This game is a mixture of RTS style basebuilding married to tower defense with gorgeous graphics and an attention to detail.

As you can see I enjoyed the early access but as of June 3rd, 2025 the game has a serious system bug for an unknown number of people. My last play session was from 19:41 to 20:58 or roughly a little more than an hour. In that time the log file grew to 42GB of useless error messages. 42GB/77 minutes is 9 MB per second. A longer play time of 4 hours would be ~130GB. I tried to report this and they blew me off.

I suspect they made a deal with the devil and rushed the game out to appease Sony for the sponsored release show.

If you like Oxygen not Included but want a game with absolutely no real tutorial, this is the game for you!

The game's difficulty curve starts with a cliff of trying to figure out what is going on and what do you need to do. Once you get over that little hurdle its a pretty gentle but unstoppable climb upward.

My mini-guide for getting started at standard/normal difficulty: First priority is to make cots for your staff in a closed room (don't forget the doors) and then full speed ahead to get research going ASAP so you can unlock the Medical bed. As soon as that's unlocked, redirect toward cooking/sustainable food. iron is in the further underground room in the form of a few rock piles. First and highest priority with the iron to build are two medical beds (yes two! your magicians will get beat up a lot)

Otherwise I currently have a professor attuned to lightning, another is green/plants, and the last is your enforcer attuned to the "dark" purple tentacle magic school. Basically lightening person is dedicated to research, green person is best for chopping/harvesting, and purple person does a bit of anything. If you get the ghost helper, ramp up their priority for cleaning up spills, secondary cooking. Always have double the meals to staff/students. Also I don't think food every spoils. The ghost will never level up but it makes up for its uselessness in having unlimited mana and not needing food or sleep.

When the ghost isn't doing anything important: select everything/anything fauna related (esp seeds) and (m)ove them indoors on the floor. If the rain comes you will lose all of it. Select the ghost and then while holding down shift, right all the stuff marked to be moved and assign that task to the ghost. The game doesn't tell you until like day 4 that shift right click queues tasks onto a dupe... I mean magician.

Word of warning when fighting with the "dark" magician. They're your heavy hitter but there most powerful spell (miasma) costs a blood sacrifice. As long as they're in the back, just spam it like crazy for an easy win. Once the battle is over, force them to eat, and then its straight to medical rest (right click it).

Last thing, when you have 3-4 hours left in the day, send all of your staff to do the push the fog back ritual, and try to do it every day so your level is above 200 (the number is on the mana font stone).


Anyway good luck and have fun!

Dying Light 2 is a playable game, but it will leave a bad taste in your mouth if you are expecting a sequel to Dying Light. They really dropped the ball with this game, and it is somehow of lesser quality in every way (story, controls, weapons & items, enemy logic).

That said, it is not all doom and gloom. The para-glider added a bit of fun to the game and like I said at the start, it is playable. For someone who didn't play the first game, they might even enjoy DL2.

Unfortunately I cannot figure out how to move using the Index knuckle controllers so just a tad frustrating.

UPDATE:

With the left knuckle controller, grab a brochure and pick it up by pressing the index finger button. With the right knuckle controller, point down at the ground then use the thumb stick to point at where you want to go. If you do it right, the knuckle controller will also slightly vibrate.

It feels short but this was an entertaining and unique experience.

Important stuff first:
It is playable for me though I've heard 6xx-7xx nvidia owners need to upgrade to the .10 hotfix drivers.
The 388.13 driver is required for a remotely sane experience.



Cons:
Nvidia support is sketchy, I experienced my first BSOD on Windows 10 when I tried changing the refresh rate from adaptive to fixed. (388.13 resolved this)
Alt-tabbing from fullscreen to desktop caused a panic reboot from the motherboard. (388.13 resolved this)
Very evident screen tearing even with a 1080 (388.13 resolved this)


Pros:

MG has stuck with meticulously detailed map environments.
Controls are fluid and responsive
Character development so far is just as well done as Wolfenstein: NO

Don't recommend as is; wait for them to fix the bugs. Show-stopping, literally broken, is having the mouse cursor dissappear on me (even when running windowed).

All together decent game and one I hope to get a chance to enjoy someday.


Pro's
1. Map/environment complexity is markedly more improved than its predecessor.

2. Equipment moderately improved on, some weapons have additional bonuses you can unlock by doing challenges (Kill 5 Orc in a row without losing might, etc), Gem stones (I don't remember if first had an equivalent, they're like minor stat modifiers)

3. Nemesis system is on steroids, if you don't put a Captain down quickly it will adapt around cheese tactics and force you to actually play the game.





F*** this game(for now)

1. Combo-counter and Might, still trying to figure it out but feels unintuitive so far vs first one where you had the counter and a lot of audio/visual cues to tell you how close you were to going on a rampage.

2. Dissappearing mouse icon
An Orc named Narug killed me (and because I couldn't see the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ cursor I couldn't do the last save) so he became Narug The Tark Slayer. I hunted his ass down and set him on fire. Sometime later Narug returned from Ork Hell and became Narug The Flame and before I could kill him a ghul ripped my thoat out. Really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pissed at ths point, I hunted Narug The Flame down and he had adapted to being vaulted over so I used Orc fodder around me to build up my combo-count and hit him with finishing damage. Right as I got this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beaten down and dead, his last save QTA shows up BUT I CAN'T SEE THE ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MOUSE ICON so he got away.

3. Movement system doesn't feel as refined as the first and there are more than a feel early assassin creed like accidents where your character zags when you just want it to drop down, or zigs straight into a fire hazard.