Like to start off by saying I do like the game which is why I am giving it a positive review. Additional qualifier that I purchased it on sale for 19.99 USD, and I have not yet played it on the most difficult settings, so I can neither confirm nor deny any reviews alleging it to be "impossible."

Pros:
- Good feel as a resource management building simulator, think a less complex oxygen not included with zombies.
- Tutorial tells you what you need to do to survive while not being over the top hand hold.
- Progression from the early game to a mid/late game is very noticeable as scavenging becomes insufficient to keep the zone alive.
- Map system makes for interesting challenges, though I am not sure how much it will effect replay-ability.

Cons:
- Management system of workers and squads isn't too great, "unemployed" workers will need to be manually assigned to already existing job orders.
- Access to vehicles quantity and quality are a role of the dice with no current way to build makeshift transportation, This results in painful resource management later on as things becomes further away from your on foot workers who can not use vehicles to help resource gathering.
- Late/end game of a zone currently impossible, as the three main resources wood, metal, and brick have a hard limit on the map. Wood becomes required for cooking food with metal required for increasing food production and ammo. Brick is the lowest of the three on paper, but every time your walls take damage you need to repair it with more brick/wood/metal depending on your walls. You can theoretically get away with a high quantity of towers equipped with bows to reduce metal upkeep but that only swings into more food required for an ever growing zone population and more wood/metal for the towers needed to house guards.
- Population control. Early/mid game has no serious issue here, as having people come in at an increased rate via radio is nice and controllable and the early low population makes for a nice feeling of being understaffed. However, eventually your population will boom for two reasons. People naturally coming to you, though you can send them away, and your population will start having children, something you can also kind of control but only by bricking moral. The last resort becomes sacrificing squads to zombies/raiders then recruiting new squads to repeat the cycle as your food production becomes unable to sustain your growing population.

Conclusion:
For the price offered I would recommend it. I go by the standard of getting a minimum of 3x gameplay in hours for the price of a 2 hour movie ticket and the game did that in its current early access build. Allegedly, there will be more story and end game renewable resources which should make this game far greater than what it is now.

Great game with a great community working together to spread democracy across the galaxy.

Recommended for now, but ready to put the thumbs down in the event the automaton S.O.N.Y. virus attempts to breach Super Earth security again.

Early on the game had its issues but was fun with a good community. However, now with the RNG of you and your opponents starting roster playing a significant part in whether or not you will win the match. Hopefully they tweak units back to allow for more play styles again, but until then I do not recommend playing this game.

After being away for a while I decided to give the game a second chance, but I was only disappointed to find out the things that made me walk away from the game became the game itself. What used to be a minor setback because of one bad set of cards for you happening to be exactly what your opponent needs can become a recurring issue. With cards now repeatable you can encounter large scale effects that ruined you coming back every turn instead of every 4+.

But the problem no longer just extends to just modifiers to your units or global effects anymore, now there are units that you can only access through the in game RNG reinforcement system, and you must select one no skipping allowed regardless of how much these reinforcement options cost. These unique units can then be purchased normally if you selected them, but you have no ability to edit their upgrades the way you could for your normal units. This means that their play style is not only very limited, but you can go several play sessions without encountering them. Apparently you can adjust the probability of units showing up, but this is only a %chance adjustment.

In short, the auto-battler genre has its fun parts, and this one advertised itself as one where you had a autonomy over how the game played out with a very small RNG effect per round that gave each match flavor rather than the major factor. But now nearly every game is one where you turn off your brain and if you win it is because the game won for you.

The latest change to the UI upon the Scortch Earth update is hands down a travesty. The menu when the game was in its beta was better than this and over the course of several patches it was significantly improved, so why they threw it out in favor of what can only be described as a console port interface where the obsession of empty space for "cool looking" visuals and big boxes meant to be seen by someone 15 feet away from their screen is beyond me for a game that used to be PC exclusive. In game is also rocky with inventory visual bugs such as ammo count not displaying, weapons in hand going invisible, and other bugs that had been fixed years ago are now also rearing their ugly heads back with this major patch. Give me the ability to get rid of this stupid menu system and stomp out these long fixed bugs Crytek.

After major 2024 alteration to matchmaking - solid B for effort in trying to get rid of the ping abuse and rampant cheating in the game. After a few weeks of game play where cheating was every game it dialed back to questionable every 8th-10th game. Unfortunately, this did not last long as the ping requirement is still too high to create a solid region lock. The programmers may have added a system that looks at your VPN to work with the ping system, but this is easily bypassed resulting in the same players who ruined the game back to what they are doing. Thankfully, this is still seems to be reduced for now, possibly due to more action taken from player reports. Still don't recommend the game, but more so with a huge case of buyers beware than flat out never touch this thing.


Before major 2024 alteration to matchmaking - game would be incredibly fun if it were not for the consistent existence of noticeable cheaters in every other game. Normally I give a pass assuming something was my fault, but when observing others and then seeing the same player several times in a single month who is making shots from far range with zero visual, I can only assume that Crytek still does not have a proper method of dealing with the problem. This has become such a problem that players make a game of reaching full prestige and telling the world they are cheating only to never have their accounts banned.