Recent reviews by Bottle of Acid

Placing as not recommended only because the game feels like its marketing itself as something it isn't. If you expect Runescape or any other MMORPG game with engaging gameplay and systems, this isn't it. What it is though, is basically a collection of Clicker games / Idle games, or one clicker game but reskinned multiple times and then presented together as a game.

In essense, everything you do is tied to a profession. A profession has a leveling system that allows you to click on things around its level. If anything is above your level bracket, you simply cannot click or interact with it. Combat/ Foraging/ Fishing/ whatever. This results in mind bogglingly boring gameplay after the first hour or so.

But that's just part of it. As an MMORPG, it feels ... Lonely? You see a lot of players running around everywhere, but there is no interaction with them. You won't talk to them, you won't trade with them. You can't even attack the same enemy as them. Players are just mannequins.

The map design is segmented into very small cells akin to a Gameboy era title. While its not bad per se, I am not the kind of gamer that wears nostalgia goggles and praise games simply for re-enacting technical limitations of the past. It just feels jarring and not immersive when you are constantly walking between small rooms, even if it does have a slight charm to it.

The aesthetics are fine, but the theme is extremely generic. If you like it sure, but this game does not have the benefit Runescape had back in the day when medieval MMOs are as commonplace.

Quest design is outdated as well, often involving multiple chains of backtracking and fetch quests.

There are no doubt fans who love everything about this, but well...

No more money to stay in pre-alpha 2. Potential is there, but execution is lackluster. And Im not even talking about the technical issues.

Zombies make no noise and coop if you are not in a full premade is just chaos and utter failure. Permadeath means you are more likely to just lose your character and get nothing back because you entered a public lobby where 7 other people got eaten in some random corner of the map and you cannot extract because the game forces you to complete objectives before you can extract.

Im all for challenging games, but this one is just annoying. Compounded by lag and netcode issues means teleporting zombies and the like. Give it time to cook.

Graphics - Good
Map Variety - OK
Gunplay - Great
Audio - Great
Bugs - Frustrating
Mission Design - Lame

If you like tactical shooters this is decent, otherwise wait for it to cook.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Zombies do NOT stagger when you melee them, so there is no way to not take damage when you are in melee range. To understand why such a baffling decision was made, you need to understand that this game is literally the same game as their VR title Survival Nation but instead of VR they slapped in desktop controls and sold it a second time, without making proper adaptations.

In VR this is not a big problem, because you can reach out with your melee and back step easier.

Its decent, but the Extraction shooter style loot loss punishment NEEDS TO GO.

Your gameloop involves running 'Tours', which is a set of instanced missions starting with a few 'exploration' maps where you run around collecting resources and gear and sending a limited amount off through the recovery system (Which is basically ejecting loot into the sky from your base) that give a small roguelike bonus for the rest of the tour. At the end of each tour is the recovery day, the full-on assault main event where you are onslaught by waves and have to use all your weapons and towers to survive. After the tour concludes you bring back the loot and said loot can be used to research or upgrade stuff or use on your next tour (for consumables).

If you die during the tour you fail the entire tour and have to start again, and also lose all your loot that is not recovered. This is one of my biggest gripes with the game and I think the devs trying to shoehorn in Escape from Tarkov style punishment into a PVE tower defense game is just bad practice. There is literally nothing gained from making things punishing for the sake of punishment. This game does NOT need it.

The game is a mish mash mix of multiple facets the devs think is cool from other games thrown into a pot and stirred. Most work, thankfully, but some really stick out like a sore thumb. When you're playing singleplayer having to run around stuffing turrets with ammo boxes manually during a multi siege when you have tons of things going on can be too finicky. The Real Time Strategy component where you take a top down view and command units and build structures work decently well at least, and is one of the better aspects.

There are a lot of cool ideas here, and having a core weapon that you can change the parts to modify the behavior is at least awesome and reminiscent of Vanquish from the PS3 days.

Shooting is serviceable albeit a little rigid. The AI voices and awful dialog is meh, but not important. Models look pretty and visually its a spectacle. CIWS and rocket turrets pummeling at enemy waves while mechas unload barrages. Its visually one of the cooler games this year if you're into that sort of thing.

The main gist of the moment to moment gameplay involves using your custom build core tower base, see screenshots. Its a giant base where you can put individual walls and doors and turrets etc. Its awesome even though kinda limited at the start at least.

Decent game so far. Its probably way more fun in coop, but I don't know anyone crazy enough to buy games to play with me.

EDIT: DID I ALSO MENTION THERE IS PERMADEATH?

"Mom can we have Tarkov?"
"We have Tarkov at home."
Tarkov in the home toilet:

Pretty solid foundation that needs quite a lot of work. Server issues aside, the game is basically fantasypunk warframe, or think of it as MMO Remnant where your goal is mostly to craft new characters and weapons and level them up. There is an overworld to explore, although a large focus of the game is repeatedly running dungeons.

The core features are decent, but the polish and execution often falls quite flat. The open world looks pretty, and the map is fun to traverse, but the content in it is far lacking. You get your basic mobs, occasional minibosses and a number of public events that while fun the first one or two times becomes an auto-skip later. You aren't very well rewarded for exploring off the beaten path. There is not much hidden areas or special loot. After exploring and unlocking every waypoint in the first overworld I have only come across one miniboss that gave a special set item, and that was on the main path even.

Side quests are atrocious, mainly due to the lack of any waypoints or markers for more than half of them. There is literally one side quest that just says 'Find anyone who knows anything about this' and that's it. Another one, after you get the antidote item there isn't a marker to return it, and I have forgotten who spoke to me about it in the first place. Some quests have markers, some have them for the first half, many don't. Its inconsistent.I have a long list of quests I want to complete but am not because I have zero idea where to go.

Dungeon running is your main loop here, and you do so by crafting colored elemental stones which you use to change a dungeon into whatever element it is, adding an effect (Flora adds toxic shrooms and make all enemies toxic for example). The system is pretty cool, albeit there isn't really much difference in how you tackle the dungeon between them, with flora being the most annoying due to the need to slow down and clear the shrooms.

Dungeons still need more personality or mechanics as other than the good ole' spike dart in your face, there really isn't much else environmental hazards or mechanics in them. Most dungeons are simply A to B run, clear, run clear.

The dungeons are procedural-generated with modules that can connect to each other in random order, with a few events that will randomly spawn from a set pool. Many quests rely on this, and require multiple runs of the same dungeon to roll the event that you need. Some annoying design includes quests that require 3 pages when the dungeon always only rolls 2, which means you need a second run.

Characters are quite fun to play with, albeit currently they are standard MMO archetypes with very generic skills. You can bring any weapon on any character, so you can play a tank with a rifle if you really want to. Build variety is OK, but lacking because 90% of it is just stats. There aren't much that changes your skills or does special effects, most just buff or debuff numbers. Some 'echoes' give you special conditional effects, but overall the builds need to be more diversified.

In combat, its decent, and it exists in the middle between a tight action game like Warframe or Remnant, and a traditional MMO like WOW or the more modern ones, Its far more forgiving than Remnant, with plenty of time to evade most of the attacks, but there is still a requirement to watch telegraphs and constantly roll and heal on a higher level than an MMO.

In conclusion its a solid game but marred by a lack of polish or execution that is needed to take the game further past a baseline average. This is early access, and I hope the devs DO spend the effort to bring this game upwards.

Things we need:
-Better Build variety and options past stats
-More charismatic dungeons with better use of environmental behaviors
-More enemy types that change the way you tackle them

BEAR TRAP EVIL 4 is a faithful remake of the beloved title albeit Leon's legs do not have to lock down in the ground in artillery mode every time he needs to use his gun. Make no mistake, four parasite-infected villagers might be ready to bash his head in, but that sweet wooden SFX of barrels breaking is the reason the United States Government has sent only one man to do the unimportant task of saving the president's daughter. If Leon didn't have such a deadpan serious face even when uttering his one liners he would have gone insane from the dreary atmosphere. Like a pesky Egyptian street peddler the merchant returns. Whenever Leon leaves his shop he immediately packs up and runs through a hidden network of tunnels to set up shop coincidentally in the path as Leon stumbles upon him again, and again, and again. Enemy variety is decent - European Leatherface, Short Napoleon, Eustace Bagge on Crack to name a few. Its like walking through a Madame Tussauds, except the figures move and want to murder you. Leon doesn't care though, as he delivers supplexes and Thai kicks laying a smackdown to whoever is unlucky enough to get capped in the knee by his nine millimetre. Ada Wong is back, but not fully, as her side campaign that was present in the first game has been cut from this remake at launch.If you're a fan of Resident Evil, this one won't disappoint. Oh, and I hope you enjoy beartrap animations.

Sons of the Forest is a sequel to the first game, aptly named The Forest, where you play as a mercenary sent in with teams to find a missing billionaire and his family. Amusingly, almost none of the soldiers brought guns with them on the trip, save for a few who brought only four bullets with them.

The visuals are great. A huge improvement over the first, the island here sports very well crafted terrain maps, with a good mix of inclines, clearings and cliffs covered in lush foliage with enough variety to create some really beautiful screenshots. Long, clear streams and lakes flow and stretch around the island, providing access to drinking water and a means of log transportation.

The game's enemies exist in two main factions - Cannibals and Mutants. Cannibals are the main surface dwelling opponents, and multiple tribes have camps around the map, some more aggressive, although every tribe will be hostile to you. They are for the most part human-looking, and some will use primitive weapons. They will patrol the forest, increasing the patrol amounts at night and upon spotting the player, the scout will run back to camp to bring reinforcements.

Mutants exist mostly under the surface, in the game's dark and dreary caves. They have many deformations, and provide some of the game's more terrifying enemies. As you kill more cannibals, mutants begin to emerge more, and vice versa, as both factions are at heads with each other.

There are also animals such as deer, moose, rabbits and the like, which exist mostly as hunting game to provide you meat and bones, the former of which can be stocked up in camp to save food for winter. Yes, there are seasons in this game, and Winter changes the entire landscape into snow filled lands where visibility is improved but crops don't grow and fire is needed to stave off hypothermia.

As for you, the player, you have access to a few melee weapons and guns. Nothing too fancy, but they get the job done. Progression is not similar to standard survival games where gear is tier locked. Instead, gear is spawned at fixed locations that are often only accessible once you have acquired an item that lets you get to it.

This means that you can speedrun the game by reading guides and knowing exactly where every item is and picking them up quickly. However, this is not how the Forest is meant to be played. It is an exploratory game first and foremost, and the game is best experienced slowly discovering and searching the forest on your own. There are interesting scenes set up that tell the tale of the island before your arrival, and some are not even marked on your GPS.

Base building exists, and the second game lets you freeform builld custom structures using the logs. There are some missing items from the first game, such as water-based structures as of this review, but whats there is serviceable, mostly storage options as well as basic survival furniture.

As for stability, the game is not very well optimized yet, and crashes happen quite frequently on low to medium spec machines. A crash means that you would have lost all progress and items since your last save, so save often. There are some Early Access woes, such as loot falling through the ground, which can be annoying but not game breaking. There are a few exploits that can be done such as duplicating items and the like, but this is your game, so play how you will.

As a zombie survival game, it has the foundations covered quite well enough. Food, water sustenance bars, inventory grids, outfitting and basic base building. Most of what you will find here are basic survival trope mechanics you can easily find anywhere else. Character movement and flow is pretty decent. Aside from melee locking you into a casting animation, running around and jumping over stuff works for the most part.

Visuals are okay. It uses Unreal 5 which comes prepackaged with decent lighting and post processing. Most if not all of the structures are UE store market assets which you will recognize from other games, which isn't bad per se, but the level design here is often lacking, with almost everything slapped on a flat plane without far off visual markers like mountain ranges or landmark towers. Again, it looks pretty with UE5 lumen and an okay amount of assets used, but the placement is quite... Stale.

But what makes a zombie game stand out from the pack? I think this is something this title still needs to find out. There is a zombie night siege system similar to 7 Days or Night of the Dead, but this idea is no longer novel. If you take away all the standard survival game tropes, there is nothing. The zombies only come in two varieties, either your normal shambler or a crawler that is just a tougher zombie.

What this game ultimately needs is some higher overarching draw to it that other zombie games don't have. As of now, its a serviceable zombie survival game that gives you what you expect, nothing more. For its price, its nice to just muck around and kill zombies, and build a base and try to reach the final progression tree.