Disclaimer - Free weekend review.

The game is a frustrating experience. It's disappointing because there is potential there but it's not very fun atm.

I gathered 7 friends and the first game took us almost an hour and half. The second game with 4 players took an hour and 40 minutes. The game spreads the party around the map at the start. Getting all the players together is a needless chore that basically wastes 10-20 minutes every game. The proximity voice chat is extremely unreliable so we ended up on discord instead.

If you die or get infected early then you're on the cuck chair for the entire rest of the game waiting for your friends to finish, which takes quite some time. At least in games like Tarkov I could at this point go for a scav raid. We had ~half our party die by the middle of the mission and it'd have been nice to have the option to 'extract' early and have another go with a full party.

The zombies will respawn endlessly, often very very close to you. It's easy to get bogged down in one spot. This also means you will be constantly in action, and I won't lie - fighting the zombies isn't fun enough and I was bored of the constant melee towards the end of our first game.

It's not exactly clear how the infection works but if you do get infected your only choices are suicide, finding a very rare cure item or taking special pills every two minutes that delay the infection. With a couple infected we tried to finish the mission and managed to hold on for about 30 minutes while also completing the objective which had us run around the entire area searching for what seemed to be one or two dozen 'research documents' until we finally could extract. This was honestly miserable and next time it happens to me I am shooting a bullet into my own head and leaving the game to play something else.

The combat is just unpredictable and tiring. You will be fighting zeds for most of the duration of the mission with next to no respite. They are very tanky, fighting a single zombie can sometimes drain your entire stamina bar. The stagger mechanic is unreliable, sometimes they don't get staggered at all even with a charged up melee hit which usually means they get a free hit on you. It's just not very fun, and you'd think you can play slow and tactical, sneak around and use items to bypass groups but it just doesn't play out that way.

Ranged weapons feel similar, the zeds are still very tanky, require multiple headshots or body shots to kill. The only one that I'd say was actually fun to use was the 12 gauge shotgun.

In the end it's just painful and not very fun. And I don't consider myself much of a casual gamer, I'm not saying the game ought to be easier. But the core gameplay must have something to keep you playing. Reward the players for using tactics or other smart ways to solve problems and avoid zombies, maybe also make the combat actually satisfying and fun. All I'm seeing in this game atm is a mindless and painful grind.

To be fair to the devs, as I only played this during a free weekend, I will try to play this game again in a year and change/hide/delete my review.

With the 1.0 release, the performance decreased to the point that the game is unplayable with specs meeting both minimum and recommended specs.

It's a crying shame, because the game is super fun provided your PC can run it without constant stutters and massive FPS drops.

The persistent world, the logistics system, the scale of the game are all very cool, but what really breaks this game for me is that the underlying core shooter gameplay is quite basic and simply not very fun to play. The game as a whole feels like a huge Rust server that has the playerbase divided into two teams that fight each other, except that the combat in Rust is quite fun, in comparison to Foxhole.

Really not as good as everyone says.
- Linear
- very easy
- QTE, QTE everywhere
- boring bossfights
- boring characters (maybe except for the main villain who is slightly less boring after one of the final dialogues)
- enemy AI is very dumb
- difficulty is made by making the enemies spongier
- Lara somehow avoids infection after getting stabbed, cut everywhere and then walking in literal blood rivers or overall mud, ♥♥♥♥ and so on throughout the entire game
- A Fuso class battleship is beached on one of the game areas, however both of the fuso class battleships were sunk nowhere near the island the game takes place on (also it is beached backwards, which is kind of odd)
- shotgun is utterly useless in this game
- lara keeps using the bow in cutscenes even though she also has a pistol, shotgun and a frickin AK-47
- bow somehow does twice the damage if Lara holds it "charged" for a second or two
- somehow Lara does not get hypothermia despite wearing the same tank top throughout a lot of mudwater swims and bad weather
- Enemies always immediately know where you are and start shooting at you if they notice a body
- Lara carries 4 weapons and a crap ton of ammunition and collectibles on her while only wearing a tank top, pants and a belt with a couple pouches
- Undead samurai carry 00 buckshot and 7.62x39 in their armour for some reason

+ Torture porn (however, i advise just watching the 10 minute compilation of "Lara death scenes" on youtube)

I guess it's fine for ~10 hours gameplay if you got it for free. Felt like downgraded Far Cry to me.

(Review text hidden)

Battlefield 4 but better.