I dropped hundreds of hours in this game, and don't get me wrong, will most likely continue to. But I despise the fact that they expect me to pay 1930 CAD (989 for EP's, 359 for GPs) to get the full sims experience, especially since a decent portion of the DLC is things you would expect to be base-game anyway. Everything breaks every time an EA exec farts, the base game itself is buggy as hell, and even with all the DLC you still end up needing mods to make the experience more fun.

I will never *buy* the DLC because i refuse to support such unbelievably shady practices from a company that already makes way too much money

tldr; shaky yes. While i truly enjoy this game, it has plenty of sore spots that can get in the way of truly enjoying the experience. Updates are 50% good and 50% bad and game direction is all over the place. Maybe worth full price for the amount of time you can get out of this game, but i think you'd better wait for a sale.

The Good:
- Surprisingly cozy during downtime, yet butt-clenchingly tense during loot runs or blood moons.
- Great details and worldbuilding
- Enjoyable building, barricading, and trap-setting system
- Incredibly in-depth and cozy crafting/building/deco system.
- Silly, yet surprisingly dark take on the zombie apocalypse genre.
- Many many many different ways to approach houses and buildings with varying levels of resistance and payoff, allowing for strategy and tactics in the way you loot.
- Some great music on the soundtrack here or there.
- Runs great natively on (my current install of) linux, which is greatly appreciated by me.

The bad:
- Somehow still missing polish in some places (ui, combat clunkiness, ai behavior) despite years of development time.
- Update direction is all over the place. Sometimes its moving in the right direction, sometimes its rocketing backwards at the fastest pace it can manage.
- Performance can be iffy sometimes, despite low graphical fidelity.
- Not the biggest fan of EAC, as both a kernel-level anticheat, and a poorly made one at that. I don't play enough public 7dtd servers (and i doubt you do/will either) to truly need it, and it only serves to bloat when playing with friends.
- Very slow actual progress on updates and game changes.
- Devs insist on further monetization on an already expensive (nearly triple-a priced) title
- Game struggles to truly make me worry about death or injury, despite the thousands of maluses injuries will apply to your survivor. These maluses only serve to annoy, not truly incapacitate in any way.

I truly love this game, but the constant balance changes make playing it hurt. Few games focus on the crafting and survival aspect of a zombie apocalypse like 7 days, and it makes for a surprisingly cozy experience in between intense fights. It's a lovely experience when playing multiplayer, and a genuine joy when the pieces click together. Forging and crafting as i build up the defenses to my home feels truly great, and you really get to flex your strategic mind when designing kill boxes and defenses against blood moons.

That being said, there are plenty of sore spots i've found with this game. Balance changes are usually shaky at best, the worst being the change from skill-trees to skill magazines. I found this change incredibly frustrating, since not only does it make very little sense, but it slows progression down to a total crawl, deincentivizing crafting things yourself in favor of abusing traders and loot rolls. Not only do I take issue with the quality of balance changes, but the content of said balance changes. Choosing to change the skill-tree system (which, imo, was perfectly fine balance-wise) but not the abusability and nonsensicality of zombie pathfinding, is questionable at best. TFP also, at this stage of development, seem to prioritize further monetization of an already highly-priced game over significant content changes, which is especially insulting given the time it's taken to get to this stage in development.

The prepackaged (E)asy (A)nti(C)heat is significantly bloated compared to other implementations of the same anticheat, even causing crashes and fps loss on some of my less fortunate machines. I find very little use for it from a casual gamer's standpoint, only really serving its purpose when you hop on a public server, which for me, was never. I find the game as a whole is surprisingly taxing on machine requirements despite its low graphical fidelity, which is somewhat excusable given it's voxel nature.

tldr; Take a shot for every comparison to phasmophobia. This game is unfun, unoptimized, poorly mastered, abandonware, and lacks any significant improvement over phasmophobia, its competitor. Treat it like a movie you bring to bad horror night. Spend as little money on it as possible, and try with friends.

I most certainly wanted to enjoy it as a direct competitor to phasmophobia, but it kinda blows.

First off, since this game is a phasmophobia-clone (or at least in a significantly similar niche), I wanted to compare and contrast the two. Unfortunately, there's not much to contrast at all. Most of the features of phasmophobia, down to even the equipment (and the names of said equipment) you bring into missions, are the exact same. I will say, this game does do a better job of building scary and well-detailed spaces, creating a much more haunted atmosphere than phasmophobia's silly (player given) nature could. But that's about all the positives compared to phasmophobia I could muster. The polish of this game's features is severely lacking, the gameplay is lackluster compared to phasmophobia, and despite lacking too many differences, somehow significantly reduced in quality. I didn't find a whole lot of joy in the gameplay loop at all, finding it to be a significantly watered down version of Phasmophobia's loop. Not to mention, Phasmophobia is in active development still, while this game is abandoned for the studio's next batch of shovelware.

Despite borrowing many mechanics from phasmophobia (often directly), devs seem to misunderstand what makes those mechanics fun to play with or interesting to use, meaning it's gameplay lacks a significant amount of the oomph you would expect, as well as just feeling obtuse and frustrating to play. This game is castrated by its own adherence to the phasmophobia genre. I suspect if this game developed and fleshed out it's own mechanics, it would significantly mitigate this point.

Furthermore, for a game where speech and understanding speech is integral to parts of the gameplay, it's significantly difficult to understand what the ghosts are saying, especially through 3-5 different vox filters, poor audio mixing, whispering, and heavy accents. The actual scary bits outside of the atmosphere made me laugh at best, and made me annoyed at worst. Most of this game just feels incredibly scuffed and directionless, and lacking a great deal of immersion.

My first mission playing this game, I asked the ghost for it's name. Next began a thirty minute exchange where i repeatedly asked the ghost to repeat himself while turning up every audio setting trying to even catch one syllable of what was said. I ended up handing the tool to my friend, hoping he would understand it better, only for another 15 minutes of the exact same runaround. This put a severe damper on any immersion or fun this game could have brought me. I still feel bad for the poor employee on the other end. Maybe I'm just hard of hearing, but instead of whispering through a walkie-talkie effect, maybe this game should take the phasmophobia route and use TTS instead?

This game has really piss-poor optimization. I found myself struggling to hover above 30 fps on the lowest settings, and i personally feel there's zero reason to require an SSD on a game that isn't open world, or even loading that many assets at once. The maps are not nearly large enough to warrant such a requirement.

I think it's recent abandonment only solidifies this game's place in my heart as tuberslop. 100% Wouldn't recommend unless on sale and you've got friends you're willing to play this with like it's a bad horror movie night.

Slap 500 mods on this and you've got a better cities skylines two. Still don't like the paradox-style monetization but there's plenty of ways around that.

I think people are only complaining about the bugs because of the censorship for console release. I've played about 30 hours and only encountered one game-breaking issue, which i was capable of fixing on my own without losing progress. As for the censorship, it's a fair thing to be upset about, but i don't find it particularly overbearing. Dismemberment appears to still be there, and i've ventilated atleast a few chest cavities. Furthermore the game was never gore-centric, it just happened to be an addition the game had on top of realistic gunplay and tight, adrenaline-inducing gameplay. I don't mind being upset about censorship, but I feel like the complaints of bugs are facetious at best.

For me, the game plays wonderfully. Few games make me shake with nervous energy, and this is one of those few games. The guns feel well balanced, they have weight, and never fail to make me smile with glee at the power they have. Criminals pose a real threat (although they are far too beefy compared to your average swat officer). The environments are great, combining different threats to keep you on your toes and constantly switching tactics. All in all, it comes together to make a great tac-shooter experience.

I've experienced maybe four bugs that got my attention, those being:
1. On occasion, suspect weapons will clip through walls. I've only experienced this ONCE in my 26 hours of playtime, and managed to de-clip it with grenades. This is by far the only inconveniencing bug i've experienced with this game.
2. If a suspect drops more than one weapon, there's a chance they will float, but they are still interactive. At most a mild issue.
3. Occasionally, when cuffing a suspect, they will float into the stratosphere. They do not disappear nor die, just kinda, head off. They'll return when the anim is done or simply will head out, remaining cuffed. This is more a laugh with your buds than an inconvenience.
4. You can throw grenades in the police department by going to the shooting range, stepping up to shoot, then bringing out the grenade and holding left click. Now you can walk to wherever you wish to throw the grenade. This is just silly and fun, not upsetting.

Wonderful and faithful recreation of the autistic hyperfixation that inspired many of your favorite games, an excellent addition to the library of any simulation game fanatic. Graphics are wonderfully portrayed from the eye-bleeding state of the original, while still maintaining that carpal-tunnel inducing control scheme. Natively supports linux which is hardly heard of. 11/10

Truly awesome game, absolutely lovely and artistically pleasing aesthetic, and incredibly addicting gameplay loop. Excited to add this game and it's soundtrack to my library on release!

tldr; Unintuitive, uninvolved gameplay, lacks polish, transitioning to abandonware. Worth a purchase if you need to spend the cash or its on sale, but wouldn't recommend otherwise.

Bought this game about a year ago now. While i was interested to see where it was headed when i first purchased, this game quickly lost it's steam and now is in the transitioning stages to abandonware. Would love to see the dev put a little more love into it, considering it still feels like it's in a very incomplete state, but the chances of that seem to be waning as time goes on.

I'm a decently large fan of the bones that this game holds. It makes for interesting stories, and there's some really well thought out little details, like historical empires rising back up in the areas they once existed. But, it really severely lacks polish and shine, as well as some basic quality of life features. There's still no undo feature about a year into development, the UI can feel extremely unintuitive, and there's just a whole lot you'd *like* to do that isn't there. The core gameplay is painfully uninvolved, which i suppose is the point, but without many direct ways to intervene you lose a whole lot of the reason people enjoy ant-hill type games. Some people enjoy simply letting them run, and that I can appreciate, but personally I prefer being able to intervene and cause trouble on my own, without having to rely on the game near-completely to create interesting scenarios.

All this being said, If it's on sale or your money is burning a hole in your pocket, it certainly wouldn't be a terrible purchase, especially if this type of game is up your alley. But I can't consciously recommend this to most people without a large disclaimer that it lacks a significant amount of polish and gameplay.

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