Survival Machine

I just finished the game this evening, clocking in at 67 hours. I played it exclusively solo. It has just enough pros to outweigh the cons to me, so I'll do a rundown. Great: - responsive devs who understand that not everyone likes Discord. They responded to posts in the Steam forums in a timely fashion, and, one of the bugs I found (also noticed by others), was patched within a few days. That's good effort. Good: + Nice music, and I love the little gramophones you can find to play little snippets of songs I'd like to see expanded into full-length songs. + Runs great on my decent, but not "top-class" rig + unexpected automation options available later on, though simple, were appreciated + decent variety of simple puzzles. My favorite was the cemetery with its small-scale "pay attention and LOOK around" style of information gathering to solve it. + We're rolling on a giant, slow train machine that we can build on, pretty cool + Generally rewarding resource collection. You get a decent amount of resources from busting one rock or one tree, not one or two "wood" or "stone" + automated turrets. I love turrets, mines, traps, automated defenses, etc., in almost any game. I find few combat experiences more satisfying than not lifting a finger and watching my "wall o' death" take care of intruders. + vertical building. You can build multiple levels on your survival machine. I ended up with a ground layer for defense and primary workstations, a secondary level for energy production and lesser used workstations, and a third level for a private house/storage. Cons: - the game definitely seems marketed more toward children. You get farting zombies, silly zombie sounds, zombies with pails on their heads, and a villain that, while adequately voiced, sounds like he's been told he's a villain in a game for seven year olds. "You've not seen the last of meeeeee!", maniacal (yet not too scary) laughter, "Wait until you see my ultimate weapon!", etc. I ended up muting the game whenever Zombieburg *sigh* showed up. - only two biomes. While they differ quite a bit and are well designed overall, I was disappointed that we didn't get a bit more variety. - Some of the puzzle rewards are really underwhelming (a handful of flowers and a few planks?). I stopped doing most of them after I realized that you could usually just advance the train to a new spot if you didn't find an "easy" lootbox to get the recipe you needed. - irritating "snowstorm" mechanic in the alpine region. Overall, I had a good time with the game. It's not something I would be likely to replay again, but when I wanted a more light-hearted gaming experience than what I usually play, it came along at the right time.

Refunded. This is a "1.0" release that is in NO WAY ready for it being 1.0 In 2.5 hours of gameplay I had 45 min worth of loading and crashes, endless stuttering, WILD balance issues, and an overall lack of any type of cohesion. The "Upgrades" felt nonsensical, the "Combat" is nothing more than hold left click against enemies until they die. You have stone tools and they throw HUNDREDS of zombies at you at a time it feels like in one area so you have to take 3 weapons with you to even hope to complete the zone without multiple trips, even with the durability increasing kit on. There are FAR TOO MANY zombies for how bad the combat is, and durability is FAR too bad for how many zombies there are. ONE of these needs to be adjusted to find a halfway decent balance. The only benefit/positive I saw to this game was the giant moving base, which is a super fun idea and implemented well enough compared to the rest. Wish we had better storage options early game though, having 50 Barrels to have any hope of storage for 1 slot each was painful.

Played single player. Paused the game. Animation paused me character mid-chop. Went upstairs to take the kids to bed. Came down, unpaused. Dead. Check store page. Hmmm, nope, not seeing "Early Access". Might try again in a few months.

Сетевой режим не работает.

I played this game with my father and we had a blast. Would not suggest playing solo. The gameplay boils down to "zombie, loot, construction, DEFEND FROM THE HORDES OF THE UNDEAD!" This game is very obvious in the fact it is still being developed, expect jank but nothing crazy or frustrating. The base is totally epic. Big ass machine, it's pretty cool, very detailed. I love the mechanical animations in the engine room and even around the craft. Only thing I would add is more guns (like a shotgun), and maybe have the fart cloud from the farting zombies ignite and burn away with the flamethrower. The cloud doesn't do that much damage, my only complaint is that it gets in the way of zombie looting. You only gotta worry about them if your a fart smella. The tommy gun is very steampunk, however most of my gun ideas are "dieselpunk." The "trench sweeper" Winchester Model 1897 is steampunk, even a humble double-barrel. The Winchester Model 1887 lever-action shotgun would rock but in a terminator kinda way. However the BAR, FG 42, .454 Casull, the STEN, even the Browning A5 are all dieselpunk. This saddens me cuz cool guns are cool, simple as. But Hell, they could do anything. They got the Colt 1911 and I consider that dieselpunk. The story kinda sucked so don't expect nothing to blow you away, this might change in the future. Certain voice lines I found cheesy, but maybe that's something to like. Not too complicated, very simple. I will not spoil this game's "big twist" even if I thought it came outta nowhere, IDK it's not bad it was just unexpected. Give it a try now or wait till they add more stuff. Either way I found this game to be a decent game, I had fun. Not too chill not too challenging. All in all an ok experience. I fear this game would become more of a time sink if there was more to do.

This is in response to the most recent dev post about not using AI with a disclaimer. Disclaimer - I don't mind game companies using AI, I don't mind AI in the gaming industry or any industry. It is the future. I also understand that this is not a popular opinion in the gaming field. I like games with AI in them when its done right. I also cannot find the credits as mentioned by other reviews as well. This game is also 10000% right up my alley and something I could spend hours in, if done right, which currently it isn't. With that being said - I ran your blog post's images about stuff not being AI through an AI detection program. This tool said that your image of the 6 figures was 99.86% AI. The reseaons being: 👤 Face and Expression The faces in all six portraits appear to have a smoothness and uniformity that is slightly unnatural. The skin textures lack subtle variations, pores, and imperfections common in real portraiture. Expressions are consistent and stylized, suggesting an AI-generated approach to rendering character emotions rather than unique individual nuances. 💇 Hair and Headgear Hair and headgear across the images show uniform lines and a slightly idealized structure. The flow of hair and detailing in items like the goggles and hats seem overly precise and clean, lacking the minor inconsistencies and texture variations typically seen in hand-drawn or real images. 🖋️ Line Work and Shading The line work and shading are highly controlled, with consistent thickness and smoothness throughout each image. Shadows are evenly distributed and lack the subtle randomness of natural lighting, which hints at an AI or digitally generated source rather than traditional manual drawing. 🎨 Style Uniformity All six portraits share a highly uniform artistic style with consistent character proportions and design elements. This uniformity suggests they were generated or heavily influenced by a single algorithm or template rather than separate human artists. 📑 Background and Composition The background is solid and void of texture or variation, which is common in AI-generated character sheets or digital results aiming for clarity and focus on the subject without contextual distractions. Summary: The entire set of portraits demonstrates characteristics typical of AI-generated imagery, including flawless and stylized facial features, uniform hair and accessories, perfectly controlled shading and line work, and consistent artistic style across all images. Again this doesn't prove it to be AI but its very odd that the program is stating that it is AI when you are saying it is. I enjoyed the game as a whole, but the AI/Non AI whatever you call it is bad, no other way to say it. And even if Bastion isn't an AI voice, her voice is oddly AI sounding. Its to uniform and to perfect for it to not be AI. There is a point when she says "deliberate" which is a very very very very common word that is used by AI and not something that is used by normal speaking humans as often as AI uses it. In addition, the usage of the word is odd in the statement. So whether or not this is AI or isn't AI is up for debate. Only the Devs know what is truly AI and what isn't AI. My opinion is that its is near 100% AI but I cannot prove it as I don't have access to the files. The negative review is because of the slop that this game is. Its boring, highly generic, and mechanics don't make sense. Even the building is pretty bad. The pathing of the zombies is archaic and doesn't make sense. Also the bots seem to of developed teleportation and invisibility as sometimes you can't see the zombies until they are literally slicing open your throat. My advice for anyone is this - play the game and see for yourself. My review is subject to what I think is good and what isn't. The AI question is subjective as well and unproven but there is solid evidence that it was developed by AI. This game isn't for me at this current build. Will try to pick it up at a later date and see whats improved.

The game's ending felt like they ran out of money and just ended it. The tier upgrades are irrelevant. The zombies never changed or became harder it was the same set from the first world. Nothing new was ever really introduced. When you got to the end items you didn't use them very long because as I mentioned earlier it just seemed like they ended the game because they ran out of money and yet left it to where there would be DLC if they ever had the funding for it...something along the lines of THE VOID. Then there are the list of all the bugs...and man are there a lot including the world just vanishing, zombies floating in air, not being able to damage zombies, etc. give it 2.5 stars out of 5. Had higher hopes and was let down.

While there are some aspects of this game I enjoyed, overall, for the price, I would have to say this is a hard pass. I won't bother mentioning the story, enough reviews have already done that. It's very bad, like child writing levels bad. The voice acting is on par. Overall it took me 21hr to 100% the game. Initially I saw reviews in the 60hr+ range and thought, "wow this game must have a ton of content". That is not the case. There's 3 "zones" (really just 2 since the last one is just for a "boss" fight), and each zone feels like it was made by a totally different dev team. Realistically you could beat this game in around 12hr, the rest of my game time was spent getting some particularly annoying achievements. There's zero cohesion between the 2 main zones, other than your ship. Storage unlocks randomly and too late in my opinion, it was a pain to manage inventory and storage for the first few hours, than it becomes completely irrelevant when you stamp down 20 chests. There's significantly more unlocks in the second zone compared to the first and other than getting some extra inventory slots, you're disincentivized for decorating, since your stuff can be broken during hordes. The BFG makes zero sense in the context of the game, makes the zombiestein fights irrelevant by 2 shotting him, and somehow can't kill regular zombies in one hit. For some reason zombies have "levels" next to their name, which as far as I can tell just serve to tell you that the zombies now have more health. I found crafting to be almost completely meaningless due to looting insane amounts of high tier crafting resources and components from zombies and loot chests. By the time the end of the game came around and the city wanted me to make 8 nukes, I had 96 in storage and never crafted a single one. After the 5th or so horde night, horde's just became annoying. I was in zero danger of "losing" (you don't actually lose, it just skips to the next day) at any point, even on the hardest difficulty. I had to intentionally make a new game to get the achievement for losing the game, because it was literally impossible to "lose" after some basic infrastructure, like a wall, was built around the core components. The combat feels nice until midway when the mobs become sponges. POI's repeat too much, even knowing that you're traveling in a loop. 3 different versions of a barn that you will see 50 times before you're done, and most POI's can be cheesed with the glider, or the very late game double jump ability.