I wanted to like this game since it has a lot of what I typically like in a survival game. Which is of course, survive and craft stuff. But a critique I have is it seems like everything is overly resource heavy which turns into very long periods of gathering item A and B for one thing, so that means you have to run from where you're based to a spot that takes 10 minutes to get to since you don't run very fast. This doesn't include the fact that things like stone buildings are such a huge resource sink it really slows things down. This will inevitably lead to you taking many trips that are roughly 15+ minutes to grab just enough of the materials you wanted before you have to head back and rinse and repeat. If there is a faster and more reliable way of movement, I have not gotten to that point, and with how often I've heard of issues with people's pets disappearing I don't think I would trust it anyways.
There's also the issue of performance with the game on open world mode. I can't run for more than 5 seconds without having frame drops consistently, even if I bump down things like graphical settings to possibly lighten the load of how much the game has to do. I'm aware that the game is CPU heavy (only learned that after receiving this game as a gift) but the constant hitching is off putting. This happens if I run DX11 or DX12, but I stuck with playing on the former. While I don't have the highest end gaming rig, I would imagine that having a somewhat decent build should be more than enough considering I don't have this kind of performance problem with any of the other games that I play, so I wasn't expecting this kind of issue. This happens even on single player and having a very small and simple base.
The hit detection can be pretty funky about half the time. You can try and nail an animal with your spear that's a few inches from you but somehow miss, but the animal can mess you up being 6 feet away from you. Using a bow does seem like it has a better hit detection compared to the spear, but when a bear is trying to nibble your arm off, it's easier to use the close range weapon. It also doesn't make sense how you can stand in a house that has no windows and being crouched, but somehow the animals can still detect you.
While I think that the game has some good ideas going for it, it seems to not keep up in terms of optimization or bug fixing. The very obvious memory leak issue is a glaring problem that both my partner and I have when we play for a while. At times it seems like things are just being slapped together with chewing gum and hope it works kind of situation, since I have seen some bugs being a problem even before the full release. Having quite a few features being behind $20 DLC meanwhile the base game has well known problems is insulting to say the least.
TLDR; game is extremely grindy and poorly optimized. I'd recommend choosing another survival craft game.
