This Land Is My Land

[h1] Giving This Game A Fair Chance [/h1] Despite plenty of reviews pointing out that this game is unpolished and unfinished with bugs, I wanted to give it a fair shot. There aren’t many games that let you play as a Native American fighting back against invading forces, so here we go. I will update the review as I play to provide my initial boots-on-the-ground impressions. [h3] Hour 1 - First Impressions [/h3] To be honest, it was a bit awkward. Loading times are unusually long, and while the directions could be more concise, I think there is enough polish here to get me going without much struggle. [h3] Hour 3 - Finally Learned How To Deal With Enemies Effectively [/h3] Now hear me out. I'm the kind of guy who learns things on his own without looking up guides and tutorials online. I like to use whatever resources the game makes available to get from point A to point Z. It took a good amount of struggling to get a handle on how stealth and combat work. But overall, things make sense and seem at least somewhat balanced. Enemies will spot you if you make yourself easily visible and can't detect you if you’re hiding in tall grass. Looks good to me so far. Another learning curve I had to get around is the menus. Hoh boy, the menus. It feels like half the time I'm playing, I’m navigating menus instead of the game. Go into this menu to get your warriors to gather wood. Go into that menu to craft arrows. Go into these menus to see how your other campsites are doing, then go into other menus to do X, Y, and Z. I am getting used to it, but wow, what a hill to climb. [h3] Hour 7 - Learning How To Put Warriors To Good Use [/h3] Besides gathering horses and resources, it turns out you can also send your tribesmen (and women) to set up other campsites to expand your power and standing against the invaders. This makes sense, but it would have been nice to learn how to do that earlier on—better late than never. Also, I'm not sure if my warriors can use firearms effectively, but I sure do love to arm them with guns since I get a ton from raiding settlements. [h3] Hour 34 - It Got Better! But Is Now Almost Unplayable [/h3] I've discovered a ton on what you can do in this game. You can go into settlements solo bows blazing, take the stealth route, or create a warparty of other tribesmen that fight alongside you. You can get pretty tactical with a warparty which I absolutely love. You can automate which tasks your tribes do in a specific order. Need more buffalo pelts to upgrade your camp? Place an order for more pelts and they'll get it done asap. I really liked this feature; I wish I learned about it early on like many other things. I've expanded my tribe to about 10 different camps with about 70 people total. Interestingly I noticed the more I progressed, the longer it took for the world to render, and my save / load times have become absurdly long. How long? I'm talking about 5 min+ just for my game to save. Often I'll ride my horse into another area, just for the game to freeze for about 40 min before I can play again. Not only that, but I've been consistently experiencing low fps after about the 30th hour into my game, which was no issue in about my first 10 hours of butter-smooth game play. I have a pretty decent computer so I know its not my pc. [h3] Final Verdict [/h3] I love this game for what it is. It has a really good foundation to be amazing and I'm not just saying that to be nice. I genuinely love a ton that is here and what it could have been if the game was actually finished. I can get past the lack of polish and jank. I can get past the bugs and glitches. But I can't get past the 5min+ load and save times. The last time I had to wait 10 minutes before the game unfroze during a loading screen. Good thing I made myself something to eat in the meantime. I cannot in good conscious recommend you get this game. But if you really want to try it, you'll find a beautiful and fun game with jank you learn to live with.