It has become clear to me after playing this game why Microsoft rarely makes games itself anymore and why they acquired actual studios with talent rather than finding it in there own buildings. It's because there's none left. They have companies that can literally print millions of dollars for them at there whim and im floored at how poorly they manage all the talent they have acquired. Its sad really. The game is mess and I saw nothing but issues from hour 3 to 185 including new ones till the very end. They could have something here but they didn't put the time and effort into making it better for the player and for fun rather than fattening wallets. Let me tell you what's up.
There is fun in numbers...im serious. This game is very clearly marketed at having groups to play with and I wholeheartedly agree with that. At the very least play with 1 other person and even a lot of the jank you can overlook or put up with just not everything. The world is fairly large in size and stuff like this is always better with a buddy.
Optimization scrapped. All jokes aside this game is a mess. Tons of bugs, glitches, needless buffs, systems breaking that completely ruined my gameplay. I should not be spending more time and effort trying to figure out ways to make things work properly than actually having fun with the game. You want to see for yourself? Keep an eye on Wolf Spiders. They break the game more than anything. They walk straight through walls, clip into the ground and attack you from underneath, and can even follow you anywhere on the map once they clip beneath it. Even pets they give you in game which supposedly help you fight are good pack mules but intentionally get in your way while you build and fight often cause your demise rather than helping.
The players time is not considered. I love open world crafting games but things should be balanced accordingly. Time is one thing that is way too out of wack. Building certain things takes too much time between gathering resources which in a yard setting should be plentiful but instead you have to wait 5 in game days for them to come back. Want to simply sleep the time off? Can't. Game tells you that you can only sleep once every so amount of hours. Want to build this? Run around the entire map over and over and over again getting finite resources that also take time to respawn and there's not enough fun things to do to continue occupying tame after hour 40 or so. It becomes the same thing and its boring.
Weaknesses do not matter. The game talks about gathering data for all the things in the yard and learning how to fight them. I used 1 weapon for the entire game with no sour, no fresh, no spicy, and no salty. Just regular upgrades and I killed everything but the hardest boss in the game. With enough tries I could have but that fight is so badly made I wanted to be done with it altogether. The game lies and tells you that you need all this info but none of it matters. You can do more (kind of) on certain enemies but most of the time I barely even rarely saw a difference. Only real difference I saw was clubs against armored enemies. That's it. Find what works for you and go with it.
Limitations. For an open world game freedom and passion are deathly important. This game sells itself on being "Honey I shrunk the kids" vibe going. What they fail to mention is you cannot simply build anywhere you want. This game will tell you that you cannot build on top of certain materials, you don't have rights to build somewhere (im a child shrunken in a back yard what in the hell are you even talking about?), or the game deems it unfair for you to have a base in certain place. All the weapons in game including the one I soloed it with all feel like they were nerfed badly. It all feels so weak in comparison to what it should be and my guess is "balancing" as if Microsoft has any real world concept of what that even means. Nearly all the fun little wacky and fun things I tried in this game none of them panned out. .Games are about fun and earning your way to the top of the hill not be feel like your dragging a concrete slab the entire time and when you finally reach the top they tell you the real reward was the journey up. ♥♥♥♥ you Microsoft.
Sold as a game for kids when it really shouldn't be. Nobody seemed to tell me this before playing this which in hindsight seems strange but fighting bugs is one thing but did nobody pay attention to the story? About how a bunch of scientists kidnap a bunch of kids, perform experiments on them, shrink them, and put them in a yard. No? Well how about the SCA.B wrist thing that was also given to you, a kid, and find over 50 more throughout the yard in places where previously kids were killed. You never find the bodies of course but the fact that they blatantly just put that out there like it's just normal is screwed up in so many ways.
Basebuilding sucks. One of my favorite things to do in open world crafting games is building a place to lay low and get back to it. This game made me genuinely consider just not building one at all and hide in a soda can or something instead. Your constantly in your own way when building having to be in just the right spots at times or you can't put down a simple floor. In this game I am glad they weren't too serious with the structural integrity of everything at least but all late game builds look like crap. Not even factoring in during base attacks I watched bugs to just walk through the door, one base that was built on top of a rock the bugs walked through the rock and ate my base from below which I could not stop, invincible bugs during base raids only that I had to simply watch them destroy my stuff, watch bugs crawl up the side of my base and simply walk where there corners meet at walls right through and begin attacking me, and repairing after a raid is made tedious as hell and don't care for it. Only a few places in the entire game are worth building on and the rest just sucks. Have fun figuring that out.
This game I would say is fun with friends but not solo. Pick up for 10 or 15 bucks and your good but any more than that you deserve to get robbed. This company braggs about profits and quality yet never show in. They should be held to the same standard they regularly portray. Too bad they pretty much suck at everything.
