I can not recommend this game in all good faith.

I loved the Total War series, I've bought and played a good majority of them and watched endless hours of content from many different people and places.

I've put 100's of hours into most of the games and spent stupid money buying the collectors editions.

This is purely because CA is a god awful, scummy, terrible company with ZERO care for their consumer base.
They treat you like a thick skulled piggy bank they can just take and take take from.

Constant bugs and game breaking issues they refuse to fix that have been there for years, Awful treatment of their biggest content creators and straight up bullies if you try to point any of it out.

They've gutted each game more and more so they can drip feed you content that should be in the game already or at least sold as packs and not individual parts. You have to pay over £200 to play the game with all of its features and even then you miss out if you haven't shilled out another 200-300 on the other games and EVEN THEN it's broken, shoddy and barely works.

I have no faith in this god awful company and their poorly made games.
If you still somehow find yourself playing this game then I do believe you will have minor fun as the mechanics are so heavily swayed to boring gameplay and broken loops that you'll find yourself lacking confidence in winning any battles or fights or sieges. You'll seek ways to cheese fights and outcomes because an actual fight becomes a tedious mess.

The core gameplay is not bad by any means but is far from great, build armies and fortify towns while you expand your empire, cool I guess.
Shame it means nothing when the AI just cheats in massive armies with either higher tier than they can hire units or just absolute garbage slop. Sure you can change the settings to your needs but it still barely makes a difference

Oh you want to play it for the multiplayer? Sure, good luck keeping a stable connection, not crashing or desyncing mid game or fight rendering any time you put into worthless and wasted.

I am bitter and disappointed, Jester me if you will or insult me on the comments but do not support god awful business practices and scum bag community reps. The fact Games Workshop or Warhammer allows this kind of scummy practices to ruin their reputation any further than it already has is beyond me.

-10/10

STUPID METAL BOXES.

I'm giving it a thumbs up as it has the vibe and aesthetic of Stalker that I love but I am unsure if I can really recommend this game past that and there's no "maybe" option on steam. Dont get me wrong I am enjoying the game but it feels shallow (Yes its just released) and lacking in what the store page advertises it as.

TLDR, It misses elements of what it says it takes inspiration from, it hits the STALKER vibe well, its a bit shallow but all in all it is rather entertaiing and fun considering its only just released - Make sure you have friends to play it with.

Misery is fun and entertaining but it feels like it lacks the bits of what its actually going for.
It describes itself as a rogue-lite Lethal company stalker game which it has parts of each but sort of falls short on two of those.
It nails the STALKER part, same styled hud, the designs and even the areas and gameplay - Its brutal and you always feel like struggling through early/mid game but once you've got gear its kinda a non issue. You got a few mutants though never many and theres bandits who seem to be able to nail you through fog, trees, bushes and round corners from 100m away with a sawed off. Very frustrating but very STALKER

The only real thing Lethal Company style about is the changing levels after an emission and the horn you can honk, theres no over arching objective to collect for or explore/work for, no real story or notes from previous stalkers/workers far as I can tell, you just sorta grab loot and build a bunker and meme if you've got friends to play it with (I did not lol, solo life) it doesnt really have the rest of the feel that Lethal Company had. Maybe I've been unlucky in my runs but at emission 20 I've only just been placed into the bunker area and before that it was about 6 rehashes of the same apartment complex maps.
You occasionally find silly things like baba yagas chicken legged hut or dwarves but even then thats about all I've found that seemed... weird like Lethal Company would of had.

The Rogue-Lite element I am not really sure how it is even close to that, you die, you respawn in the bunker naked and can just go grab your gear. There's no end to the run with new knowledge or the chance to enhance the gameplay you just... die, spawn, collect loot again and if you can get your loot back then you can, nothing more really there's no real repercussion other than maybe enemies camping your body or maybe losing your stuff if the emission is imminent. It feels like it was chucked on just for the name of it.

Its a really mixed bag, the progress feels strangely gated by radiation at all points, it took an age for me personally to get an actual rad mask to survive in some of the milder rads after maybe 15 emissions.
The bandits aim bot style crazy see through fog etc makes trying to fight them not difficult but frustrating as you get tagged and suddenly your guy wobbles like mad. I get it bullets hurt but this is also a game
The bunker doesnt really feel that important other than being a place to dump your loot that just sorta accumulates over time as its pretty easy to get enough food, weapons, clothing and even guns/mags though ammo is seemingly always scarce which I get being a valuable commodity in an apoc world until you have the workbench to make more, the bunker sorta just seems to be there for the sake of decorating and maybe a few of the workstations to progress but even then its just easier to dump everything in piles and thats that.

The world changing is cool, I like the exclusion zone vibe and the weirdness but it doesnt really add much more than being able to explore a slightly different area until you get a cool area which you probably cant explore because you have no rad resistance.

Artifacts, I havent really looked for many myself but when I have the detector seemingly just breaks and wont find anything even after having been ticking further along to say something is near, nothing drops, I assume a visual bug as it has done that then after weapon switching and moving around finally working again. I'm sure they add some benefits though I cant see how much theyd help, foods abundant, liquids are, as are healing items.

Its fun, its strange but I dont know if it's really a big yes yet. 9 hours isnt much time in the game and yet I feel I've met most of the mutant/monster/bandits so far, maybe emission 20 isnt that far in I'm not sure but I am still trying to just get rad resist as it seems dire and scarce to find.


Feel free to disagree or argue in the comments, I'm not hating on the game just giving my two cents, Its a cool game I just wish it had more of what it says it offered. If you're just going to be a ♥♥♥♥ then save your energy and give me jesters instead lmao

Honestly, I was expecting what everyone was saying that it's just a "shameless ripoff" and I was quite thoroughly surprised.

It takes all the best aspects of your favourite edgy grimdark tabletop game and your favourite sci fi spaceship battles of FasterThanLight and somehow just makes them into this wonderful game. Who'd of guessed it'd fit so well?

Seriously though, the combats plays the same as FTL with a good amount of variety from 40K sprinkled in. What's not to love about it? Great fun, go all out guns and missles then next run nothing but breach causing raiding with upgraded combat thralls.

The addition of being able to equip your crew based on what they do is a nice touch, I think it'd be cool if they also had skill bars like FTL for each room but I can see each faction and their units have different % gains/immunites/resistances on varying things so maybe one I've not found.

The UI is clunky as heck though, I get there's an aesthetic going on but it needs cleaning up, more obvious buttons and less decorative clunk.

Solid game, 100% getting it, the demo is sick.

Just hope it's distinct enough to survive incase the big dawgs get a whiff

Privyet, Stalker.

Too busy keeping game breaking bugs, awful server performance and refusing to fix anything with a poorly made rebrand so they can monetise every action and take away your classic in-game ways of earning to fund their failing game due to greed and incompetence.

lol, imagine this use to actually be a solid game back in the day. Nah I'm good, uninstalled for good - shame.

The game itself is great, the Devs really made something special and it has brought many hours of fun and enjoyment, The Devs did a great job on the gameplay however their lack of openness and hiding things, along with their community managers being a bunch of reddit mods that speak down on their community, with a bunch of mixed stories during the whole Sony account fiasco is beyond worrying.

They have cut ties with 100's of areas over the whole world due to the backlash of them trying to FORCE a completely useless unneeded feature instead of fixing it.
Do not give these greedy idiot scumbags a positive recommendation for their scummy practices.
They willingly almost killed off one of the only games that has taken off in the PC gaming area for their business all to pad their useless statistics.

They pulled the wool over everyones eyes.