it appears to be the worst game release of Paradox in a long time, for good reasons, actually. And Paradox is already addressing it, announcing new updates etc. Players complain about a complicated UI, not fun at conquest, lack of features that would make the character management and gameplay fun and less tedious, the tedious trade system, and many other things. As said, they will certainly fix it in 8-12 months but until then it is... kind of interesting how PC Gamer and other magazines rated the game so high when the actual players have reasonable doubts, that even Paradox addresses. I get the feeling that those journalists did not really play the game, which is a shame, or did not know the prequel Europa Univeralis: Rome, or other PDX titles such as EU4, CK2 or VIC2, who knows; certainly interesting though and good reminder that if thousands of players rate a new game so badly that there must good reasons for that. Fortunately, PDX is actually pretty good at addressing such issues and improving their games over time. 4/10 today, and 9/10 in 1 year, for sure.

wait until it is cheap. it's worth $5, not more. dull gameplay for a survival game. horrible terrain textures? like when you are in the game check the actual 3d models and textures. awful imo. they are good at creating twitter friendly gifs and stuff, but the overall game is, compared to survival games, cheap. what a shame after such a loooong early access of 2.5 years? so when they worked 2 years before ea on it, is this the game we get after 4.5 years? not to mention the console ui. why did they not bother to give us a pc ui? for me at least astroneer is not worth mentioning.

i dont think that it is a bad game, it is just too shallow? can we say that? ive read a destructoid article on bad north, and it is exaclty how i felt. its too shallow, too underdeveloped, too cheap? not enough meat on the bone. it should be for free or $5 perhaps imo. and i hope that those super positive reviews on metacritic are not fake accounts of the dev really because this game is no way that successful so far