Recent reviews by Vindicator

Frankly, after over a decade of Early Access and constantly changing and reworking things, you'd expect the devs to have settled on an appealing vision for the game, optimized and fleshed it out, and polished it up for release. They've had plenty of time, game sale money, and experience to do so, and yet the so-called 1.0 update is a glorified Alpha just like the 21 Alphas before it. No change in update files at all from the test build, very little optimization to the point of destroying performance and making your PC work overtime. Gameplay has been boiled down to mostly RNG mechanics and trader cheesing, the sandbox still has very little flexibility thanks to scripted Points of Interest that give you little room to play differently, the UI is often unhelpful and needs a rework...on top of being significantly increased in price despite it all.
Do yourself a favor if you've not gotten the game already and stay far away from this game, and any others this particular company makes in the future. They've made us wait an entire childhood's length of time for this bag of trash, and I'm tired of trying to give them any benefit of the doubt that they'll actually finish and fix this game.

After the first time they almost killed this game, you'd assume Arrowhead would have learned that players don't like buggy, unpolished, player-hostile game experiences, but apparently not. Once again, we're at a point where game performance and stability is at an all-time low - even *worse* than it's ever been in the past, with constant stutters, crashes, even softlocking PCs and needing total restarts.

Beyond that, it seems Arrowhead has returned to the same awful balancing philosophy they'd almost destroyed the playerbase with prior to the original 60 day redevelopment plan - a plan which has quite a few key points they've either not addressed at all, or have actively gone back on or made worse. Although it may not seem like it as Arrowhead has been performing stealth-balancing with unmentioned changes that by all rights should be in the change notes, we've been thrown new enemies - like the War Strider which wasn't publicly announced and has no weakspots at all, even defying the core 'heavy armor with a lower-armor weakpoint' design principles of its faction - that break the balance of the game. The new Dragon Roach is basically a stronger flying Bile Titan with no way to take out its bile attack like the Titan, and a stronger, more punishing acid splash. Enemies have had parts made arbitrarily stronger to change what's even viable to kill them. Newer Warbond weapons, like those in the ODST warbond, Control Group, and Force of Law release with weapons so criminally underpowered that weapons in the *free* starter warbond sometimes outclass these premium items. Enemies like War Striders and Bunker Turrets ragdoll your diver into helplessness for sometimes up to half a minute before you can do anything - if they don't kill you in that time. Between poor if varied weaponry, increasingly tough enemy types or enemy buffs, extreme use of control-robbing mechanics like ragdoll or stagger, and more, Arrowhead has shown they don't want players to have a *good* time, they want players to have a *hard* time, whether it's a fair hardness or just helpless, ragdolling bull. I mean, even the devs seem to have admitted it, as the hit-scanning rupture strain bugs were so terribly egregious in hitting you with no time to react that the moment they fixed the bug making those things *able* to hitscan clients and not just hosts, the community rioted and Arrowhead had to remove them to be redone. To be clear to those who assume I just want a power fantasy - I don't. I really don't. I want a *fair* challenge where when I die, it's because I did something dumb, not because my controls were taken away from me for half a minute, or I was bathed in gunfire from bullet sponge enemies, etc. A game can be *both* challenging *and* fair, but Arrowhead seemingly can't see that. Fun seemingly isn't their goal. Even among bugs, harmless 'fun' bugs like teleporting out of the extraction shuttle were patched within mere days of popping up, while bugs from the game's launch and after-launch that cause crashes or inconsistencies have yet to be fixed.

And finally...the nail in the coffin is that this is a studio that just won't listen. Certainly they'll play nice temporarily while reviews are bad - look at how quickly they pivoted during the review bomb the first time. As soon as the heat is off of them, though? Look how they went back to making things harder and ignoring the most pressing bugs basically as soon as the community's eyes were off of them.

I could forgive Arrowhead for the poor performance assuming it really is just the engine being so rickety. I could forgive them for the hostile balancing if they really hadn't ever done this sort of game balancing before. But I *cannot* forgive them knowing that they haven't and seemingly won't learn from this. They promised us they heard our voices the first time, that they would do better. Yet, here we are once again, with a game so buggy most people can't or won't play, with severe balance issues and enemy mechanics that serve more to frustrate than to make a fair but strong challenge. This game was pretty much the most mechanically unique and narratively fascinating in the genre - but it's being rotted to its very bones by poor technical decisions and equally awful balancing choices.

Genuinely an unprofessional and highly unpolished cash-grab cobbled together from mod content and sold in a package that breaks many actual quality mods out there, and UNABLE to be uninstalled after installing despite its label as a DLC. Irreversibly changes your game, adding in poorly balanced content with clear lack of official support like voice acting. On Bethesda's part, laziest 'DLC' to ever come from this company.

Unfortunately, especially considering the level of content in the latest and far overdue update, I cannot recommend this game. Sharing its identity with the original flash version of the game for which support was dropped, this port is rather unfortunate. Any good port of a game should carry over the same featureset as the original, and this game simply does not. A very integral part of the flash version of Sas4 was weapon crafting. Not only did it allow players to get access to weapons they hadn't yet obtained in drops once they'd passed the required level, but it allowed players to reliably gain a weapon with max free upgrade slots for improving, and gave something to properly grind for. Without this, ALL non-premium weapons AND the upgrade slots available on them are 100% randomized in the in-game loot crate system, giving players no control over what weapons they can get, or how many slots they can upgrade.
Worse still is that the team clearly is still adding content, however shameful the current amount is after the years of almost nothing, meaning that the choice to keep weapon crafting out is a very intentional choice. Objectively, I cannot recommend a port that refuses to implement features that were a staple of the original, and subjectively, the lack of such content actively dampens the fun of the game in my opinion.

As I've recently learned that this game has been abandoned by its devs and left as a somewhat buggy mess, I've decided to give a negative review over positive. I had wanted to give it a positive review, stating that the game, while buggy at times, is fun and that I hoped it would get patches. However, as it is abandoned, it is unlikely any patches will ever come. The game is fun for builders and survivalists who prefer a bit more sandbox than true survival, but I'm afraid it's far too buggy for true enjoyment. From failing to save both automatically and manually costing hours of progress, to sometimes buggy physics deleting items or killing the player unfairly, I cannot recommend the game so long as it stays abandoned.