I was legitimately afraid I'd not live to see the day. Thank goodness I did. Love me some extraction shooters, and this one is the perfect arcadey middle ground between things like exoborne and more hardcore milsim like tarkov/grey zone. I was a fan of Embark since The Finals, and they officially have a 2/2 record on their hands. Big recommend to fans of the genre, and all in an aesthetically pleasing package. Can't wait to play more, but I'm literally up at 2:30 am for launch on 1 hour of sleep, so I will have to let the rust belt rest and recuperate for now. Hope to see more of you top side

I haven't even made it out of normal silos, i've only played a handful of runs, and I don't even have more than 2 hours in. I can already tell you I'm massively addicted. This is one of those ones where you can dedicate a good amount of time to a single run, have it all fall away in a single mistake, and come back clamoring for more. I've only seen a very small portion of what this game has in store, and I'm very excited to see what's ahead. If you like games that are unique to themselves and don't really have any analogs to them, check this one out. It's pretty cheap and for what it gives you, it's a wildly worthwhile deal.

This game has a stranglehold on me and refuses to let go. A design that turns the entire crafting survival genre on its head, this game is my go-to example of why a solidly crafted, hand-made world will always stand above the procedural generation approach. I have been playing LOTR Return to Moria, and while I've been having fun, I just keep wanting to get back into the Cascade Research Facility to do it all again. At about a hundred hours to solo the current release, full release is most likely standing at somewhere around 120 hours, and I can't wait to get my hands on the remaining content so I can fully complete my knowledge of the facility. It's like a second home, one that I'm always going to return to every few years for the rest of my life.

I feel that I need to say something positive in regards to the performance of the game, and maybe offer some tweaking tips that have helped me run the game at full 60fps at 1080p with no lag and sharp graphics.

Firstly, this game ran like doodoo during all of the beta phases, and during the one attempt at running the benchmark, I wasn't feeling much more confident than the beta left me. When I figured out the goldilocks settings for this game it felt like I unlocked a portion of my brain I've never used before.

For reference, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, Ryzen R9 5950x CPU, Nvidia 3070ti GPU, and a dink motherboard that probably bottle necks me on most games.

Raytracing HARD OFF, the lighting still can look great without it.

I don't know how this witchcraft works, but with a nvidia card, I set the DLSS to AMD FSR, and use that to access the frame generation that my 3070ti is not capable of using with the nvidia dlss. This is far and away the biggest game changer of a move. With this enabled, I am able to run the rest of the graphical settings at high (including render distance). It looks so good that it made the previous negative performance of tweaking these settings seem like a distant nightmare.

Set DLSS to Quality, DLSS Sharpening to 1.0

These are the three biggest things I recommend. Maybe my eyes can't see the way that everyone else's does, but getting a solid 60 frames on this game feels like a dream come true.

I'm not even going to say anything about the gameplay, this is already a heavy contender (and likely winner) of my personal game of the year, and I just hope that everyone that wants to play it is able to have at least the performance experience that I've experimented down to.

Best of luck hunters, I really do hope everyone's able to figure the alchemical input necessary for their rig to run this gift of a video game.

If the anti-cheat is going to prevent you from playing this game on a matter of principle, then by all means give this a pass. If you want a third person shooter that perfectly captures the motif and feel of the first game while expanding upon the explosive nature of the action, then I cannot recommend this game enough.

A breath of fresh air that will allow me to play something instead of Phasmophobia on communal game nights.