Score: 3/5
A very tentative recommendation.
Reminds me a lot of Horizon Zero Dawn. Great combat and movement systems that are crushed under the weight of the writers and bad design decisions. Awful pacing, mostly repetitive content, and inconsistent writing/story that starts out strong and gets progressively more awful. Tone fluctuates between serious and goofy. Multiple woke/DEI inclusions. It is not immersive.
[b]The Good[/b]
1. Combat
On-foot combat against zombies and predator animals is great, especially the horde system, explosives, and the crossbow. Strong bullet-time mechanic.
2. The writing/execution for Boozer and his friendship with Deacon is ranges from subpar to great, weighted toward very good.
3. Perks/Character Progression
Big picture, Deacon starts out fairly incompetent but becomes very competent by late-game after unlocking a lot of perks through the perk trees and quest/event completions. Most perks are between moderately and unreasonably impactful, with some duds that you have to pick as prerequisites for the actually useful ones.
Great, consistent visual changes to main characters over the course of the story.
4. Some of the environmental storytelling is very good, and the dev(s) brought almost no attention to it.
5. Play-time is framed very well.
6. Moderate mod support. Many old mods have compatibility issues or don’t work well on the new patches.
7. QoL features. Picking up a non-flora, non-corpse, non-quest-related world item will auto-pickup nearby world items. On-the-fly crafting wheel with time dilation. Promptless, smooth vaulting and wall-cover-snapping. Climbing needed a bit more polish. Deacon can jump off a one-story building without taking fall damage.
8. Most resources have infinite respawns with reasonable timers, some a bit too fast.
9. Variety, especially regarding visuals except for human NPCs.
10. Some of the humor lands.
11. Audio/SFX/music are great. Voice acting ranges from bad to great.
[b]The Bad[/b]
1. Story starts out strong, is a roller coaster for the rest of the first half, then nosedives in the second half.
2. Very rough scripted sequences
Some human NPCs are totally ignored by zombies and the game doesn’t hide it at all. Including those in on-foot chase sequences as part of the main quest. The zombies detect Deacon just fine in these chase sequences. No in-universe explanation, just lazy devs or budget/time constraints.
[spoiler]Some scenes are made up of a bunch of illusions/contrivances: the player can’t fail, and all the NPCs will wait until Deacon catches up in a high octane chase sequence, and the fires don’t do damage, and none of your choices matter, and your bike has infinite health and gasoline.[/spoiler]
Deacon won’t loot most enemies killed in these sequences.
If you activate the sequence from somewhere other than where the devs intended, you will be teleported to the intended starting point.
When captured, enemies do not strip Deacon of his clothes or knife, handcuff/tie him up, or maim him. Plot armor is just too strong for ‘em.
Rarely, an NPC who has no reason to lie to you will say one thing then do something completely different.
Rarely, the characters will do something absolutely unnecessary because the devs couldn’t show something occurring/progressing organically.
Some sequences will teleport weapons into your equipment slots and give you unlimited ammo.
3. Stealth
The stealth-related gameplay is average, with most human and zombie enemies being highly unperceptive for sight, sound, and smell. Unless there’s a scripted event, then they get wall-hacks. As seen in many video games featuring stealth, NPCs act in repetitive, artificial ways to better allow the player to get stealth kills, or to move through a level/area undetected.
The stealth-only, heavily scripted puzzle-solving sections are extremely restrictive, contrived, and unfun.
Many characters is stealth sequences/gameplay will make a lot of noise verbally or physically while close to enemies without being detected.
4. Melee weapon durability is extremely unrealistic, especially the fire axe. Your knife is undamageable. The others have 10-25 uses before irreparably breaking. You can unlock field repairs and weapons with something like double the normal durability by investing a lot of resources into the upgraded weapon, with significantly increased field repair costs. Melee damage balance is between fine and awful, weighted toward awful. Human enemies have infinite ammo, but only a bit is lootable. And Deacon will only carry a laughable amount of spare ammo/mags.
5. Deacon’s character monologues/dialogues ranges from strong to awful, consistently weighted toward the negative side. He is a woke white knight, and a biker gang member engaging in social posturing and pissing contests, and a very passive aggressive high schooler in an adult body, making snide comments about the person on the other side of a radio with the radio still sending audio, or while they’re nearby. He will often make bad strategic decisions to advance the plot.
6. The game is not designed for you to use looted weapons long term, preventing upgrades, ammo purchasing, and the ability to store them in your locker. Different firearms do not share calibers. Deacon will not pick up ammo for unless it is one of the three he has equipped currently. Enemies have unlimited ammo but you can only loot a few rounds off their corpse.
7. Technical/Visual/AI Bugs
a. Visual stuttering/lag/temporary freezes in cutscenes, loading screens, and normal gameplay. Couldn’t fix it for normal gameplay.
b. One of the characters in the intro sequence disappears when shot. Rolling back to previous patch will fix it but you lose bugfixes.
c. Boozer is not programmed well when he’s close to the player in scripted sequences. Expect him to bug out, aggressively accelerate/decelerate, sprint then stop suddenly until the player gets close enough, then enter a jank walk animation for a second before sprinting, and randomly moving in a zig-zag pattern at whatever speed.
d. Sometimes a zombie will be invincible during a scripted event where you are supposed to kill them.
e Physics-enabled items sometimes despawn.
f. Some items respawn when they clearly shouldn’t. Some lootable corpses become relootable after a certain amount of time.
g. Some random encounters won’t allow you to complete them.
h. When Deacon gets close enough, NPCs will frequently have visual jank/bugs, or many will spawn at the same location all at once.
i. My bike would sometimes repeatedly clip through the ground while riding.
j. Rare CTDs.
8. Random events often don’t give you enough time to reach them.
9. Artificial movement speed manipulation to ensure Deacon can never pass some characters on foot or in the motorcycle chase sequences.
10. Minutes of unskippable cutscenes for the dev/production companies each boot up. Fixable with mods.
11. Normal is too easy about half the time. Hard is too hard about half the time.
12. Forced time skips so scene matches script is often anti-immersive.
13. Flashlight is visually attached to Deacon’s shirt and is fixed forward, but rotates with the camera, rather than with Deacon’s body/facing. Including illuminating 180 degrees, through Deacon’s chest.
14. Some areas have very blatant invisible walls, with enemies on the other side who can detect you.
