Greekheim. That's the best way to describe this game. It's Valheim, with a new skin. Like Valheim, I struggle to call this a survival game. It has some survival elements, but at best I'd call it "survival-lite" or "RPG exploration base builder". You do not have to eat or drink to stay alive, food provides buffs in the form of more health and stamina, and/or regen. There is no drinking. Once you reach a certain point in the game (very early), you don't even take fall damage anymore. The only way to die is in combat. It's no more a survival game than a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. The game is beautiful, but the world feels a empty once you've spent a few hours in it. This can be a pro or con. If you're after a lot of action, this may not be the game for you (in its current state). If you want a more relaxing "survival" experience, this game is quite nice. Enemy spawns are sparse, and locked to their spawn areas. You'll always find enemy spawns at the same place you found them last time, they either stand in place or roam a very small area. Having random spawns and wandering enemies would greatly enhance the "survival" aspect of the game. Wildlife far outnumbers enemies to fight, so if you enjoy being a hunter, you'll like this. Speaking of hunter gathering, this game is an OCD gatherer's dream. Or nightmare. Look at any screenshot of the game. *Everything* you see can be gathered. Whether it's by axe, pickaxe, or your hands, everything has a use. Walking through the game you're constantly shown "Press E to gather..." on every bush, stick, or rock you pass. You can constantly spam E as you walk around and have a steady stream of items go into your storage. As for storage, it's entirely space oriented. There is no weight. You have a set amount of spaces in your "backpack", and you can fill them all with full stacks of items at no detriment. I rather like this, dealing with weight management is a more annoying part of survival games. Like every survival game that's ever existed, item durability goes down way too fast. I'm patiently waiting on the day that devs realize this is an annoyance and adds nothing to gameplay. The map is very nice but small. This game uses a hand crafted world like Conan Exiles and Ark, so there is no sense of finding anything new and wondrous on a next play through once you've explored the whole thing. This wouldn't necessarily be a con, but the world is pretty small. You can run across the map in a few minutes. There is a section not available yet, you can see it on the map but cannot enter. Once this opens up it will increase the world size by a good bit, but it will still be small. If this is all the game world we get, I see this as being a pretty big limiting factor for the longevity of the game. The legend on the map needs to be separated from the map as an image, so it's always visible as you're zoomed in and scrolling around the map. The map icons are a bit busy and it's easy to forget which ones are what without having to reference the legend. Combat is fun but nothing that stands out compared to any other game. You have your standard stamina based block and dodge and some "heavy" attacks tied to sprinting. These attacks are the Troy inspired lunge attacks. They're fun. Bows work well, you don't feel like you're having to unrealistically compensate for an overly enthusiastic missile drop like many other games have. Combat is fun and easy to master, can't complain. You earn stamina based "super powers", such as air dodging, superhero landing, and gliding, but they don't seem to have a purpose other than being there to be cool. Gliding feels like a substitute for Conan Exile's climbing and traversal system. Other than gliding, I forget the other two exist because I have never needed or wanted to use them. This is something that absolutely needs to be fleshed out properly. If these are going to be in the game, they need to have a purpose. Building is nice but is lacking depth. The build system works well, you never struggle to place anything or have to try and glitch things to get them placed how you want them. You'll quickly find that you want to do things that you just don't have parts for. Hopefully the build system will be expanded on in the future. Performance needs some work, while I can hold over 60fps at 4k with my system, the game doesn't *feel* very smooth. Even using a separate program to inject scaling and framegen, it still doesn't feel smooth. You will have to play around with a lot of the settings and API choices to get the game feeling as smooth as possible. Overall I do recommend this game, if you're a fan of Valheim and are ok with buying into an obviously not finished product in hopes of it being fleshed out in the future. It's fun, but in its current state you only have a few days of content to play with.
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