Recent reviews by Sturm Pionier

Its an amazing product for a small team passion project. Do not expect AAA budget.
Pros:
-Game is built around easily tailoring your preferred experience from loot availability, zombie lore, progression of time, all the way to mod integration
-Lots of systems to play with that make for a great roleplay experience. You can struggle with hoards in the city and attempt to carve out sanctuary building a fortress and looting for treasures or just as easily live in the forest away from it all just trapping game and fishing for food.
-If you like Runescape you have stat grinding (optional since you can tweak XP gains at start)
-Character building is full of deep choices before you even start the game. Easily hundreds of builds before mods even.
-Can be fun with friends to try and survive your apocalypse. Now with B42 and forward you can survive and thrive into the "Alexandria" stage of redeveloping communities with farming, agriculture, and the ability to create new tools from raw resources.
Cons
-Game has been in development for 11+ years at this point and things are still going slow.
-While mods are great it feels like the game practically requires a dozen for expected features IE: Lockpicking, prying doors with crowbars, the ability to freehand draw on maps ETC.
-I cannot see PvP ever working in this game to be any fun because of current game engine limitations.
-Game is extremely janky mechanics wise and require vast esoteric knowledge for success. Moodles only provide vague information and being told you may not know that as soon as your character gets the tired moodle you do 50% less melee damage. Damaging your right hand basically screws your ability to do melee. Hitting a zombie multiple times builds up combo damage each hit stacking infinitely. These are all mechanics the game will not explain in any way.
Mod Specific:
Mods like Week one are really opening the sim aspect and allow an experience akin to 2004's Dawn of the Dead opening so you can watch the decline of humanity first hand.

Its pretty good when they aren't removing the fun.

EDF is simply amazing. So simple yet amazingly re playable and fun with friends.

Any review containing "Pay to win" is being willfully ignorant as there is nothing you can buy for real cash not available from the in game market and PvP is always matchmade based on what you have equipped. I went from free starter packs always to the highest power items in less than a month without needing to insert a credit card.

Pros:
-Matchmaking is smooth and you can buy/sell/craft without ending queues which are usually less than a minute
-Matches are quick and combat is fun and arcadey.
-Build variety is amazing with hundreds of different parts to mix and match for style or effect
-Less grind than any other FTP i have probably ever played to get to cool fun stuff
-Don't like a build? unlike other games where you wasted 50 hours to unlock a weapon you don't like you can sell it on the in game market and possibly make a profit to buy new parts you want to try instead and it even tracks what you paid to make it easy.
-Helicopters are mixed with normal armored cars and PvP only currently, fun but is currently undergoing re-balancing on the test servers for auto targeting weapons.
-Aside from cosmetic skins that swap the entire model of weapons and cabins (no bonus only visual overhauls) everything else including most decorations are able to be earned and bought from the player market without spending a dime.

Cons:
-Still pretty damn grindy
-Bots: Up to half a match may be filled with bots, they can be free points or an annoyance depending on how you look at them
-If you are a late comer like me it takes a while to earn some of the cool structure parts with engineer badges you get from doing weeklies but they are still available for free.
-Servers can have stability issues but worst case is you lose the progress of a 4 minute match.

AI= still garbage that kills itself
Content= Piece mealed as DLC
Sieges= No balance and AI cannot navigate a town map anyway
Because its fantasy they have gutted most of the 4X mechanics for "steamlining"
The only upside of this game is the spectacle. Creative Assembly got a license to print money but decided investing in it wasn't worth while.

Insert Credit card to win

ESG'd to death. DO NOT BUY.
Got bought by people who don't care about the game.

Ten years in December and game is still in what any other company would call early beta at best. Vehicles were added and removed only to be re added but still not work at all. Zombies AI is buggy as all hell and they still skate around while swinging. 3rd person in a game of high risk instant death is just bad design because the optimal strat is sitting prone perfectly safe on a roof and pop up to instantly kill anyone in line of sight. Your own character model will disconnect from collision mesh allowing you to die trapped by zombies indoors while running down the road or simply have the camera fly through walls.
Simply put, its a game that will never be complete because the engine seems to not physically be capable of achieving it.

Its battlefield 2042 but with support and free to play.
Game is great and can be played mindlessly like battlefield solo or full mil sim with platoon and tactical command in 50+ man groups. Factions are NC= titanfall merc/freedom fighter boys. TR= Commies who love rotary guns. Vanu= imagine covenant weebs.
Downsides is the games market is stupidly expensive however only cosmetics options are restricted to premium currency.

Ignore the sales page the game finally hit 1.0 on 9/25/24 when they finally implemented a non complete RNG item progression system to make the game playable.
>I still wouldn't advise giving any money to Fatshark as this game has gotten ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for real content since launch.
>FOMO shop filled with overpriced garbage because they had to copy D2's Eververse. The worst problem is half the "premium skins" have ♥♥♥♥ modelling and clipping issues. Why would pay $20 for a skin in a $60 game that look worse than modded skins in other games?
>Game has a solid L4D gameplay loop and good atmosphere
>Game also crashes lots and still has mission ending bugs and terrible decision in level design at times (Like a pit under a railing that can't be escaped and forces you to leave the mission or just close the game in frustration)
>Guns can't be customized in any useful way (without mods) so if a gun has a bad sight its useless in vanilla even if the weapon is amazing
>Even after 2 years we still don't have the ability to choose to play solo despite it being a Beta promise. So if you play max difficulty missions you may just be joining a speedrun Zealot who literally doesn't want you there if you don't have a build for it.
>Still after 2 years you cannot simply choose a mission you must wait for them to rotate onto the available pool. This means if you play on highest difficulty for fun you only get to see 3 maps every few hours. The limited map pool is really not helped by this.
>If you really want to buy this game get it on deep discount. This game was basically unplayable trash for over the first year of its life even after "1.0" and Fatshark has done nothing to ingratiate themselves to players right after it was released they sold a better version on XBOX store that had $30 in premium currency for free and those who had been Beta testing their broken product were given our Beta ♥♥♥♥♥ helmets to mark us as the clowns were are for expecting more from Fatshark.