Recent reviews by Bran

Don't get why all the reviews are negative. DLC is a bit on the expensive side, but new map and new basegame cold features, snow environment, ETC is a huge huge huge boon to modders.

Like blackwake with more boats but smaller crews

I'm gonna use this space to address a couple of common problems people have with the game. This might sound condescending at times, but that's only for people who it applies to. you know who you are.

Q: "WAH IT TOOK ME 8 HOURS TO FARM FOR MY FIRST SHIP!!!!"
A: Dude. In the town you start in at the dock is an NPC that you can talk to that will build you a sloop for about 500 units of some various resources. You get about 80 wood per tree harvested. You can walk around for a few minutes and gather some fiber. Kill an animal or two for some hide. You can now most likely afford the sloop. It's been maybe an hour. Upon restarting this took me maybe 30 minutes.

Q: "WAH I LEFT THE PORT IN MY BOAT THAT TOOK ME 8 HOURS TO GRIND FOR AND I IMMEDIATELY DIED"
A: This could be for a couple reasons.

1. Ships of the Damned. These are very easy to avoid if you pay attention. Even if you don't you can usually still survive the encounter if you're quick about it. They also have a very small aggro range for your small sloop to ensure that newer players can survive more easily.

2. Whales. These are a bit harder to avoid, but still very easy if you pay attention. If you can't see the GIANT WHALE THAT'S BIGGER THAN YOUR SHIP SLOWLY LUMBERING TOWARD YOU LIKE THE STEAMROLLER IN AUSTIN POWERS, then maybe you need glasses I guess.

3. Other Players being terrible people. This is the most common method of dying and losing boats. My suggestion would be to find a group via the official discord, or just.... try again. grinding for the sloop again isn't hard and infact the default ramshackle sloop is quite fast and can generally outrun all but the most dedicated of griefers.

Q: WAH THE BIG GROUP WAS MEAN TO ME WHEN I LANDED ON THEIR ISLAND!
A: Go to the official discord and look at the recruitment channel. If you don't want to join a group, find a group that's accepting renters to live on their island. You will pay them an automated tax and in return they will protect you. It's a very beneficial symbiosis for both parties. The group may even allow you to participate in PvP with them!

Hopefully this clears up some of the negative reviews. A lot of the ones as of recent are really grinding my gears because they're clearly written by people who don't want to bother slowing down and learning the game.

If you think I'm stupid feel free to leave a comment. I'll probably read it unless you're complaining about the wipe. The game needed it. Deal with it.



As a final note, you should be aware that the chinese clan "CSTG" has taken over a good majority of the NA Colonies server and seem to generally be hostile. When travelling, ensure you avoid their territory, lest you suffer a premature death I guess.

DayZ. Where can I begin? I guess first I should address all the negative stuff surrounding the game.

So. For starters, this game has been in early access for a... very long time. This really seems to have been a management issue. The developers seemed to want nothing more than to stick to the current engine and deliver content as much as possible, but couldn't decide to nail it down to doing so. They made content, did upgrades, made content, did upgrades... but it took them forever. It seemed every time they did an engine upgrade, they had to hold off on content, or redo the interface for the umpteenth time, or fix a load of newly introduced bugs instead of focus on content... and eventually, with the new player controller, they had to rip almost all weapons and vehicles out entirely. Their Art team has made all of this great looking content, and none of it's actually in the game now. For this, I do have to say that the hate is pretty justified.

However, I need to remind many people of something. Bohemia Interactive have never abandoned a game. DayZ has never been "abandoned". It has been mismanaged and poorly directed, but never did Bohemia ever abandon this game. For example, ArmA, bohemia's first title as an independent studio, recieved its last patch in 2011, despite a 2006 release date, the release of ArmA II in 2009, and the fact that it was infact essentially a re-release of operation flashpoint: cold war crisis, which had been developed by BIS under their then-publishers Codemasters. ArmA II is still recieving updates, with its latest patch, 1.64, releasing in 2018. DayZ is far from abandonment, and likely will continue to see updates for another 6 years yet at least.

Now that they have finally committed entirely to the new engine and have implemented it fully, things are very quickly being reintroduced. Mod support is a huge boon, too, with a larger weapon variety than ever before in the game's development. There's even already a few custom maps out! There's cars... base building..... farming... most of the things from 0.62 are here again. It's FINALLY coming together! However, despite that.... DayZ is not worth $45.

If you liked the mod. Or if you like Exile. When this goes on sale? Pick it up. You won't regret it now that things have finally started to go somewhere. Helicopters are coming... Lots of guns are being reimplemented. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It's been a long time coming, for sure.

epic store is dumb.

I would say that I will remove this review when BL3 comes to steam

But I won't because I don't like being talked down to by people who are trying to sell me things. This review shall stay here FOREVER as a reminder that making your game EGS exclusive and then trying to "take the high road" is a good way to make your consumerbase mad at you.

PSA: The server browser currently is buggy and doesn't show all servers. You can find more servers on the discord.
There are multiple modes other than just persistent mode that make the game go much faster, and you can also modify the parameters yourself.

If you like TTD or railroad tycoon, you will love Mashinky. It's currently a bit rough, as the game is still a bit early on and only being developed by one person (with a bit of help in the art department from a handful of people.)

Pros:

- Finally a modern alternative to TTD!

- Takes the same base gameplay formula from TTD, with more complexity added on top, such as station and industry upgrades, and more resources to manage than just cold, hard cash. I also really appreciate the addition of more than one grade of slope. It makes much more of a difference than you would think.

- YOU CAN RIDE YOUR TRAINS OH MY GOD

- YOU CAN DRIVE YOUR TRAINS OH MY GOD

- The game melds the isometric gameplay of TTD with the 3D, smoothed look of games like Railway Empire, Train Fever, and RRT3. It does a pretty good job of making the isometric building appear smooth!

- One of if not the only modern transport tycoon games with proper multiplayer!

- Mod support!

Cons:

- Era system is a bit... odd. I'm not sure how I feel about it, compared to introduction-date type like in RRT or TTD.

- Time really blazes by. There is no time to really enjoy things like riding your trains around. I hope the timescale is scaled back somewhat!

- Mod support is good but the current variety of new locos and stock is a bit smaller than I'd like. I wish we had more stuff! Not really on Jan though, so I can't subtract a point for that. Just something I figured I'd bring up.

Things that are also of note:

- The soundtrack is okay. It gets pretty repetitive, and for some reason, the game has two copies of each song in the folder, so each song plays twice for a total of 20 minutes of repetition per each song. This is really grating. I ended up replacing my soundtrack with the soundtrack from railroad tycoon 2 and 3, which was really easy to do. Just replace the soundfiles in the folder. They play in order.

- The trains are a very odd mishmash of european and american trains, with american town names. I hope this gets separated out in the future, with more variety!

- There is no transparent glass anywhere. This bothers me more than it should.

Some comments about the graphics:

The graphics are nice. They're a good step above the graphics from RRT3, but not even close to Railway Empire. Flat maps are very visually boring. Mountainous maps are pretty nice, however. I hope that the graphical fidelity of the cabins of the trains and cars are improved at some point.

Updated 4/25/2022

The game has come a long, long way since it was first released on EA. Some things of note:

On a PC using a 1070 and an i5 3600k, on the center map, I was getting 50-70 FPS in most areas, with small dips to 40 every once in a while, at the time of writing.

The Center map and Primitive + are both more than enough content to keep you very, very busy.

The Scorched Earth DLC was outsourced, and the game is very near to being feature-complete, with the intention of having been finished by now.

The Scorched Earth DLC is most likely an attempt to recoup money lost due to the recent lawsuit.

The game overall plays like rust with a much more relaxed tone that is less about PvP 24/7 and more about building your army to overtake the leading faction, or to play peacefully.

There are a -lot- of dinosaurs.

I personally don't see an issue with the Scorched Earth DLC, as it doesn't provide any tangible advantages over non-scorched earth players. The roles filled by scorched earth equipment are tailored specifically to the map, and it's all optional. The fact that it was released while the game is still in early access is indeed a bit shifty, but the game is -very- near to being complete, and infact runs quite nicely on modern higher tier gaming hardware, which it has been designed for.



In all, despite the outcry over the DLC, I personally enjoy the game and have gotten much, much more than my money's worth out of it over my time played, and will happily defend its devs and reccomend it to my friends.

Pros:

-Fun RTS

-Crazy amount of unit numbers with somewhat less micromanagement

-Realism

-Classic

Cons:

-Alttab makes the game crash. This is not a bug, this is a feature.

-Slavic netcode tries to balance game speed selection across multiple people

-Gamespy MP is dead, requires hamachi or some other equivalent


Verdict: If you played it as a kiddo and want to play again, get it. If you didn't, wait for Cossacks 3.

I came. I saw. I died a little inside.