Worth it for the $8. A play-once kinda situation. Took me and my friends 8 hours. I don't see this being replayable unless they add procedural generated maps or community maps. Even then, the game is so niche I don't know if that would fill the feeling that something is missing. This game was pretty easy.

Its friendslop. The content is pretty stale, I'd say. The real entertainment comes from within.

I'll let the other reviews speak for themselves because this game has been out for years already. Really fun and definitely worth $30. Solo is good but friends make it better.

Criticisms:

- The logo-based inventory system is jank. You expect me to memorize all those logos which represent what types of ammunition or utility that item is? Its not THAT bad, but still frustrating.

- I feel like the AI, while still being suitable for gameplay in their current state, could be expanded upon. I think there is so much room for improvement here, yet what they have currently is playable and still fun. It'd be really cool to see more of the RTS of this game come out. Idk exactly what to expect, but something feels missing.

If you have friends to lobby with, this game will be easily worth the money you spent on it. I've only played one day and I've gotten my money's worth.

The idea of a new map every day excites me, we'll see if that holds up.
The game's visual design and character customization features w/unlockables is attractive, well done.
The game is incredibly simple to play, yet complex in application (in a good way). Its not easy. Its not crazy hard. This is a great balance.

Phenominal concept, feels polished, feels like someone put some heart into this game, and its incredibly fun to experience with others. Great buy.

This is a biased negative review, because I originate from Warno (go figure).

I take several issues with the core gameplay:

1) LOS/weapons indication:
- For example, I can see my unit's weapons have a range of 600m, but 600m is completely useless to me in-game as I'm thinking on-the-fly. How close do I have to move a unit for them to be able to engage something, but not overcommit too far to die? This is a question you currently can't answer. There is no in-game tool to review the capabilities of the unit you have selected, other than what you see at the bottom of the screen. I can't micro the unit to it's fullest potential, frustrating me.

2) Complexity/Clarity
- I can see each unit has their own unique benefits and weaponry, however it is not clear how effective these are or what types of units they counter well. For example, in Warno's case, elite infantry or units that excel in certain areas or have higher firepower/training are indicated as such. I understand I can micro my deck down to the specific weaponry units carry, but for example I have little idea what the difference between certain aircraft missiles are. I'm left to figure these things out on my own, which might be OK, but its stressful.

3) Movement
- The movement is pretty abysmal. I need to hold "SHIFT" with a unit selected in order to see it's current orders. Even then, I cannot see what path that unit will ultimately decide to take. I'm left to micromanage the pathing of the units. On top of this, sometimes units ignore your initial order. If I tell a tank to hunt, sometimes it will stall out and refuse to hunt until I issue a duplicate order. The same seemingly happens, given less frequently, for normal movement.
- The movement of units overall feels pretty slow, thus the gameplay reflects this. There isn't really a moment where I'm stressing-out over a push.

4) Consequences
- Send a vehicle into an enemy area? No problem! When they catch an ATGM to the face and it destroys their vehicle, they'll dismount like nothing happened.
- Lose too many units? They'll be back soon. Just wait a timer.

5) Incentives
- Long range ATGMs, artilery, mortars, and aircraft/helicopters are the primary drivers of gameplay.
- Ground unit engagement is minimal. Only 5-10 units are "fighting" on the battlefield at any given time, likely caused by the effects of the previous bullet point.

EDIT: I only have 3 hours. I'm more than 100% sure there is more I could complain about, especially balance issues as other reviews are mentioning. Every single feature, even down to the little things, I believe Warno does better and more attractively. I can't be incentivized to play a game when I know I'd have more fun elsewhere.

EDIT: Also, overall, where is the strategy? Whats the incentive to strategize? Is this even a strategy game? I can YOLO an infantry unit right down the middle and figure out generally where the enemy is. I'll just send tanks behind them or something. Where is the incentive to organize, plan, and execute an attack or a specific defense? Everything is so generic to the point where you don't really have to worry what your units on the field look like. Get an ATGM and some stingers and you're fine.

PHENOMINAL CONCEPT! ... but missed potential.

This is a great game for its price.

The real-world map choosing is amazing. This alone sold me on the game. I love zooming into my house, creating my HQ where I actually live, and then playing the game from there. The tower defense feel is great. The zombie survival aspect is great. The ability to manage, create, and adapt buildings is great. The squads CONCEPT is great (more on that below). Overall, AMAZING potential here.

Now time for the criticism.

I'm only 7 hours into the game with several different runs to optimize my mistakes I've made while learning the game. However, I think there are some core gameplay issues keeping me from being eager to continue. I want to keep playing, but the things I mention below are putting me off. This is a great game and I see the potential though!

Feedback/missed potential:
(please interpret all of the following information as feedback, and not as a negative review, this is a fun game for the price)

- The story events where it basically causes your own civilians to die as a result of your "actions" in the story is crummy. Let me be skill based. I want to save them. I want to do something about it, but you kinda can't. You just stumble into a "bad situation" out of the middle of nowhere and it feels forced. There is no indication of what you're about to get yourself into (no matter how major or minor that event might be).

- The worker/citizen management system is abysmal. I cannot stress this enough. I have absolutely no good feedback for it. It doesn't work as one would expect. I think its one of the worst aspects of the game. There is no incentive to use the worker management panel. Whenever I'm constructing or scavenging things, its not very intuitive that your workers just choose a random project to work on. I have no visibility into where my workers are at, what they're doing, or what they're going to do next. I want to be able to prioritize things, or even manage my civilians on an individual basis. Increasing or decreasing a number for "the amount of workers" on a job is incredibly bad. Let me assign workers, or let me assign priorities on jobs, or basically ANYTHING EXCEPT for what it is now. A number isn't very helpful, and you don't know where they'll go after they complete the job. Not only all of that, but if you don't have materials, they just won't work. If there are no materials, offer me the option to easily reassign them. This is stuff I believe is most important to the game, as its basically all I do on a day-to-day basis (is base building during the day). This is a HUGE quality of life thing, and I think it is currently poorly executed.

- This plays into the previous point... but please let my guard tower workers do something else during the day. I was a little upset to find that there is no real threat during the day (or maybe I'm missing something?), so guard tower workers are absolutely useless and just eat food. They're mainly only useful at night. Let me reassign them during the day.

- The squad movement is a little jank. I like to position my squads so the zombies run into them. However, if you move them around during combat, they act irrationally. I think they should have some level of autonomy. Like, for instance, if there are zombies nearby and the "free movement" option is on for the squad... let them take cover by themselves in a sheltered building. I shouldn't need to micromanage what should be a common-sense action for an AI. Let them act human and be scared.

- Squad management: Inventory transfers, replenishing, swapping, or any other squad action feels unintuitive. They work, but I think they could work better. Don't make me click buttons or perform an action to do the most basic function of something (like accessing an inventory). I think this could be a button on the squad which opens an inventory menu. I shouldn't need to click the squad, click the exchange button, then click the building I want to do it on. This wastes a TON of time. It can just be a button for the current inventory of the building.

- Camera movement: The breakpoint between the map and the in-game camera feels jank. I think the scrolling feature (to zoom in and out) can be improved to feel more smooth and seemless.

- Cars: Does a squad need to be locked to a car? I understand its useful from the standpoint of scavanging/looting buildings, but what about at night when I want to have them walk around between my buildings to help with defense? Clicking a button to disassociate the squad to the car feels jank, but I can't think of anything better at the moment. Maybe a garage building?

- The radio: The radio/antenna interface in the bottom right feels useless. The dialogs are sometimes painful to get through. Helpful information through here is nice. Story events through here are nice. Random events that hold no significance? Sure, its immersive, but distracting. Maybe offer the option to turn this kind of dialog off.

So far, this is everything Drug Dealer Simulator should've been. I love how dynamic things are. I love how you can have dealers. I love the grind.

My only complaint is how child-like this is. This is an adult game, obviously, but the police are NOT intimidating whatsoever. They're just goofy. I long for the feeling of the scary police radios, or accidentally running into a police officer around the corner and getting jump-scared.

Definitely worth it for $15. However, I feel like this currently has huge missed potential.

Static tavern. Static farm. Static world. Static economy.

The gameplay loop is good. I desire one similar where you can build the tavern, potentially procedurally generate the outside world for meaningful resource searching, encounter some type of setback or increase in difficulty other than an increase in complexity of recipes, seasonal events, random realistic events, macroeconomic effects on pricing and demand, etc.

This game, despite inventory balancing and general management being fun & engaging, feels built for a cozy/relaxed/cheap setting -- and not one to be played long-term.

Brilliant, and satisfying as the title suggests. No complaints. It is definitely worth the advertised price, and I'm only 5 hrs in.

EDIT: 40hrs in. Amazing. Would've paid double for this game.

I'm 6 hours in the game and I think I already got my $40's worth. I love the intricate level of detail and micromanagement others have complained about. The idea that whoever can best micromanage their forces will be the most effective sounds like a good skill valley to dive down.

For those considering a purchase, beware that this game has a learning curve of at least a few hours until you can do anything meaningful. The tutorials alone maybe take 2-3 hours, which seemingly exceeds Steam's 0-2hr playtime refund policy window. This seems kind of crummy, and maybe by design, but the tutorials do seem necessary to me. Just know you probably won't be able to refund it if you do play through all the tutorials.

I have not delved deeper into multiplayer yet. As you probably noticed, I'm new to this, therefore I wish to get a little more learning under my belt before I go there. I'm highly competitive so the multiplayer prospect excites me, but I cannot speak to it's quality yet.

As for the singleplayer quality: I personally enjoy playing against bots to learn. The singleplayer gameplay alone is pretty damn satisfying, and you have a good variety of maps and settings/configurations to choose from.

From all I can tell, this is worth $40, or whatever price point it goes on sale below that -- given that you already know you enjoy RTS games and military strategy.

My only fear is that this game will take after it's predecessor, R.U.S.E., and Eugen will allow certain military licenses to expire, therefore killing the game.

EDIT: Multiplayer has been extremely fun, regardless of winning or losing. Not sure why I saw some reviews bashing the multiplayer. Sure there might be some balance issues, but they're not very apparent to me.

I will change this to a positive review if the following gets addressed:

Someone on the steam forums (https://steamcommunity.com/app/2920570/discussions/0/4757577823503176104/) said this, and below was my response: "Doing tasks means nothing, am I the only one who notices this?"
-----------------------------

You're not the only one that notices this.

I want to voice this somewhere, and this seems like the place to do it, so I hope the devs see this.

Currently, there is no point (I mean literally no point, keep reading) to do any tasks on default settings. Implementing custom settings is the only way it makes sense.

By default, 2% productivity for specialist tasks and -2% productivity for slacker tasks causes the game to completely balance itself out, and no meaningful progress is made in the game.

For instance, every player has specialist and slacker tasks. If each specialist has slacker tasks as well, it means they're negatively contributing against their own work. Therefore, for rounds where you have 2 slacker tasks and 1 specialist task, you are negatively contributing -2% to the progress bar that round by completing those tasks. (-2%, -2%, +2%)

A good strategy on the default settings would actually be to slack off against slacking off. Don't do the slacker tasks. Wait for the next meeting to get new tasks where you can contribute meaningful work.

Even then, it won't matter. Your teammates will either not do tasks at all, or do the slacker tasks too, therefore doing work for no reason.

The manager really only matters on default settings. All lobbies are using default settings. Its so bad.

A better way, I've found, is to increase Specialist productivity to 25%, and slacker productivity to 15%. Therefore, meaningful progress is actually made, and the game isn't just a manager firing people.

I voiced this concern to the DEVs in their discord and they reiterated that there is a custom gamemode where you can tweak these settings yourself. They said they will discuss internally about better ones.

My argument is that the default settings ruin the experience across-the-board for those who simply create a lobby and play the game, unknowing to them. These, seemingly being the vast majority of lobbies, decrease the quality of the game for players like me who play competitively to win.