This is an incredible game with incredible flaws. It's a HUGE cut above other games at this price point though. I'm going to have some criticisms, but know that I only point these out because if they got fixed, this would be one of the greatest sleeper hits in many years.
The good:
It's VAST. It's got crafting, skill trees, stats, powerups, challenges, tons and tons of weapons, and an absolutely unfathomable amount of items to collect. Exploration is rewarding, and there are so many cool areas to explore.
The... areas which may require attention:
Polish, plain and simple.
What I'd like to see changed:
We need an "unstuck" button. While it's fun and feels great to explore, I found myself getting squeezed into bizarre places with no way out. Thankfully the quicksave function exists, but come on. Every game needs an unstuck.
Brings me to my next point, I'd love to see an auto-save that happens maybe every 5 or 10 minutes just in case.
Guns can be infinitely reloaded. It's very strange to even comment on this, given the crazy world we're in here, but it feels so weird to be able to drop my mag and reload my gun infinitely. In reality, if you drop a magazine, those bullets are gone. Repeating this would eventually drain your ammo, but in this game it stays the same, and you can just infinitely reload.
WE NEED THE OPTION TO TOGGLE CONTROLS. Crouch isn't toggle. Aim isn't toggle, and there's no way that I can perceive to toggle them. This is unacceptable.
Settings NEED some more options. I'd love to see individual sliders for things like dialogue, sound effects, etc. There's this cat... The Cat... it's mewing is... about 10x louder than anything else in the game, and it would be so nice if the dev would have done some quality assurance beforehand, but we're stuck with this cat echoing sonic boom levels of mewing repeatedly. It's just unnecessary.
The game doesn't explain itself at the right time... Healing? What's that? Hunger? What's that? Forget about it till later! No. I have almost 4 hours into this game, and it's unacceptable that there's no quick use button for a common healing item. The two methods I have managed to figure out are halting gameplay outright and going into a menu to use an item, and about 3 hours into my play, the game revealed that there is a quick use wheel you can access with G. This absolutely needs to be changed. My suggestion would be to apply a blanket term to all healing items regardless of what they are, and just letting you hit that button when you need to heal. This wouldn't be as bad if there was a way to cancel the quick use radial menu, but once you've pressed it, you absolutely HAVE to consume something, resulting in many wasted items.
We NEED a light source we can toggle on and off. Nuff said.
I also didn't even realize this for a few hours, but you can actually vault/climb... about 5% of the time. This would be lovely if the system were tweaked to actually function closer to 40% or 50% of the time at the very least.
Subtitles don't display all dialogue. Also unacceptable. There was some kind of transmission I got with some random guy with eyeliner talking, and I couldn't hear a damn thing he said. This might also be mitigated by allowing the user to designate which audio we're allowed to adjust, but it still doesn't excuse it simply... not existing. Think of the people who have hearing issues, please.
In conclusion-
This game is great, despite all my complaints. I've been having an absolute ball playing it. My nearly 4 hours have been a delight. I picked this game up at sheer random, and I genuinely cannot believe my luck. Exploration is fantastic, the skills and stats are great, there's crafting, collecting, looting, all the ingredients for a perfect dish, but my issues above keep me from giving it a 10/10 stars. As it stand now, I'd put this game at around a 7 or so, which is great.
Finally, I'd like to complain further about some of the gripes nobody will read because this post is so long.
I died during a cutscene from an invisible enemy called a "crabman"
There are enemies that explode and instantly kill you.
That's the meat, hopefully the dev reads this, leave me a comment if you do, and just know these critiques are meant to be constructive, and I only bothered taking the time to leave them because I see something great here before me, and I can't wait to see where updates take this charming game!
