as a Runescape enjoyer i'm gonna love this assuming the devs keep working on the game

Yes.

Time played as of full review: 20 hours
Long review below

Ratings:
Performance: 5/10
Exploration: 4.5/10
Building: 6/10
Bugs (higher=less buggy): 2/10
Amount of content: 5/10
Price: 8/10

The game is fun and overall i've enjoyed my time playing it but I just can't recommend it at this moment in early access. I understand it is in early access and devs wanted another 6-8 months to work on the full release but currently game is quite barebones, unoptimized, and swarming with bugs from small to game breaking which I have looked past to have a good time with friends.

Content:
The game is missing a lot of content including but not limited to: log sled, water collector, wall gates, many furniture options, bonfires.

They've added a few new things like the crossbow, pistol, shotgun, 3d printer, etc but there arent enough improvements to the game. For every new item we got, we lost 2 from the original forest that had no reason to not be in this game. The biggest change is the building which I do like but again you can't build much so the new building mechanic feels wasted.

Performance:
2070S - R5 3600x - 16gb @3200mhz @2560x1080

Game runs between 40-60 fps depending on location on lowest settings. After an hour or so of play, I started to get memory leak (or what I assume is memory leak). Fps starts to drop slowly but surely until I can get no more than 30fps after about 2 hours of continuous play. After a restart of the game I'm back to around 50-60fps.

Map:
The map, while bigger, feels very barebones and uninhabited. Everything is far apart from each other without many POIs (if you can consider bunkers and caves POIs). The most interesting thing you'll find is a cannibal camp on the surface of the world. While the trees and bushes are denser, that's all there really is to look at and explore around the map. Exploring is quite easy as you are a mountain goat soldier hybrid, allowing you to walk up almost any kind of steep slope. The game also outlines every place you need to be to acquire all items and complete the game in the GPS.

Story: Story is unfinished as of this review but as it stands, it is very lackluster. Doesn't take very long to finish the story (if you try, you can finish in a few hours) and its quite ambiguous. Unlike The Forest, you have no clue what is going on and everything is just a mystery, especially at the end.

Bugs:
Game is extremely buggy which is almost fair considering the games circumstances but seeing birds fly underwater and through structures while deer straight up run through trees just isn't enjoyable and hurts the immersion. Add to that the many duplication glitches I accidentally found on day 1 and a whole host of small bugs/glitches just ruins the fun and again, immersion of the game.

Major Bugs(all found myself in a single play through in multiplayer):
-losing major important items obtained after restarting a save (shovel, shotgun, etc)
-clipping through the world permanently (place a chair where the person would spawn in, then have them sit on the chair without touching the floor)
-shotgun held horizontally no matter what weapon or tool you have out
-putting food in drying rack sometimes will cause you to be stuck in the drying rack until another player takes out a piece of meat from that drying rack
-losing attachments from guns when you give the gun to Virginia
-Logs can clip and fall through the ground. Once this starts happening, you can expect 80% of all logs cut to be gone within 5-10 seconds of cutting down a tree.
-log duplication (should honestly be a feature with the logs disappearing)
-you dont take damage if you have building book out, and you will gain speed with it out, allowing you to slide down surfaces at break neck speeds with no chance of taking any damage
-After finishing the game, you may find that all textures are gone and you are wallking around a black void with strands of wonky twisted textures scattered around the background.

Difficulty:
This game is EXTREMELY easy. When you die, you respawn nearby with all your gear beside you. When you get really cold, the only downside is losing up to half your stamina. Being starved and thirsty only reduces stamina. No sanity meter so you can eat cannibals 24/7. There are no illnesses you can acquire. In multiplayer, you can die endlessly without consequence. You can also loot the exact same spot hundreds of times by saving there, then exiting the run and going back because loot always respawns after restarting session.


If you're still wondering if you should buy and are not a massive fan of the forest game, I would suggest holding off for a few more months and let the devs iron the game out and add more content.

Update: after around 17 hours I ran into many more bugs. There are a bunch regarding building in this game (im talking around 10 distinct bugs I came across over 1.5 hours of base building) along with bugs like getting permanently stuck while adding food to the drying rack, losing items after relogging, 80% of logs chopped disappearing within 10 seconds of the tree being cut down (constantly by the way. We resorted to duping logs), characters glitching THROUGH and under the ground, making them unable to play (only fix we found was to have someone place a chair on the spot the person spawns in at, then have them sit on the chair). There is another bug where your shotgun will be sideways attached to your hand no matter what weapon you have equipped, and also a visual bug where your axe is always being held no matter your weapon equipped.

Can't even play the game. After my first move, all HUD disappears and I am stuck. Happened with tutorial (ended up skipping) then literally first real game it happened again. Literally cant move or do anything except move camera around and press escape and browse the settings menu.

♥♥♥♥ game