What a great game.
= Pros =
The combat is simple but very fun with lots of different combat styles to choose from. The gameworld is gorgeous and actually had me going, "Wow." when I first played. There's many unique areas to discover that the devs clearly put a ton of care and passion into designing and which were a joy to explore.
The survival mechanics are very well tuned to be important without being frustrating or annoying. Playing through the game co-op was an absolute blast. The writing is nothing special, which might be surprising if you know Obsidian from Fallout: New Vegas, but none of the writers from that game actually worked on this one, but it serves its purpose. The game has many hours of content that kept us engaged the whole time (much longer than the 8.1 hours it says as I write this-- steam just didn't properly track all of it).
= Cons =
Perhaps the biggest and only real downside were the frequent bugs affecting multiplayer synchronization. Floating, phantom water droplets you couldn't interact with were a basically constant occurence for whomever was the client player. Crashes and random disconnects were unfortunately not entirely unusual for both myself (on Windows 10) and my co-op partner (on Linux Mint), but mercifully the game's autosaves resulted in no loss of progress. Strangely, when I had my game's language to German, German text began 'leaking' into the client player's English game and soon caused his game to crash, forcing me to play in English as well.
= Other =
There's a number of things I would have liked to see in the game that weren't present, such as earthworms, centipedes, grasshoppers, rain-- suited to scale with temporary flooding and mud, climbing mechanics, and the conspicuously absent frog (since there are tadpoles). Perhaps we will see some of those in the sequel.
Overall fantastic, 9/10. Pick this game up instead of whatever "friendslop du jour" is out there.
