DYSMANTLE

Would like to complete the game but a three year old bug with 'Side Hustle' quest completion achievement is still active. How would you feel if you just played a game for over eighty hours and then you get cooked by something the dervs say is fixed, maybe we need to 'dysmantle' the lie. I do not recommend this game it left the most soured feelings in me, one thing you want to avoid a bug you know is still there and leaves the player left empty after all the play time, my choice you bet but your game, had to play it eighty hours to find it was broke. “You'll laugh then cry and kiss twenty bucks goodbye” I even got suckered for the pet DLC, was nice but not enough. 10Ton left me insulted.

Encore un vrai coup de cœur ! Je suis tombé sur ce jeu un peu par hasard, et ma première pensée a été : « Oh, un Project Zomboid en plus joli ! » Eh bien... pas du tout. Dysmantle a sa propre identité, et elle mérite clairement qu’on s’y attarde. Le système de survie est accessible sans être simpliste. Pas besoin de dormir, pas de micromanagement pénible : on gère surtout la température, et quelques mécaniques bien pensées comme la cuisine, dont les recettes n’ont à être réalisées qu’une seule fois pour offrir un bonus permanent. Les combats sont dynamiques, les armes variées, le monde est vaste et visuellement très réussi. Même le système de progression avec ses compétences à débloquer est très bien conçu. Et si, comme moi, vous aimez tout ramasser sur votre passage, vous serez comblé : l’inventaire est super agréable à gérer, et sa capacité rend heureux n’importe quel collectionneur compulsif. Côté gameplay, il y a vraiment de quoi faire : On peut tout casser, ce qui est incroyablement satisfaisant. Les quêtes, la pêche, les caisses chronométrées, les énigmes, les trésors, et une foule d’autres défis variés s’enchaînent naturellement. Résultat : on a envie de tout explorer, de tout accomplir… jusqu’à ne plus savoir par où commencer. Les DLC sont dans la même veine : agréables à parcourir, utiles et bien intégrés au reste du jeu, avec leur lot d’objets, d’armes et d’outils pertinents. Et le meilleur pour la fin : aucun bug en plus de 80 heures de jeu. Oui, vraiment. À l’ère des sorties bâclées servies sans vergogne aux joueurs affamés de nouveauté, c’est devenu un exploit. Tout est fluide, bien optimisé, et ça se sent à chaque instant : les temps de chargement sont ridiculement courts. Depuis l’écran principal, il suffit de deux secondes pour se retrouver en jeu. Les déplacements rapides ? Une seconde à peine. Après ça, je sens que le prochain jeu que je lancerai va me sembler terriblement lent… Dysmantle a été une excellente surprise que j'ai parcouru avec plaisir du début à la fin, sans jamais avoir à me forcer. Je le recommande sans hésiter à tous ceux qui tentent de se décider en lisant les avis : si vous aimez explorer, casser, améliorer, fouiller et progresser dans un monde franchement bien fichu, foncez !

Cool game, sucks that you took an easy route in AI slop all over.

Dysmantle is about escaping a post-apocalyptic island, and the primary means of doing so is reducing it to constituent parts. Nearly every object in the game can be broken down for materials. Steel fences, cars, buildings, the emotional-damage-of-other-survival-games-you've-played-before-this-one, etc. All of it goes into the grinder. It's cathartic in a way that's difficult to articulate and embarrassingly easy to lose hundreds of hours to. The map opens up at a pace that respects your intelligence. New tools, new areas, and no invisible walls; progression is well-paced and guided. When you finally crack open a region you've been eyeing for two hours, the payoff lands. Combat is competent enough to stay out of its own way, which for this genre is higher praise than it sounds. Fishing deserves its own paragraph and here it is. The bar, or the timing prompt, or the little fish icon that mocks you when you fail. Sheesh. The fishing minigame tradition in other games is a crime against leisure and Dysmantle wants no part of it. You cast... You wait... You catch something. That's it! That's the whole thing! It's how fishing in games should work and it's an indictment of every other developer that this feels like a revelation. The DLCs earn their price tag, particularly Pets and Dungeons. A companion with actual utility changes how you move through the world in ways that feel meaningful rather than cosmetic. The other expansions add new areas that fit without feeling like they were amputated from the base game to be sold separately. 8.5/10 Ruin everything. No, seriously, everything.

This is a game that makes me glad the ratings system is Recommend or Do Not Recommend. Because this was ultimately a fun and charming game I'm glad I played and I do recommend. It isn't without its pain points, but they weren't enough to prevent me from finishing the game. And let me not bury the lede - a big part of my pain was not realizing there was a building system until I was about to beat the game. I don't fully blame the designers - since my friend bought this game for me (and I'm so glad they did), I kind of just dove right in without researching it at all. But after about 30 hours, right before I took on the final fight of the game, they asked me "did you build a base yet"? And I said yes! Because I thought I had - I'd gained access to a smelter and woodcutting for progression, and I'd placed them in a farm, so that was my base right? I'll admit, it seemed odd that I'd been given blueprints just to place these and a handful of other items, but I didn't really think about it until I was sweeping the island for materials in the endgame and stumbled on a field VERY close to the starting point that tutorialized the building mechanics. Shoutout Negaoryx... That's when I realized that all of my pain with navigating the island, wondering why I couldn't access almost ANY of the plateaus with obvious enemies and loot, it was because I had absolutely missed a core mechanic of the game. To Dysmantle's credit, this didn't actually prevent me from finishing the game. At all. I did have to take long excursions around things, but fundamentally nothing gamebreaking was out of reach. I did always wonder when in the game I'd get jump boots or something to access one of the game's first locked boxes... But at least now I know. To pinpoint part of the pain: this game can be obtuse. It doesn't always tell you how to progress - it will tell you "I need to find X item" and give you a marker, but for the most part you kind of just need to clear the fog of war on the map until you find everything else, whether that's a route or a tool. My usual playstyle of "explore the map for fast travel points and dive into questing later" felt punished during my playthrough, but then again after playing the whole game without a core mechanic I don't know how real this issue is. Part of the problem is the unlock system in Dysmantle does not show you ALL of the unlocks you don't have. There is a basic tech tree you can see the outline of from early on, where things you aren't leveled high enough to craft are "greyed out", but there are also areas/quests on the map that directly grant you items that assist in your progression by ADDING items to the tech tree you couldn't have known about. Like for me, since I didn't know I could build, I never saw the build tree until the endgame. I wish I had found this and actually used it in the course of my playthrough (or watched the trailer I'm sure would have showed it off, since I basically just trusted my friend's rec and dove right in), but alas. The combat is relatively simple - there are primary and secondary weapons, you can attack, dodge, and run, and there is an armor and trinket system to enhance your character for combat that I quite enjoyed tinkering with. It wasn't as deep as I would have liked, but that's part of Dysmantle's charm that I REALLY enjoyed - it isn't MEANT to be strenuous or rushed, and when I stopped trying to I found the whole experience to be very chill and relaxing. I play a lot of live service survival games and being able to just chill without worries is honestly kind of nice. I especially enjoyed the tower defense portions - I wish these had played an even bigger part of the game. I enjoyed making sandbag mazes for enemies to navigate my turret fire! With all this said: I'm likely to pick up at least one of the DLC later and see what it's like playing with ALL of the tools at my disposal... If I do, this review is likely to get updated.

DYSMANTLE is essentially a psuedo-incremental game about exploring, killing zombies, crafting, destroying everything for resources, and leveling up. This is NOT a survival game, and I feel like it's weird that it's marketed as one. There are no survival mechanics and if you die you simply just start at a Dark Souls campfire and the mobs reset. I love it. I like that it's not a survival game. I like that it's just a game where I get experience for doing everything and I level up and get perks. I do wish this game had a bit more 'oomph' as it is starting to feel a bit monotonous -- but it's still an enjoyable enough experience. The game lives up to its name and you truly can dismantle everything in your search for resources. Side note for fishing lovers -- this game does have fishing but its essentially as simple as 'go up to water and afk. go eat a snack and come back and you'll have all the fish in that part of the water'. It's definitely the most disappointing part of the game for me. Overall it's an easy 8/10 for me, but I definitely don't think it'd be for everyone. Do not expect it to be a survival game. The fishing is not interesting and is essentially just an AFK grind.

Really good game, but I wouldn't recommend it to everyone as it can get really tedious in several parts ( mostly the second part of the jungle, and at the end/post end ). It's also a "survival crafting" game where survival is non-existent : you don't NEED to eat, drink or sleep, but you CAN cook to get bonuses/healing and sleep to pass time. But you also have bandages and painkillers so cooking to heal is useless. Crafting is not the main point either. You'll unlock new gear to progress, maybe upgrade them, and that's it. Weapons and tools don't break ( and that's good ) so you don't need to craft more. And there are campfire with chests to store your stuff everywhere, so you don't even need to build a base. You CAN build a base and even unlock a device to teleport there, but I didn't build one. It's an exploration-based game and you'll spend most of your time exploring the gigantic map, fighting monsters and destroying everything to get materials for upgrades. You can also destroy objects to clear a path, but the game is cleverly built so that you never have a tool strong enough to bypass every roadblock, or it would be too easy to progress. I finished with the normal ending, but the game continues. Unfortunately I couldn't find the last Myth Tablet to access the last area, and I'm NOT going to run around the whole map again to find it. On top of that there is another challenge consisting in "ascending" all the signal towers ( one per region ), but to do that you first need to kill all the monsters in each region once. And when you complete "The Ark" you access another level with a map where all the towers are marked in red, until you ascend them. And on top of that there are all the "ghosts" appearing at night you can kill. And the challenge obelisk, the tresure hunts, etc. If you're looking for a game with a lot of content which can potientially lasts for hundreds of hours, play Dysmantle. And if you want more there are the DLCs...

Decent middle of the road survival crafting game. More story driven, with some clever map design, though it drags for quite a while. It's a fine game to decompress with but I doubt it's winning any awards. Many of the voicelines are text to speech which is a shame.