Recent reviews by Arcter

I wanted to like this game, and found it to be pretty satisfying in parts, but overall the design is just too simplistic and overly weighted towards punishing the player. This might be partially due to the fact that I tried to play as a melee diplomat character, though it was on the "normal" difficulty setting, which I had assumed would be lightly challenging but not enough to present too many unwinnable situations. I'll briefly discuss some of the issues that were most frustrating for me.

- No overwatch or unused AP carrying over between turns. If you finish a turn with unused AP, it just disappears. You can't set your character to attack when something gets in range, and your movement eats up a ton of AP, meaning as a melee you basically have to facetank 2-3 turns of every enemy firing on you until you're actually able to engage one of them.

- No cover, crouch, directional positioning, or defensive posture. There are no active ways to reduce an enemy's ability to hit you apart from standing behind walls and your passive damage mitigation like armor.

- AI controlled squadmates. On one hand, not having micromanage every move is arguably nice, but on the other hand, your AI guys can get very dead very fast because they just don't exhibit the slightest amount of common sense. They tend to kamikaze a lot, and sometimes just wander around in the back without firing a shot because they can't figure out how to move forward. It's agonizing how a fight you have failed miserably can be whomped on a subsequent attempt due completely to AI having lucky RNG.

- Status effects that make you unable to fight are frequently inflicted on your party, but almost never on enemies. Too often I have spent the majority of a battle just watching the AI fight itself because the main character, the only character you actually control, is prone on the ground and can't get up. I assume the knocked down status can be reapplied while you're prone because I've been stuck on the ground for entire fights (even after taking resistance to it). When using aimed shots to do the same thing to an enemy, it rarely works, despite hitting or even critting on the target.

- Overabundance of kill quests for which the objective is found via random encounter. Wandering back and forth in an area with the vague hope that A) I'm in the correct place and B) the thing I'm looking for will actually engage me just feels very uninspired gameplay-wise. A few of these would be okay, but too many quests just have you basically just hoping RNG will smile on you.

- The inventory is such a mess to dig around in, and often becomes unresponsive to mouse-scrolling. Being forced to constantly juggle a thousand pieces of pointless garbage between characters due to weight constraints is a gameplay feature I've never enjoyed in any game. It would be nice if you could just sell all your junk at any time, but you're discouraged from doing this because the economy fluctuates, meaning sometimes you get a decent price for your loot, and sometimes it's worth virtually nothing.

- Playing through on normal difficulty, I encountered way too many unwinnable fights. I would reload, regroup, assign new tactics to squadmates, equip them differently, sometimes leave and grind out another level, etc... and it just didn't help much. In certain fights it seems hard coded that enemies get to go first and basically shred your entire party with sniper rifles or grenades before you ever get a turn. All combat boils down to which team can use overwhelming force to bludgeon the other team to death. There's nothing strategic to the combat at all, given that it's mostly you watching simplistic AI fighting itself.

- When there are a lot of units in a fight, combat takes FOR-EV-ER. Maybe this was partially my fault for playing a melee character, but the majority of larger fights were me taking 5 seconds to repeatedly walk 7 steps without attacking anything (because everything was always 2-3 turns worth of movement away), then sitting watching the AI for 30 seconds.

- Using combat meds can give your character an addiction debuff. Radiation sickness is generally cured with alcohol, which can cause an addiction debuff. Walking around the overworld causes a hunger debuff. It's nice at least that your squadmates are immune to these debuffs, but I still struggle to see what they add to the game that is valuable or fun.

I enjoyed this game enough that although I'm quitting / uninstalling, I'll keep an eye on it to see if updates make it sound more appealing to my sensibilities, but I don't get the impression development will trend in that direction, based on the tone of the forum community. That's a shame because I think the ATOM RPG team has built a good foundation, but without adding more complexity to the combat, I think most players will find the game too aggravating to stick with.

Played ~10 minutes, my review is not for the game itself, but the lack of features. Issues for me...

* No option to increase the field of view
* No option to disable motion blur
* No option to disable depth of field
* No option to significantly decrease mouse sensitivity (lowest setting does nothing)
* No option to disable bloom
* No option to disable screen shake
* No option for click to aim
* Alt+F4 doesn't close the program
* 30 second "check for updates" every time you boot up the game
* While using M+KB but with gamepad plugged in, all command prompts show gamepad keys
* Too many non-attack actions keyed to a single button

I could tell immediately this game would give me intense motion sickness if I played for more than a few minutes. Disabling all of the above-mentioned settings requires decrypting and altering config files, which I'm not willing to do. It's clearly a zero effort port of a console game. No thank you.

Fun, immersive, scary, rewarding, and recommended.

I enjoyed the sense of progression, though having new upgrades based on finding semi-random item caches (what's in the cache, not where they're located) occasionally threw up some frustrating barriers. I'm not a fan of hunger / thirst oriented chores in survival games because they tend to come up obnoxiously frequently, but you're able to play without them. Once you get to endgame, things happen pretty quickly, and after it's done, there's not much reason to keep playing. That being said, I'm looking forward to doing another playthrough as well as the DLC that's eventually coming out.

People looking for good combat should probably look elsewhere. The game does have hostile creatures, but running away is almost always going to be a better option than fighting, particularly with the larger threats. Initially seeing these creatures can be frightening, but after you learn their behavior patterns, they mostly feel like what they are, which is generally just animals being animals. The story is somewhat bare bones and told more as something that happened rather than something you are personally experiencing. My only real complaint about the game was the lack of a map in-game, something which I hope has been / will be fixed with a mod.

I highly recommend this game.

It's hard to recommend this "game" to just anyone because although I love it, I suspect 90% or more of gamers would find it dreadfully boring. The entire premise is simply cleaning up messes. There is no other gameplay. Nothing attacks you or attempts jump scares because you've arrived on the scene after all the action has happened. Unless you play with someone else, you basically don't encounter another living creature in-game. It is possible in very specific circumstances to die, but there are no repurcussions for death, you just respawn.

The mechanics are all designed to be repetitive, semi-tedious busywork with mediocre tools. That being said, I find it deeply meditative to turn on some music or a podcast, enter a level and just set everything to rights. Going through an area covered in trash and gore and making it spotless... there's genuine satisfaction to be found here. I prefer to ignore the in-game evaluation system, which seems inconsistent and irritating, and just clean things to my own standards.

What a typical session consists of:

1) Picking up countless bits of trash and gore and running them to the incinerator. This is by far the most time consuming element. You thankfully have access to trash bins that allow you to carry more than one item at once.
2) A lot of mopping. Mop buckets need to be replaced after a short while or you just redeposit filth. The dirty buckets must to be incinerated.
3) Little odd jobs like welding bullet holes shut or restocking emergency kits.
4) Recleaning stuff because you accidentally made it messy again with bloody boot prints, fire damage, a severed limb getting blood on something, etc.

To be clear, this is not an exciting game and arguably not a fun game, but as previously stated, it can be rewarding. There are also a lot of nods to familiar gaming and sci-fi tropes or moments. The game has a dark sense of humor, evident in some of the massacre sites you encounter, and although there's no narrative to the game as a whole, every level has a vague backstory that can be explored through found objects and data logs.

A couple negatives... the game has sometimes triggered motion sickness for me, some of which can be mitigated via the options, but not all. The netcode feels wonky, with more distant friends having significant lag. Obviously this doesn't make a huge difference because there's nothing happening action-wise in the game that necessitates rock solid sync-up, but the lag can do weird things to the game's physics.

I would suggest watching some gameplay vids before buying this game, but I do enthusiastically recommend it for people who want to try something different.

So much fun and excellent at feeling fresh and somewhat random from game to game. Highly recommended to people who like Left 4 Dead, in particular.

Bit more detail with six years of hindsight...

Sincerely fun game, but I can't recommend buying it at this point (Nov 2018 onward) unless you have at least one friend with whom to play, and you're picking it up on sale.

Finding public lobbies that are A) actually going to fill or B) willing to let a new player stay is going to be very difficult. As for the gameplay itself... to be blunt, PDTH is punishingly hard. It's more of a purist game than Payday 2 in that there are no unlockable skills, so although loadouts evolve a bit over time, a level 1 player will still be working with the same skillset as a level 193 player.

This means you're either good at the game or you aren't, and if you're only playing with bots, you need to be really good. Historically some players took this as a challenge to be surmounted, while others find the difficulty to be tedious and move on to another game relatively quickly.

Speaking as someone who played a lot, I wouldn't really enjoy going back to this now, but it was really good back in the day, and if you can get a dedicated group for it, consider giving it a shot.