ESO is one of the few MMORPG's that has stood the test of time. I have gone back to the game multiple times, and every time I find myself enjoying the gameplay. The level of content after 12+ years of development is staggering. As long as you can find a decent group to play with, there is always something to do. Definitely worth a try if you haven't played it lately!

On Easy, this game is enjoyable. Progression makes sense, character abilities are varied, etc. Is it too easy? Sure, but at least it's fun.

On Normal though, this game design just doesn't make sense. My first few runs ended the same. For example, I would play Bernie the mage, and finish the first level with 5 STR, 5 DEX, and 3 INT. In Easy I would be 10+ INT with a couple of points in the other stats. The difference is the game design. I pick an INT-scaling character, so the game gives me nothing but DEX and STR camps. Exactly zero INT camps in the first two levels. The only few points of INT I could get were from the 3-attribute camps where I could pick what I wanted. Seriously, how is that good game design? At first I thought this was a fluke, but then I played Croaks (DEX character), and nothing but INT and STR camps spawned. So in addition to the difficulty scaling of health vs damage (both for you defensively and the mobs defensively), they simply give you stats that do not scale with your weapon type. IMO that's just bad design.

Beyond that, you can clearly tell it's still an Early Access game due to the shallow pool of content. The first four levels you fight through? Those are the only four that exist. The boss at the end of the first four levels? That's the only boss that exists. Then the game resets you to level 1 and you start over from scratch. Every single run is exactly the same. Honestly this feels like an EA demo of a game. Lots of potential sure, but right now it isn't worth the $10 I paid for it.

I'll give it 6+ months or so to cook, and check back on it. Hopefully some day I can flip this to a positive review...

This game is essentially an AFK waiting simulator. I played for just under 3 hours, and of that time I think I actually "played" for about 15 minutes. The entirety of what I experienced thus far is this:

1. The game gives you a quest to go do, such as harvest some ore.
2. You take the ore chunk to a Mining Station. After a few minutes here, the chunk is converted to ore pieces.
3. You take the ore pieces to a Smithing Station. After a few minutes here, the ore pieces are converted to ore concentrate.
4. You take the ore concentrate to a Smelter station. You combine the ore concentrate with rough wood logs (which have their own crafting chain to obtain), and after a few minutes you have molten ore.
5. You take the molten ore back to the Smithing Station, and after a few minutes you get 1 ingot.

So, that is 5 steps involving 3 different crafting stations to make an ingot. Figure roughly 20-25 minutes for all that, including run time between the locations of the crafting stations.

On the average, a metal tool takes 4 ingots to make amongst 3 other materials that all have their own crafting chains. So repeat the above process 3 times, plus all the time for the other 3 materials required.

This may be the most boring game that I have ever seen. Zero fun just standing there watching the timer tick by. Supposedly this game has a combat system too, but honestly I don't think it's worth spending the time on it. Refund incoming!

It has a lot of potential, but I can't recommend this game in its current state. Extremely slow grinding right from the start. I've played 2-3 hours, been on about 10 runs, and I'm mostly still wearing starter gear. I got one blue weapon and 2 green items (1 I couldn't even use). That's it. Everything else is still starter gear. What makes it all worse is that you run a 15-min dungeon run, and a majority of the reward items you get is yet more starter gear. Playing an entire 15-min run for next to no rewards = bad design. After a few maps in a row of zero progression, I'm shelving this game. It just isn't set up in a way that's fun to the average player starting out.

I first played this game years ago, and despite being a huge Star Trek fan, it didn't work for me. It was too grindy and I felt that getting to the part where you fly a ship in space took way too long to get to.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago... I thought I would give it another shot, and I'm glad I did! The "new player experience" is considerably more streamlined. Getting started was a lot more fun, and you are basically flying your first ship within an hour of gameplay. I've been playing the game daily ever since. It ended up being the best Star Trek game I've ever played, and it is even relatively easy to do as F2P! Definitely a lot more grindy as full F2P, but it's doable. Personally I had no problem with tossing $20 to the game devs to keep this game going. Plus now that Jack Emmert has returned to Cryptic Studios as CEO, this game may even get some long overdue attention from the devs!

Really solid game all around.

I'm really liking the direction this one is going. It was definitely a slow start... It is an odd transition between when your character does everything themselves into gradually letting the NPC villagers do it all. I kind of slowed myself down originally by not summoning more villagers. I had thought I wouldn't be able to make enough food to keep more than 3 villagers fed, so I stalled at 2-3 villagers for a long time. Eventually once I had the cooking hut built it became infinitely easier to make food, and that majorly opened up the game.

Once I got up to 5+ villagers I finally saw how much faster the progression was with a group of NPC's. Gameplay-wise there is a ton of content for your village. While that seems to be the main focus of the game, I am curious to see what else there is to do once your village is fully up and running. Right now it still feels like there is no end of all the different things I want to get done. I honestly haven't even started pushing into the combat against the stronger enemies yet, so there is a huge part of the game I haven't experienced yet. At this point this one is a solid 7/10, and I'm hoping it will continue to improve.

TLDR - Focus #1 on building up 5-6 villagers, and don't try to do everything yourself.

Overall it is a decent game, and there are a lot of things I like about it. However, there are some very frustrating design aspects to the game that drop this review from positive to negative. For context, I am comparing this game to other Early Access survival/sandbox games, and I have a few thousand hours invested in this genre.

1. The resources in a survival / sandbox game like this are generally a big part of the gameplay loop. However, in this game it feels far more grindy than I usually see. My group and I were constantly having to ignore what we wanted to do (build, explore, etc.) because we had to stop and grind mats for the 17th time. The energy cells and ship fuel cells seem minor at first, but to have to grind mats for them every hour gets really old really fast. Every time we complete a build or an important upgrade, we have to stop and go farm more materials again. It gets annoying to have to rebuild a dozen different components to make one single thing, because you just had to build a dozen different components for the previous goal. Most of the time too you're needing resources that get farther and farther away from your base. Like Palladium... We finally got enough to advance the storyline, only to find out that we had to find some more for several new items that came next. Since you only find that resource 1 or 2 blocks at a time, we had to fly all over the map, get out, scan for it (find nothing), and then repeat the process numerous times. Long story short - the crafting is too expensive and the resources are too much of a pain to find. We looked ahead to some of the higher tech items and their insanely expensive requirements, and that was enough to make us not want to continue.

2. The game forces you to look things up constantly, because the in-game text is either misleading or entirely worthless. For example, there is a story mission that tells you "Light strike the darkness shard", or something along those lines. Nowhere does it tell you what "light strike" even means. I had to Google it, and what I could find online was inconsistent. The first post I found about it, someone said you need a Light Shard on your action bar, and then after targeting the darkness shard you "right click to start the light strike countdown". Of course, right clicking on the light shard doesn't work. In fact, it actually deletes the item from your inventory without doing any action at all. Cue our frustration because we then had to go back to our previous planet to re-farm the materials to make a new light shard all over again. We eventually found out that you have to have the light shard in your inventory, but then right-click on the purifier tool on your action bar to start the light strike countdown. So yeah, we figured that out eventually, but why can't the game itself just explain what you're supposed to do?

3. Combat is super clunky right now. I imagine that will get better with more development, but right now it is in a really weird place. I either have some odd delays in weapon recharges (for the slower weapons like sniper rifles), or aiming is a mess with the higher damage / fire rate weapons. The enemies move up and down blocks inconsistently, so sometimes you hit what you're aiming for, and sometimes you just hit the ground near them for no damage. "Spray and pray" should not be the best we can hope for.

I will try to keep playing the game to see if the above issues get better, but for now I think this one falls under the "wait for more development" category.

Original Review: This may be the best single-player game I've played in over a decade. Gameplay is awesome, soundtrack is awesome, storyline is awesome. Solid 9.5/10.

The only thing that keeps it short of a 10/10 is the extremely frustrating mini-games. Whoever invented those... Ugh.


Final Review: About 70 hours of gameplay, and I've completed everything. All achievements, all bosses beaten (even the extra DLC boss). Looking back at it all, I raise my rating to a solid 10/10. Easily the best single player game that I have played in I don't know how long... Downright amazing from start to finish. I even started playing the New Game+ mode, but decided that may be better to save for another time. This game deserves every award it has won thus far, and I hope to see more awards in the future! Such a great game!

Really really well done game. I know it's in the survival genre, but to me I think it plays more like an old school RPG. Leveling up, getting new gear, etc. The multiplayer is done really well, and I like how they have everything set up so MP isn't a hassle. I played the game for a good 40 hours when it first came out. Since then they have been dropping new content constantly. They added a ton of QoL features, new abilities, and new bosses. All in all a solid A+ game.

Farming / Survival sim done right! I'm about 20 hours into this one, and just when I think I've run out of content... Another section opens up! At first you're just managing a small farm, manually plowing fields and planting crops. Soon enough your mech is upgraded and making the plowing/planting/watering process a lot faster and efficient. That's good because your farm has expanded to a second area, and grown several sizes larger. Then you start crafting various metal upgrades, new machines, etc. With each new thing you find out in the wild, it unlocks more. I just reached a point in the game where I unlocked NPC's that move into my farm area and give me more content to chase... More quests, new items, etc.

All in all it has a satisfying loop for the main gameplay, and the progression is solid. While I wish it was faster at times, I think the idea is to make sure you appreciate just how much the upgrades impact the game. If the progression was too fast, it wouldn't mean as much to the player. We would also burn through the content too quickly. Time will tell how much is left for me to discover in this game. In any case though, it has been worth the journey!