Recent reviews by jeremy

POS game people who like this are masochists in denial

As soon as I leave the vault I'm essentially enslaving all settlers and monopolising the purified water market. My favourite anti-capitalist game.

restarted devs ruined the game if i am starting off in ranked and i am COPPER I WANT TO VS COPPERS NOT EMRALDS AND DIAMONDS FOR 20 GAMES STRAIGHT WTAF IS THAT

Honestly dont know how this game has so many positive reviews. The devs actually spent more time botting the steam reviews to trick new people into buying this game than actually WORKING on their game.

Where do I start with whats wrong with this game BESIDES the constant ping spikes, you cant even be near 2-3 corpses without the game starting to delete itself. SO HOW DO YOU FIX THIS? you walk away from the food you need to eat or the 1-2 people you wanted to interact with.

Along with the ping issues comes FPS issues, I have a very high end PC and im lucky if I have 50 frames on the lowest settings when I walk towards anyone or anything. Forget actually playing this game youre just going to have rubber-banding constantly or fps issues.

To add onto the perfect gaming experience I once decided to safely logout using the sleep mechanic in the game because my scent bar (how u find food) was bugged and showing things that werent there and it was all around me. So when I logged back in my entire dino was reset and I had to start anew, which is great because I love spending hours on a character just to have to reset for no reason, I actually survived the horrible coding of this game and then I get destroyed upon trying to reset my game because of another bug i found.

Do yourself a favour and block this game so it never shows up again, if you disagree with this review you are a hive mind loser who is creaming himself to the lazy asf devs or you play the game with your eyes closed and the monitor off which honestly sounds like a much better experience than if you do otherwise. If you really want a dino game play POT instead.

overhyped just a glorifyed roblox game that will never patch any of its bugs because the three devs are in a circle jerk reading twitter posts about how brave they are to stand up to big corps by literally copying every aspect of this game from another game. Not one piece of originality besides the self glorification by people who play this game

how about instead of porting it from the 12 console players you just make the game for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pc and then i wont have to take out a mortgage to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ build a pc to run this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a game and even if i did that the game still stutters and has fps drops from a capped 60 like wtf are you on devs legit get your head of your ass its like you didnt even try to play the game on pc before you released it smd. 10/10 game tho

Very naice

Rust makes better use of voice chat than any game I've ever played. You are naked and alone on the world's silliest island. There is no narrator or announcer, so instead you submerge in the quietude of the unkempt grass crunching beneath your feet, as you uselessly smash your rock against the nearest pine tree. Perhaps you've also harvested some mushrooms and a few bundles of flax; enough to stave off the hunger pangs and fashion yourself a burlap shawl to cover your shame. If you're particularly industrious, you'll have furnished a nice wooden shack a stone's throw away from some fresh water and reliable resources—the entry-level homestead necessary for any successful Rust campaign.
successful Rust campaign.

ADVERTISING

But then you hear it. Faintly at first. Carried on the tip of the breeze. It's another idiot in Rust.

I don't know what it is with this game. Maybe it's the fact that you spawn unclothed and uncensored, maybe it's the brutal vastness of the design, or maybe it's the simple uncouth joy of doing bad things to other human beings, but Rust has a distinctly regressive effect on the human species. The voice chat merges with the draw distance, so when you're spotted by an idiot, you'll start hearing the ♥♥♥♥-talk quietly tickling your ear. They get closer, they get louder and more confident, and suddenly you're hopping over shotgun shells while absorbing an entire dictionary of insults.
It's so hilariously antagonistic that I wish I could say I didn't love it. I wish I could say that it didn't feel incredible when one of those naked idiots charged me with their rock and I switched to the battle axe I fashioned out of scrap metal (which he almost certainly didn't know I was carrying), and put him down with a single well-placed strike. I wish I could tell you that, as I was standing over his fatally wounded body, that I didn't laugh my ass off when my headphones were filled with the voice of a prepubescent boy shouting, "Hey man, wait a second!" I wish I could say I didn't kill him anyway. No game has ever indulged our lack of humanity quite like Rust, and I wish I didn't mean that as an endorsement.

If it feels like we've been living with Rust for a long time, that's because we kinda have. The game was first released in Early Access in late 2013 by developers Facepunch Studios, and it's been a mainstay of goofy YouTube send-ups ever since. If you're somehow unfamiliar with the premise, think of Rust as a dumber, more nihilistic Minecraft. You wake up on a map armed with only a rock and a torch. You quickly figure out that, by banging your rock on a few environmental doodads, you can harvest a few basic resources (stone, wood, and cloth) which you can parlay into a few prehistoric instruments, like a spear or a hatchet. This is similar to the scrounging mechanics in plenty of other survival games, but what makes Rust different is how deep that tech tree goes. Eventually, from those same basic ingredients and a few mechanical leaps of faith (like work benches and furnaces), you'll be able to craft pistols, flamethrowers, and rocket launchers. Rust famously does not quarter off its servers to keep entry-level nakeds away from the roving troops suited up in advanced firearms, which means that occasionally, your journey will end with you matching another player's revolver with a rock that you've tied to a stick.
This is the heart of Rust. Wake up naked, run for your life, do horrible things to one another. There is no grander narrative, or mythos, or win condition. Most of the servers are on a strict weekly or monthly reset schedule, which scrubs the island of any lingering housing or fortifications left behind by the players, which gives the experience a strange sense of futility. Yes, you will need to manage your hunger, thirst, and health—and as you ratchet up the tech tree you will discover increasingly effective ways to stay alive—but that's it. Sure there are some areas on the map that are stricken with radiation, which leads to the implication that perhaps you and the rest of your misanthropes are occupying a far-flung, post-collapse society, but those moments feel more like window dressing than anything else.

I spent the vast majority of my time in Rust playing solo, but I don't want to discount the notorious community of players that band together in clans, and wage wars of aggression along the shared hunting grounds. One of the fascinating kernels of Rust's brutality is how everything in the world remains persistent, even if you're logged off, which means that smart players arm their bases with land mines, punji sticks, and keypad locks while they're away. (Some clans even recruit players across all time zones, to make sure there's always someone on guard.)

That's a coordination I appreciated from a distance. There are a number of YouTube documentarians showing off the multi-man raids that spawn from committed Discord channels all over the world. Instead, I engaged with the population of Rust on a purely incidental level. An extremely geared man takes pity on you, and drops a crossbow at your quivering feet. That's Rust! A kid and I are raiding an abandoned gas station for food and weapons, and I give him the extra pair of pants I was carrying around. When I'm turned the other direction, he bashes his rock right through my skull and runs off with the rest of my stuff. That is also Rust.
Given the tone, it shouldn't be surprising that the community I found in Rust tended to be fairly juvenile and toxic. There's a high concentration of racism and misogyny in the global chat, so much so that I eventually left the channel entirely.

And unsurprisingly, the new player experience is quite prickly. The development team didn't spend any time cooking up a tutorial (which makes some sense, when you consider how long the game has been available). Instead, when you join one of the many servers, you're presented with a few faint hints in the top-left corner of the screen: "harvest wood!" "build a hatchet!" The crafting system itself is fairly intuitive, with well-written tooltips for each of the items in the catalog, and you can fast-track yourself into some serious munitions if you get lucky with a few resource spawns. The PvP combat won't win any awards, but it's tactile and packed with wonderfully sadist bone-crunching sound effects—connecting your hatchet with an idiot's head feels great, and really, that's all I needed. There is also a strange post-release monetization model, in which you can buy ugly paint-jobs for your weapons and clothing. Rust is fascinating for a hundred different reasons, but Counter-Strike-style weed-leaf AWPs isn't one of them.

Still though, I think everyone should at least have a taste of Rust. It's hard to think of many other games that are this uncompromising in its worldview, and I'm utterly entranced with how little faith it has in our ability to get along. We could build a utopia on this island! We could cast aside our weapons, and construct a peaceful commune where everyone is fed, warm, and loved. I love how Facepunch dangles that potential in front of our face, with no real incentive pushing us in any direction. If we are to dehumanize ourselves, and turn this Eden into a battlefield, we will do it on our own terms. In Rust there is a real sense of complicitness when you eventually succumb to violence, more potent than in any other survival game on the market. Despite the lack of rankings to chase, or K/D to nurture, or exclusive vendors to unlock—despite the unassailable fact that none of this will matter as soon as the server is wiped—we are at war, and we always will be.

Shower With Your Dad Simulator 2015 is a surprisingly polished product. Though unnecessarily explicit and somewhat controversial, it does provides a selection of some rather fun minigames, which will steal at least a few hours of your time.

I’ve been dumped in the middle of a foreboding, eerily quiet wilderness – like you typically are in open-world first-person survival games. As I make my way to the nearest coast, I’m startled out of my foraging by a bestial grunt and prepare to defend myself. But the hunched and disheveled creature pursuing me stops several yards short of tearing my face off… and waits to see what I do. This was the moment I realize The Forest is going to spend the next 30ish hours cleverly and terrifyingly subverting my expectations.

The wooded, alpine peninsula that becomes your home is almost idyllic in its quiet splendor, made up of delightfully verdant woodlands and sparkling ponds. But it’s also inhabited by several tribes of feral, macabre cannibals who mark their territory with grotesque effigies of human skin and bone from their victims. From the moment I first came across one, the peaceful, easy feeling turned into a constant paranoia. Everything was always just a bit too quiet, and even twigs snapping from my own footsteps or a rabbit darting out of a bush could make me jump.

Autoplay setting: On
Unlike so many video game enemies, the cannibals aren’t suicidally aggressive, and that’s what makes them so unsettling. The Forest’s greatest triumph is the convincing self-preservation of the AI that governs their behavior. Sometimes they run away. Sometimes they’re content to follow you at a safe distance to figure out where your base is so they can report back to their friends. Sometimes they’ll charge you to test your mettle, but stop short if you don’t back down.

“
The feeling that I was sharing these woods with intelligent enemies sent actual shivers up my spine.

There are fascinating and observable differences in behavior between the different tribes, between individuals in the same tribe, and even contextual attitudes based on how much they have you outnumbered, what time of day it is, and how much you've changed the environment with the simple but functional base-building system. The feeling that I was sharing these woods with intelligent enemies with the capacity for rationality and complex decision-making sent actual shivers up my spine. It’s a fear above and beyond being chased by something that just wants to kill you as fast as possible. While honing my skills as a wilderness survivalist, spelunker, and axe warrior, I also felt like a little bit of an anthropologist – a novel and intriguing experience I’d never really come across in a game like this before.

Below the surface, things can get a bit more frustrating. A big one is that for some reason The Forest doesn’t have any gamma adjustment settings, and the dim default left many story-critical caves outright too dark to play through without darkening the room around me. Your only renewable light source is one of those little gas station lighters which barely lets you see as far out as your own outstretched hand, and that led to a lot of me getting lost. Using darkness to create tension can be great, but this is overdoing it.

When I wasn’t frustrated by the excessive gloom, I could definitely see what the designers were trying to do. The lighter, for instance, is set up to go out after random periods of time. Each time you click to attempt to re-ignite it, there’s something like a hidden coin flip to determine if it comes back on. This led to some wonderfully heart-pounding situations in which I was plunged into total darkness, knowing there were cannibals stalking me, and my lighter clicked five, six, seven, or maybe even eight times before the flame returned and allowed me to get my bearings. The cave cannibals seem scripted to flank, disorient, and spook you with their erratic movements rather than going straight for the kill, which is further proof that the team behind The Forest has a strong understanding of how to inspire horror.

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The story you discover down in those depths is worth the trek.

The story you discover down in those depths is worth the trek. It’s a multi-layered and creepy slow burn, doled out through abandoned camcorder tapes, disturbing discoveries, and clues left behind by your son who was kidnapped just after the plane crash that stranded you. The mysteries go deep and take you to some very unexpected environments that excitingly contrast the arboreal overworld and natural cave systems. The relatively small size of the map compared to other survival games is also a boon, making it more likely you’ll find at least some of the story areas without having to dive into a wiki. Make no mistake, though – you will more likely than not need to rely at least partly on community info to reach the end.

On top of your food and water gauges, a sanity score tracks how far you’re willing to go to survive, up to and including going native and cannibalizing the cannibals. The final moments of the story tie up the question of how much of your humanity you’re willing to lose to survive with an interesting moral choice. However, I do wish sanity had more noticeable impact on how you play – other than unlocking the ability to build effigies out of body parts to mark your territory when it gets below a certain point, the difference between 100 percent sane and zero felt pretty negligible.

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The inhabitants of the island become more persistent and aggressive as time goes on.

The eight-player peer-to-peer co-op mode offers a distinctly different and enjoyable way to play. Having friends takes the tension down several notches and makes some of the story stuff almost trivial, but also enables building imposing and expansive bases that would be prohibitively time-consuming alone. Since the inhabitants of the island become more persistent and aggressive as time goes on, especially if you plop a fortress in the middle of their hunting grounds, it becomes something of a horde mode that I had a really good time with.

Unfortunately, these peer-to-peer sessions are temporary, and as far as I can tell, the dedicated server option (which can allow more than eight players and a persistent world) is largely nonfunctional at the moment. The screen to join a dedicated server is missing a scrollbar, which is bizarre, and all of the servers I came across were password locked with zero players. It’s possible this is a feature that’s not yet fully implemented, but that begs the question of why it’s even available from the multiplayer menu in the public client.

Performance was also quite respectable across the board. A lot of open-world survival games tend to be resource hogs, but The Forest runs slick and smooth on my Core i7-4770K and GeForce GTX 1070 on max settings, no matter how much is going on at any given time. That’s impressive, given the sheer density of flora, ground cover, and other small details texturing the map. I encountered some minor intermittent bugs, such as the transition animations between areas of a cave that need to be loaded separately spitting me back out the way I came – but nothing that greatly hindered my ability to progress.

The Verdict
I’ve never been terrorized, stalked, or fascinated by enemy AI quite like I was in The Forest. It’s a harrowing survival ordeal that knows how to play with tension and create the sense of a real world with complex inner workings and mysteries I was eager to discover. It’s I Am Legend told in the depths of the hinterlands, with a meaningful story progression that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Disregard the warnings on the walls and hidden between the trees at your own peril – and if you want a unique and memorable survival horror experience, then you should absolutely dare to do so.