- Colour and style
recent survival game tend to stick a bit too much too the horror genre (H1Z1, day Z...) or sometime futuristic (space engineer, empyrion...). those tend to have a many many many... shade of gray and brown and... you usually start in a desert or post apocalyptic place, all lifeless and foggy kinda looking. Not this one. you are on a beautiful tropical island with lush jungle and forest, sparkling water and beaches, windy ice mountain, SLIGHTLY foggy swamp (and yeah sometime the weather on the island is fog). the place just look natural and beautiful, which really is an appreciate change from other game where you have to stay alive in a lifeless environment. (just keep in mind that this environment and what come out of it are all deadly to human).
- Diverse and interesting environment.
Im not talking about the graphic here (who still look awesome even on medium setting on an average graphic card), but rather about how the terrain never seem empty or blend. Every part of the map have his particular set of vegetation, rocks and dinos spawn associated with it. Swamp or snow biome area have some unique flore and dinos spawning in them and nowhere else in the map. Less dangerous smaller dinos will appear more often on the beach (where player appears and tend to settle) and more dangerous and bigger one are more present deeper inside the island to make establishing settlement inland more challenging than staying on the beach... with exception of course. Each and every patch of land is open to be constructed upon and can be transform into a mighty fortress with its tactical advantage and flaw (high ground can mean distance from water/food source but staying on the beach mean more difficult access to later resource mostly present in the mountain).
- The crafting
Every item you can craft in the game is locked behind an XP/leveling system. You start with only stone age tool (pickaxe, wood axe, stone pike, torch...) and proceed toward more modern/advanced technology. So bad news: even if you have all the material to say build a rifle, you'll still need to unlock all previous engram before being able to make that toy. Good news: you dont need to know how to make it to be able to use it. meaning you can join a friend on his server/single player playthrough, be given adequate equipment and join him in whatever he's doing. you'll have less HP/stamina than him, but you will still be able to ride that full HP bronto or using the kickass turret installed on his back. (... yeah, advanced technology with dino... its a thing... ill be back on those on the bad section).
- The Dinosaurs
THAT, is the selling point of this game. Early threat in the game, become essential tool to prosper later, there is currently 47 different type of animal at the moment this review was written, 36 more are announce before full release (not all of them are reptile, there are mammal, fish, bird category too). each one has its specific particularity or trait that you might want to acquire for your own use. some gather resources faster and/or in greater quantity than by yourself, other travel at great speed or through certain terrain with ease where other would stay stuck, others just have DPS that surpasses any other. early hour into the game where you struggle to gather enough resources to make even the slightly better tool only serve to make later game so much more satisfying when you get those in minutes without fear of loosing everything by dying on your way back thanks to your trusty mount.
- The dev care and love their job
The development team of this game have been releasing new dinos, item and other game upgrades every week (usualy 2 week for dino) since early summer almost without interruption. They made a Halloween and Christmas special patch that blew my mind. each had a complete re-skin of the entire island with thematic change like tree and plant turning yellow and orange to represent the Autumn change that happen with north american flora every year and covering the entire island with snow for christmas (no ice on the lake/river however). each holiday had its special in-game events, special thematic craftable items, decorations and dinos skins (a 3m skeleton T-rex for god sake!!!). i dont remember a single game that made that much effort into patch that were after all only a 2 week events. at least not without being a DLC or something you had to buy anyway.
NOW THE BAD
- system requirement
beautiful to look at also mean require good rigs to run the damn thing. require a 64 bit system, a 1Gb graphic card and at least 40 Gb disk space TODAY, will probably require more than that in 6 month when the game will officially release. and even if you run it on a monster (i have an i7-4790K CPU 4Ghz, 16Gb ram and a GeForce GTX 980 graphic card), the game still have stability issues related to his graphic engines and some servers unstabilities. Keep in mind that this is a pre-alpha release (or did it move to official alpha with xbox release?!?).
- Dying and loosing stuff
it'll happen a lot, which isn't for the taste of everyone. Survival mean the game will try to kill you a lot and will succeed a bunch of time regardless of your effort. Predators will hunt you down, non-predator will kill you by self-defense or by accident (defending against something else or just by walking on your head... it happen) and you will probably die for several natural reason (need for food, water, air, appropriate temperature). ho also other players will kill you at some point, willingly or by accident (again, it happen). when that happen, you lose your whole inventory/equipment you have on you and re-spawn at your spawn point (if you made one) or the game's one otherwise ( starting spawn point on the beach). you can build structure to keep you stuff intact and safe, but early structure can be destroy easily by dinos and player alike. and in online session (playing in groupe is a lot more fun) mean your body consistently exist in the world. you log off and your body just fall asleep on the spot... WHERE YOU CAN STILL BE KILLED while offline. building a shelter where you can ''sleep and keep your stuff is a solution, but nothing you can do is player/dinos full proof.
- the AI is dumb
Not really trully PAINFULLY dumb, but the hunter instinct aint really strong in any of them. They have a lot of variation in their patern : some will attack you on sight, some will stay and attack you if provoke, others will flee (some flee after taking too much damage). some have tactic like attacking in group or have poison to render you unconscious rather fast before killing you. but they always do so in a straight line. No flanking/pincer/surrounding manoeuvres or surprise attacks, they dont ever migrate in large group, just wander around in groupe of 1 to 5 dinos of the same species. if a predator is chasing you but youre staying out of range with no way to reach you, it'll just stay down his ridge or cliff looking at you and letting you shoot him from afar, never attempting to flee or take cover. too easy to kite them or lead them into a trap...
- The nonsense
There is no introduction, tutorial or context of where you are, WHEN YOU ARE (pre-historic and ice age creature alongside modern human?!?). there are luminous... thing that descend from the sky inside beam of light from wich you may collect precious item or blueprint of item (a plan that allow to build an object without the requirement). the color of those indicate at wich lvl you can access them and what quality can find inside but why and how that thing arrive there: never explain (probably alien). there's also 3 colossal structures on the map that when fill up with required resources (artefact, trophy...) can spawn/teleport a special boss-dinos dozens times bigger and stronger than all other (definitely alien in origin). And finaly, the level of technology available later game is insanely high if the game is suppose to happen in the distant past. i mean you have access to modern weaponry (mounted mini-gun, assault rifle, laser pointer, semi-auto sniper...), complete scuba gear and a completely automated sentry gun!!! this is kindof nit-picking but those of you who love context and common sense in their game will suffer. other (like myself) would rather answer: screw logic and let me ride kick ass T-Rex while the other team attack us with their bronto with mounted with minigun, while covered by huge bird with guy armed with rocket launcher on its back (awesomeness: 1, common sense 0).
BOTTOM LINE
BUY THIS GAME!!!
if you're tired of gray, gloomy zombie survival game but still love survival game in general. This one is a breath of fresh air for the genre that have difficulty in my opinion to move away from zombie and more recently alien. (ok alien are still cool. but frigging dinosaure, thats a first... recently). almost everything in this game is impressive by today's standard: the visual, the mechanic, the variety, the gameplay... and may i remind you that this game is still in early access? almost none of the bad point that i mention are beyond improvement, wich the dev have been producing regularly for the past 6 month and still have 6 more month to do before official launch. while i doubt this game is or will be able to support a battle with 70 person (current max pop per server) + dinos + other stuff on the same battlefield, it certainly is one of the only one that might ever get close.
The game would have got a 8 or even a 7 when i consider what spec im running and bumpy the game still is (lag is still a constancy right now, performance and lag can vary widely from server to server) + how some crippling bug ruin the entire expérience for some player (all possession changing tribe owner because one player/member switch to another tribe). But when i take into account how much fun i had regardless of all that and how fast patches and upgrades are release by the devs, i believe 9 is a score this game can easely reach when official review on the official release will be done.