Project: Mist

I played the demo a bunch before buying this on sale and I have to say, compared to other open-world survival-craft zombies-themed games currently in development, this one is actually pretty good, and I've tried like almost all of them. The space for games like this seems to be filling up quickly while at the same time this one appears to have a lot going for it. What stands out most about Project Mist is how creepy and alive the world feels and when you combine that with the games overall art direction, which I would describe as "zombies in space, but on earth, really minus the whole space bit, nonetheless space is still important to their identity regardless of the fact that they don't actually hang out in space all that much;" and you end up with something truly special. The game does have its share of issues with performance being the most glaring. I also noticed a few slightly off sound effects and then some areas of the map are less detailed than others, still since we are in Early Access these things are all excusable and I expect to see many or most resolved with future updates. The enemy AI is not great but it's also not terrible. As far as combat goes, there is room for improvement but what is there right now is still pretty fun. Project Mist attempts their own novel take on the mobile base concept which proves to be functional and effective here and even though the concept of a train base can feel somewhat overused in todays media, this iteration of it just works. Steam input works well enough even though there is no official controller support yet (devs, you need to make the Crafting Tab a mapped out button in the settings so I can add it to my steam input settings). I don't think this game deserves all the AI hate it got, mostly because I read a response from one of the developers and it sounds like most of the AI content was really intended as placeholders until they could get the rest of the project further developed. The fact that they've already spent over $1.5Mil in development and they're producing all their own environments, models, and animations makes it worth it to me to support their efforts. Devs gotta eat and creativity, while technically is free, it also doesn't put food on the table, unless someone pays for it. Last note, when you break rocks the animation is cool but the sound is all off and ends up sounding more like a geiger counter. Last, last note, when I exit out of the game there seems to be some code that doesn't quit and I either have to restart the computer or Ctrl+Alt+Delete then end-task a bunch of processes at random until the computer either fixes or crashes, because no one knows what all those fancy processes do anyways and open AI... End Transmission