Yet another tough call. Yet another zombie survivors (YAZS) is one of these games where it is really difficult to recommend or not recommend. Some will love it, others will hate it. The game takes the survivors-like genre, removes the bullet heaven part and focuses on making you struggle. Main strenghts of the game: Atmosphere. It is dark, it feels like you are truely one of the few remaining people on earth trying to make it through the apocalypse. You can only see the zombies charging at you from the shadows very late, constant running around no time to catch a breath, evading opponents and projectiles becomes your second nature. At the same time the game manages to grasp the atmosphere of an action B-movie with the shooting and the explosions and the noise from both. Plus the references to pop culture, as well as the jokes when you bite the dust, are really entertaining. All in all this survivors is glorious. Because it feels the part. You're not some godlike entity throwing effects all over the screen to spawn kill everything while jerking off with your free hand - you are prey. It's not pixle graphics! Do I really need to explain this one? Not everyone wants to play a game that looks as if it was running on a 64-bit console back in the 90s. YAZS looks pretty decent. What you see in the screenshots is what you get. And if you turn down the brightness slider it just becomes so immersive - standout feature. The devs are still working on this game. In fact it is constantly being worked on. Earlier versions ran like sheit - the dev team optimized it. Sound effects were rather annoying - the devs made new sound effects. There were two new maps and several playable characters being added since the start of early access. The menues and statistics got an overhaul, it's a pretty convenient game now. Main weaknesses of the game: The difficulty. This may not be only a downside per se, but this game is really difficult. Dying on your run happens a lot even if you know what you are doing and after you've purchased long term progression upgrades. Often times games in this genre become easier the more you farm, this one doesn't. In fact every new game mode unlock, every further map is a steep increase compared to the last thing you did. Some people might love the game for it, but others will inevidably become frustrated after a while. Imbalance between weapon damage and abilities. This is something I had not encountered on any other survivors-like: YAZS utilizes both auto fire and auto aim. Theoretically you can disable auto aim, but that makes the game nearly impossible to play because stuff happens so fast and hordes of zombies come at you from all sides. The consequence of this system is, nearly constant auto fire from your weapons vastly outclasses abilities that have an area of effect and limited uptime. Worse still, because you are always running away from the enemy, a stationary ability is basically worthless, and because it auto aims you are very likely to not hit the biggest crowd but the single guy running up to you from the other side because he was closer. I barely ever find myself wanting to go for ability upgrades over weapon ones. The devs are still working on the game... Yes, this is not only a good thing. It's probably the biggest con holding the game back at the moment. YAZS launched with surprisingly little content into early access. And due to a small team, the updates are not coming that fast, nor are they huge. You can rely on something good being delivered, it just takes a long time. Now we need to compare the game to its competitors and what the genre is about: Usually people play survivors-like/bullet heaven because there are a ton of characters, stages and items to unlock. So you get a lot of quality time out of a low game price. YAZS on the other hand is severely lacking in that department: There are only three maps, seven heroes, a very limited progression tree, three tiers of unswappable skills per character, as well as a bunch of items to unlock for the random loot pool. Conclusion. YAZS has the potential to be one of the best the genre has to offer. But it's not there yet, not by a long shot. This is a typical case where I would say: Let these guys cook another three years and it will be amazingly good. This review being thumbsup is mainly because I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. I believe this team will eventually finish their game one day. But any potential customer needs to be aware they are buying into uncertainty. If you don't mind that, you can buy right in and enjoy what already is implemented. If you'd prefer a complete game that can stack up against whatever you played before, you better check back in two years or so. If this review helped or entertained you please consider giving it a thumbsup.
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