Nylige anmeldelser av Valkerion™

You have been told "you are not that guy"; you are just a speck trying to survive a never ending battlefield filled with horrors and monstrosities. I absolutely love the atmosphere and setting of the game, which is a great foundation for a game that definitely is quite early into development. I find myself drawn to play more of the game despite knowing there is limited content, questionable AI, and extreme unpredictability in the gameplay itself.

I've been very drawn to PvE extraction games because the gameplay loop of them is very enjoyable, but having your time wasted because a cheater decided to kill you is not. But of all that I have played, they feel stale quickly without a depth of content to play, mostly centered around mil-sim style realism; The Forever Winter is not that. I find myself playing not to just amass loot, but actually enjoying exploration and discovery, as well as embracing the unpredictability and even being absolutely destroyed by it, but not finding myself wanting to stop playing because of it.

The game is currently quite favorable in that you can recover your weapons if you die, and if you manage to recover your corpse but die again, you can continue to try to make that extract. You will not be able to recover any of the loot you got (or ammo and meds you brought in), which is a bit of a shame, but honestly I find the game actually fun enough to just survive and play that I am not mindlessly pursing making a number go up. Overall it isn't terribly hard to profit and I do not feel pressured by death, striking a quite impressive balance where there is a desire to loot but death is not such a painful setback.

There are definitely performance issues, but on a very aged 980ti I was able to enjoy the game on low settings with FSR, not really hurting the visuals too badly. I can only hope over time this will drastically improve. I upgraded to a 4060ti for the time being and can play on high settings with decent fps at all times. There are no major issues with frame drops or game crashes for me, other than being tough on the gpu, which would otherwise hurt the experience.

The AI is certainly a work in progress and once you learn how it works, can be manipulated in your favor. This is expected to change over time, as the game is still only in an arguably very early version "0.1". I have seen what other small teams have done in early access with their AI such as Incursion: Red River, so I hold a similar hope for TFW devs to do the same, as they are very openly communicating with the community and regularly posting updates.

Players can play the game in co-op from the start, with up to four players. There is little to stop said four players currently going from "you are not that guy" to perhaps, we are that guy. You are quite free to play the game carefully and stealthily; or as you learn the game, improve your character and loadout, and become more experienced, you are not prevented from feeling strong and playing the game... differently. When not alone you have a chance to be rescued, and of course there is greater safety in numbers -- provided you do not put yourself in an unwinnable situtation by getting too overconfident. I rather enjoy the way the game feels played alone and carefully as well as in a group unafraid to fight their way through the landscape. There is a good balance here and can easily be expanded on by the devs with the new maps that release, with the newest one being quite commonly regarded as a place you don't bring anything you don't want to lose.




A lot of people have a pressing concern about buying this game (myself included) in regards to the "water system". You must accumulate water to maintain your stockpile of items and money and the drain is enforced in real time. There is currently an unfavorable skew in that a new player with no information and not seeking it online may find it a very punishing feature, struggling to find this item and starting with no safety net, or even others who play ignorant of the consequences and end up losing everything without ever knowing they were at risk. The fact of the matter is, if you play the game seriously for a handful of hours you can reach the point where you are able to loot multiple days of water in a quick run of a few minutes. You can then completely trivialize any risk of ever losing all of your items to this timer. There is a lot of debate over this feature but I find that anyone really playing the game does not actually worry about it at all.

The other end of the argument is that people don't want to be "wiped" because they quit to play other games and in the future they will come back to the game and have nothing. The devs are working on this feature actively and already added the ability to defend yourself once from losing everything should you hit this timer. It is a risk like all other gameplay in Forever Winter is. If you don't want that risk, you can simply accumulate more water in your stash at any time (no limit) and log in to deposit it whenever you need -- to a stack of 99 days that you don't have to login at the most. Another PvE Extraction game I follow closely, Incursion: Red River, regularly fully wipes players to zero every significant patch. In The Forever Winter, even if you lose your stash to the water timer, you lose* your rigs which is a bit of a setback, but you keep your character levels and weapon levels (the most extensive grind in the game), as well as your quest progression and likely faction standing. It's a bit painful to lose your rigs but not losing the time spent leveling your characters is a major boon and you can immediately take quests you had already unlocked to restore high powered guns to your character/sell for plenty of cash.

Ultimately I think the mechanic would be better off getting overhauled into a gameplay currency used for running advanced missions, unlocking vendors, or even purchasing upgrades, but no real world timer. Too many people fear even trying the game because of it, and I was originally in that crowd.

I enjoyed MTaP and now Sandrock and the devs just decided to drop NPC outfit packs at $5 a pop, $30 for the whole collection, while the full set of these outfits for player is just $4. Honestly insulting. The trend of pricing cosmetics up the wazoo is really stupid in the industry and honestly makes me ready to just go back to playing the game from other source to avoid this silliness. Please don't go this route Devs.

Further, these packs currently only cover 12 of the romance-able NPCs. Forgetting if it would ever cover platonic characters, we could easily assume if they add packs for the remaining 8 characters, then it would be $50 for all packs, $25 for just one of the outfits for everyone, and still being forced to pick from groups of 4 characters per pack. Just absurd.

Had a lot of fun with the campaign, skirmish is fun too but I honestly find the AI a rather poor challenge. If you enjoy RTS and Homeworld this is a no-brainer. As much as I love RTS I would say I am not very good without a pause button and having to do massive amounts of micro, and yet I was able to clear everything on hard difficulty quite easily.

The design of the units are great and I found myself actively using every unit through the entire campaign (though little later on maybe not so much the basic LAV and AAV), which is quite impressive. Really shows that they got a great balance of unit dynamics, even late game though I built up many cruisers, all units show their usefulness with multiple weapons, skills, and upgrades. The story was really very good with cinematics between missions and the smooth transitions of in-game cutscenes straight into gameplay were very fun to see. I only wish it were a bit longer, as if I didn't pad out my time so much leveling up my units in certain missions it would have felt even shorter than it already was at just 12 missions. I bought the game at launch and came back to replay it recently, now going to replay Homeworld 1+2 before the launch of 3.

The campaign and skirmish both show some weak points if you at all play as a turtle and like to keep your units alive and win from attrition. For campaign the issues are that there tend to be little scripts for AI attacks after initial units are cleared, some missions have units that spawn infinitely from off-map, but most do not. The enemy carriers on-map will usually try to continuously create attack waves but they can fail to attack the player and just end up idle at times. You may find yourself many opportunities to farm XP and get your elite units (which I do enjoy) but I wish the hard difficulty really had more challenge to it. Once you have weathered initial attacks from the enemy I found all reinforcements to be no challenge at all, even on the final mission.

For skirmishes, fighting against hard AI is fun enough at first but they quickly show their weakness by seeming to only have two strategies. The first is of course, to constantly rush you with sparse waves of units (and of course once at the start every AI in FFA will send an LAV wave at your carrier). The second is to build up a decent squadron of fighters and bombers and begin harassing you (quite effectively) until you build enough anti-air. Yet, even when I saw one of the AI (post game stats) had harvested way more than I did, I never once see them build up a proper army, which will fail to give any challenge to a player that protects their units and doesn't also try to rush the AI with useless small attacks.

Overall I definitely recommend the game, but maybe not worth $50 unless you are a die-hard fan.

I made an extensive guide via google sheets that is available in the guides section, covering almost all aspects of the game; please check that out if you are enjoying the game and looking for information to help you, and consider joining the very active discord community!
https://discord.onl/revolution-industry/
https://steamoss.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3047604242

This has been my favorite game of the 'genre', among those of sailing naval combat games. Mainly that it is more focused on ship customization and combat than long-winded traveling for trade you would see in traditional sailing games. My biggest compliment though is definitely for the devs, that for their first game have delivered something really special as well as being a great group of people to engage with. They are very active on discord and receptive to the community feedback we have been giving them since before and after launch. Major bugs are getting stamped out quickly and many useful features and adjustments have been made based on feedback given without waiting weeks or months you might see from most other developers.

I see some worries of people occasionally that "this game should have been marked as early access". That being said, their reasoning makes sense, in that most of the game is already finished, and no major features are missing. The majority of the planned updates are for quality of life, balancing, and improvement of existing systems, capped off with finalizing story contents and the main story of the game. So it is fair to mention currently the planned story update is to be released in the time of Jan 2024, so the game is still not "complete". But the game is far from "early access" for the scope of what the devs had planned for the game, and is fully enjoyable as it is, if you don't mind waiting for the final story chapter. (There is still plenty of story currently.)

One thing to note that requires a lot of work if it isn't already planned for, after the first big chapter of the game characters do not have any voice acting anymore (at least in English). I am not sure if they are planning to add voice acting for the entirety of the story as there is quite a significant amount of dialog to add, but I hope it is something in the works. That being said you do at least get enough time hearing the main cast that you will certainly not forget their voices, and it does add a nice amount of flavor to the characters, which are far from shallow compared to similar games in the genre.

For those that read the first paragraph and wondered if that means the game is not fun outside of combat, there are definitely plenty of systems in the game for trading, freight and industry. Freight is by far the biggest source of income in the game and sees the player taking contracts to move bulk amounts of goods around the map, not having to worry about whether or not they will make a profit. Though trading isn't the biggest money source because of vendor limits, and industry needs a lot of QoL that is coming in the next update.

As a lifelong fan of Armored Core, since AC2 and playing every single game since, this really feels amazing to play - my favorite in the series so far. The game is optimized and runs like butter on a standard system here, 980ti gpu and 5800X cpu, not a drop below 60fps on high settings 1080p. Haven't encountered any issues like frame drop in hangar or crashes.

Melee. The melee combat in VI is so vastly improved upon the old and as someone who always tried to play with a focus on melee as much as possible, but many times found it rather difficult, this is a whole new experience on that change alone. The combat feels more fluid than ever, and all kinds of builds have been fun -- not finding myself just building a one trick and sticking with it no matter what like I tended to do in other games of the series.

Attitude. A vast change to the combat flow of the game versus ACs and special threats is the attitude control system. You, as well as all enemies, will suffer a crippling stagger if too much impact damage is taken too fast, overcoming your "ACS" system. During a window that is modified by "Attitude Recovery" you or your enemies will take massively increased damage during this time, making this a very key component to the combat that is new for the armored core series. It's the strongest and generally primary way to deal with special threat bosses in the game, and can be a strong (but not as crucial) part of defeating enemy ACs.

The game is very forgiving, despite people saying otherwise. You get checkpoints before bosses, as well as hp/ammo refills on longer missions leading to bosses, as well as ability to change your build and re-attempt the boss without replaying the mission. (And a reason to buy many different parts so you have options to switch to. Just replay some missions here and there to get some extra credits). No massive setbacks like forcing players to take losses on failing a mission or restricting access to funds in a playthrough (you can repeat missions or arena as much as you want for the funds you need at any time). While a skilled player that already knows the bosses can win any mission in any mech with skill, there are absolutely counters in the game that matter much more than previous titles, as the bosses are much more unique and varied. Don't give up on bosses -- if you are having trouble try changing your weapons and build.

The decal and emblem system is expanded from previous titles, now with more freedom than ever, even with new abilities like using layer masks, and you can easily upload and share/download other emblems and decals with share codes. Only downside here is that PC players cannot use codes from console players, but as time goes on there will definitely be lots of things uploaded to choose from. I already spent 7 hours recreating the White Glint emblem. Code: 1P5EB6FAYEP2

Final massive note -- KEYBOARD AND MOUSE. After 20 years of playing armored core with controller, it seemed strange to consider trying KBM for VI, even though I haven't played console in years, there are certain games I simply prefer controller. After a few hours I gave it a shot and will never look back. The game is completely transformed by the freedom you have using the mouse to look around, not needing to worry about turn rate any longer which was a huge part of every single AC game to date. In addition to freeing you up to have access to all movement commands while firing all four weapons without doing some strange claw grip on your controller, I recommend to everyone to give KBM controls a shot.

Definitely an amazing entry for Armored Core and we welcome it back!

[Also a coincidence that the game is 84% positive and only 84% of players have beaten the tutorial? Hmm.]

I didn't review Icarus when I was deep in the game, but feel like it deserves one from me. First off, the devs have really shown a standard first in how they handle the development for the game, always listening to the community and engaging well with feature upvote so no QOL has really been left behind, and bugs get tackled effectively. I wish more companies would start using this website or method for a much better experience playing a game as it develops.

As for the game itself, ICARUS has been one of the more compelling survival games I have played, though at times it can feel a bit simplistic, it really does excel in what it offers, with dynamic weather that is an actual interesting and integral experience to the game, wildlife that (mostly) is realistic and always interesting to hunt/be hunted by, and a very impressive visual experience that doesn't suffer on slightly older hardware (I can run great without fps drops on high settings with an aging 980ti).

Honestly unlike any other survival game where you are focused on the grind in one way or another, ignoring the experience, ICARUS really flips that around for me. Spending most of my gameplay lost in the beauty of the environment -- the views, soundscapes, and wildlife really making me feel like I am in the real wilderness, and I just enjoy whatever I am doing in the game, even if it would just be mundane activities in any other survival game.

For the main focus of the game which drew me in, the drop and extract system of gameplay as you take on contracts, earn rewards, and extract to spend your earning on equipment upgrades you can use as additional progression to your character from talents and tech, it was a very interesting experience that only waned off for me after reaching the final items and finding myself focusing on only playing the one mission that was the fastest way to earn currency. Otherwise, for a good 80 hours before that the missions were engaging on their own and certainly a fun way to progress through experiencing the different areas of the map, and I would still recommend new players at least play through the mission tree even with the new open world update. (I am not sure if new players can skip to this or when it unlocks, but I encourage still playing the mission tree at least for first experiences with each one, before you start grinding for currency.)

The devs have constantly added exceptional updates on a weekly basis without fail since launch, even if they in last few months moved towards smaller weekly updates/patches and releasing bigger content at once, whether I stopped playing for a few months or not I have constantly followed the weekly updates and they kept me excited about the future of the game and keep me coming back for more. Currently we just received the total fishing overhaul before which we got persistent open world and local saved games. On the horizon is a big update "Hypatia" proposing to add the mission structure into the persistent open world (will see how that works), which sounds like a great way to allievate the pain for players having progressed they tech on each mission only to have to abandon it and start over again and again, though that was the initial selling point I could see both being a good option, as well as just being a cool way to have even more content in the full open world mode. On top of that we have an expansion on the horizon "New Frontiers" we don't know much about yet but I look forward to both.

All in all I have enjoyed all my time playing ICARUS, with an extremely stable experience compared to most early access games, little to no crashes, great optimization, and constant updates, its definitely at the top of the list of survival games I have played.

Tons of innovation so far, unlike the numerous bandwagon Vampire Survivor clones that have shown up. With the quality of the game so far, the amazing aesthetic and continued updates this will be a game to remember for sure.

Enemies are way more varied and interesting, with totally different methods of attack (not just move towards player), actual attacks and patterns from bosses that make them very engaging and interesting -- to the player progression that isn't simply about getting all the upgrade points and steamrolling the game, but instead about collecting different items that excel for different characters. And oh how every character plays totally differently. Gameplay upgrades as you level up are even totally different from VS, focusing on the unique qualities of each character with "support" weapons as a second, makes it not fall into the 'samey-ness' feel you get after a while in VS, where you really just rely on how OP maxing everything out is and your character does not matter very much anymore.

So far having played the swordsman, archer, exterminator, and cleric, each plays completely differently, levels completely differently, and have their own focuses and detriments that make a whole new layer to enjoying the game that I feel is lacking from any other game in this genre so far, even in VS, where characters really only had major effects at the very start, until you approach your finished build and are just blanketing the screen with your weapon effects.

I applaud what we have for this game so far and how fresh it feels with all these new elements added. I look forward to more.

I will say that I have very much enjoyed Phantom Brigade at first, as the only other game I've ever seen with simultaneous turns like this was Frozen Synapse. On top of that, my love for strategy and mecha games, I was very much excited for the game. Unfortunately, Phantom Brigade is extremely plagued with poor design choices, an extremely shallow gameplay loop, zero story, and not much to look forward to at this time past 10 hours of gameplay. You just fight endless meaningless battles until you complete the campaign or quit the game.

I still can't recommend the game currently to anyone other than a hardcore mecha and sandbox nut. While only having been out shy of two weeks, I think the game is honestly extremely shallow and I hope to see the devs start adding new features soon, not just bug fixes, otherwise I cannot maintain a recommendation for it. I as well as many others have been extensively submitting feedback on bugs and feature suggestions, but I have to warn people that as much as I was looking forward to this game releasing to 1.0 instead of another early access dump, this is actually just an early access game without the disclaimer. As far as bugs go, the devs are hard at work addressing them and many of which that I or others reported in the first few days already got fixed, with a good amount of the others being written that they are working on it for future patches, so respect for that.

The game features however leave much to be desired. The game only has 3 tiers of equipment (common, uncommon, rare) variation for the loot you can find, and the rest is left to a very minimal mod/perk system with nothing but basic stat changes, through what seems to be an infinite leveling system. So you will not find yourself ever hunting for rare items, as you quickly obtain all blueprints, and go straight to crafting T3 items that you need the most, with your limit of T3 components. There is absolutely no reason to craft T2 gear, and T1 gear is only used for inflating your workshop level. The item variation for weapons is not bad, with quite a few categories other than standard gun types, but still leaves something to be desired, especially when a majority of said weapons are far outclassed by certain weapons that are currently OP. The leveling system is also very poorly implemented, where all enemies on the map only level up when the player liberates a zone, meaning you can grind over the hardest enemies in very short time, and then the second you decide to capture a zone, every enemy on the map will shoot several levels over your squad and you will have a harder time fighting than when you just started the game. Having gear simply 3-4 levels below enemies means you basically can't even damage them, and this is the jump I experienced after I farmed to level 15 with level 13 enemy cap on the map, then enemies jumped to level 18-20.

The customization system is quite bad in my opinion, luckily I was able to find just one set of colors that I liked, but the color system forces you to use groups of three colors predetermined by the devs as color swatches, meaning players who actually care about their looks beyond slapping random things on will be very upset that they have no freedom to choose anything. You can see how poor this system is just using any of the energy weapons that have a glow, the third/tertiary color on the swatches is used for glows and the only possible colors available for tertiary among 78 different combinations are orange, red, yellow, and many grays-blacks. Instead of simply using a system where players can say, make their own groups of three colors to apply to their mechs, I cannot understand this system. Even if we had only 20 colors to choose from, but were not forced to choose from these predetermined groups of three colors would be better.

Pilot customization is also quite bad, with the 3D models of characters looking basically like clones, no matter what presets you try to use, other than changing their skin color. Men and women are nearly identical, and there are extremely limited hair options. Nothing that really does any justice for a female character, but that aside, the whole system isn't great, and I saw one stray mention that the devs used to use 2D images before release, which may explain why the design of the 3D characters being the way it is.

Furthermore, there is NO pilot progression whatsoever. You only get a basic stat note of pilot missions completed and total kills. They do not level up, gain more hp/concussion resist or have any skills at all, and really makes me wonder what the point of the pilots even is? When hiring a single new pilot you get to see if they have perhaps, slightly higher or even lower hp/concussion than pilots you already have, and without even the basic ability to fire pilots you don't like and there being a cap of 8, means to try to find a better pilot you have to actively go get them killed in a battle. Wholly, a baffling lack of depth that does not compare in even the slightest to how you grow and get attached to your roster in a game like XCOM or just about any other of the genre.

As for story, (or lack thereof) every battle after the tutorial is just a means of getting some loot, with no depth, and the capital battle is just a battle with a lot of enemies. Nothing even special to it... I wouldn't mind this as much if the rest of the game had some better depth to it, I have enjoyed plenty of pure sandbox games. The only other occurrence is when you get an occasional random event popup with perhaps a couple of choices. They don't offer any story the majority of the time (I had one event that was just a pilot telling a ghost story), and instead are usually just a minor check to give up some supplies to help a civilian, start a quest to go attack a designated area (nothing special), or a simple +/- check. Not only do these events have nearly no positive impact, usually just giving your pilots a bit of hp back (even though they heal to full quickly after a battle anyways), but the negatives are non-existent, as I have never seen a single event where you risk anything, unless you just choose to ignore giving a few supplies and lose 1 hope or home guard point (which those don't even matter, whether because they are easy to get to max, or because they have little value).

One strange thing to point out, there may be an issue with events even more than a lack of them, considering in 60 hours of play I only just encountered the event of a stray dog, and never once is there a mention of the dog again, despite an achievement for "cultivating a strong bond with the dog/cat". It does not appear in the pilot screen, or anywhere in the game. Add this to things like the "black market" "civilian market" "criminal reputation" and I wonder where all these features are?

I have to mention that just about any other mecha I have played at least attempted to have an interesting backstory, from my all time favorite Front Mission 4, which had an unforgettable cast and insanely amazing story to play through, to the mystique of the Armored Core universe, the absolute lack of an overarching plot here is jarring at best, and not worth your time at worst. With the complete lack of pilot progression or meaningful customization, I really have to wonder why we didn't get a cast of characters to play with instead that we could get attached to. Even if they risked death, I would have found that to be a much more profound experience than, well, nothing at all.

There could have been an opposing force to chase you down around the map, hunting your mobile base, or the enemy could attempt to take back zones you liberate. There could be any number of things that would have added some meaning to the campaign, but there is not one. I hope to see the game grow in depth, as all of these issues combined leaves the game a very empty shell of what it could be.

No game should have the power to stain our steam accounts because we quit playing lmao get out of here.

One of the best sandboxes I've ever played. A rich world that you can explore in any way you want, made even better with a thriving modding community. Played for a couple hundred hours each time I start a new save and just came back to play it again. The devs have had great success and are already working on a sequel that we hope will be even more amazing taking all the experience into account with things that could have been done better in Kenshi, but even then, I find the game to be an experience that has been nothing but fun -- any crashes or issues I've had have basically been from playing heavily modded but nothing that ever really hurt me from continuing to play, just quicksave often enough and no harm no foul.

The game has two very significant features built in that set it apart from others like it (The gameplay speaks for itself --) one is the edit system which allows players complete control to change the world in their game, modifying buildings and any structures in the game -- whether player built, base game, or modded. Giving us the freedom to make things how we want, fix small issues that crop up ourselves, or just to make a player with OCD a happy player with OCD. All accessible on the fly, which have been by far the most useful game tools I've ever had in a game. Very often in sandbox games like these you can find yourself frustrated by something you want to do but can't get it to work right, whether it be building in strange spots or having multiple mods changing the game in an unplayable way -- but becomes all fixable with some know-how and a very easy to use interface.

The second one isn't as much to elaborate on, but the ability to import save game data into a new set of mods, game update, or even just to allow you to reset relation "mistakes" or npcs dying you wish didn't, several settings you can choose and import your hundreds ++ of hours save and still fix things (or add entirely new mods like brand new cities) that otherwise are impossible to come back from are not an issue (such as some significant world changing events when certain NPCs are killed).

The gameplay is something to experience in your own way -- whether you want to play with a single character or as large as a squad of hundreds that you can grow by recruiting along the way (with the help of some mods), this is an easy game to put as much time into as you want. One thing I will recommend is that you should absolutely have an SSD for the game though, otherwise the load times can be very bad with mods. (That is, load times from reloading a save. There are no loading screens in the gameplay as you explore the entire world, though if you travel across the map faster than you can load the world, you will be forced to pause for a bit to catch up, thus why you should use an SSD.)

Overall a fantastic game that I think stands above its peers, and I highly anticipate the release of the sequel.