I wanted to give this game the benefit of the doubt being a "Early Access Game", so i put the college try worth of time 106 hours at the time of this review. I didnt want to be like a lot of reviews these days with the rage machines who play for 20 minutes and quit expecting a participation trophy.

Graphics - 8/10

First off i love the graphics of the game i think they are going in the right direction when it comes to this aspect, however there is not blood or gore or anything indicating a wound or kill. You can loot an animal you've killed or a npc and theres just... nothing.

Building - 8/10

Building in this game is like a love/hate relationship, on one hand you can build pretty much whatever you want and how you want. On the other hand when you try to place some of the props it will show "Green" but then break apart 2 seconds later. I managed to build a Tavern a Workshop and a castle during my played time in the EA version.

Game play loop------

Gathering- 5/10 " It will never be enough"

This is where the cracks start to appear in this game, as per every survival game there is a lot of gathering, mining, and wood chopping involved in setting up your first house or base. This alone will take you countless hours, which by itself is not really a bad thing however there are a lot of materials you'll need for crafting, building, progression that you will have a really hard time finding or its just not in the game. Example here is clay which is a basic material needed for a ton of items in the game, however its hard to farm out in the wild. Another example of this would be the next tier of leather which is just named "Animal Hide", this is dropped by wolves in boars in the wildlands but at a painfull drop rate of like 0.1%.

Crafting- 3/10 "The beatings will continue until morale improves."

This has to be the first game i've played where there is truly nothing to do with items you've crafted, and you'll be crafting A LOT of items. Hundreds and Hundreds of items just thrown on the ground since there's nothing else you can do with it. It takes far to long and way to many materials to level crafting up, it takes about 100 crafts of something Moderate difficulty to get to the next level. The crafting in this game just feels like a slog and a half since your entire game progression relies on it. Also for whatever reason when you fail a craft the items go on the floor, in your bag, or on the roof of whatever structure your in requiring constant cleanup when your done to get your hard earned materials back.

Combat- 4/10 "It works, but its about as deep as a puddle"

Combat works but its the FPS equivalent of shoot it until its dead and move on. Stabbing endlessly until the mob your fighting dies with no real sense of mechanics or skill involved. On higher level mobs your basically bound to bug them out or stand on rocks they cant get on until you can safely stab them until they are dead.

Other considerations:

While i know its a MMO and giant clans and guilds are to be expected you will be at a huge disadvantage playing solo, until some sort of in game player shop or currency is added.

The dev's plans for monetization of this game in the future just seem extremely vauge on purpose. Could you imagine being in a clan with people and building a town only for chunks of it to dissapear if a person doesn't pay thier sub?

Mainframe has been pretty responsive when it comes to game breaking issues such as launch day rubber banding or the DNS issues they hit later on, which is a nice change from other games in recent memory.

Suggestions for changes to the game:

Crafting system needs a full overhaul
- Make it fun, not just a gather and craft hundreds, then pray
- Give us actual XP bars for skills so we can judge how much we need to do to the next level
- Give crafts a chance to proc better version "common, uncommon, rare, etc" a lvl 40 armoursmith should be able to make something easier and better then a low level. Or the proc of making more materials like Nails where as the default is 50. Maybe it will proc and make 75 or 100 depending on level.
- Make Salvaging a skill or a option for crafting or loot, to atleast give people somthing to do with the stacks of items needed to level.

Building system and skills need more clarity
- Im not sure how many people know this but your carpentry level correlates into what you can build in the construction menu. The higher your carpentry is, the more things youll be able to use to build on your plot.
- Give us some kinda tooltip or explanation of what the point of leveling combat skills or gathering skills do. For those who dont know leveling bows make your shots do more dmg, leveling mining lets you mine faster at lvl 30.

Combat changes and upgrades
- Combat feels like your fighting AI set to Very Easy, they all do predictive attacks.
- there needs to be some kinda of dodge or other mechanics introduced


Summary

Personally id wait until the core of the game has more meat to it but the skeleton is there, lets hope the def works on it.

"the regretted teleport feature may make a comeback" The developers are actually delusional if they think anyone other than them wants to run around on foot for 5 real-life hours to travel to any given spot on the map to gather resources.

Hello Fellow Gamers,

a little about me for reference: I am 53 and have gamed since the release of the first video game, called pong in 1976. I was 5. So I have owned and/or played thousands of different games over my 48 years of gaming.

I write this review with a heavy heart ( a Gamer's Heart). Here is the most important thing you need to know about this game. They are most likely going to go with a monthly fee business model. So after you pay $100.00 to get the max 4 plots, you will then also end of having to pay a monthly fee to access the game once it is full release.


If you are OK with paying a monthly fee then continue reading. I am not and will sadly be looking for a refund. Yes they will say they stated they have not decided. But children take it from an oldster. When they say they are heavily leaning towards it but haven't decided. What they mean is they have decided but they want you to hope they haven't so you will give them your money and then when they go to the monthly system they will change their tune to " oh we did say we were heavily leaning towards this" as if they were innocent, and not trying to trick you into false hope. learn this trick from this old guy.

My review of the game as of July 4, 2024

It is amazing. Let's start with the first impression, which is always the graphics. They are stunning on my Nvidia 3060Ti with my 64G of RAM and i7 CPU. the world is absolutely immersive.
Now the Crafting: Yes, yes the whiners you see below and above are simple WOW children. They never played glorious games like EvE-online or Vangaurd: Saga of heroes and so do not know how wonderful it is to have an intricate and involved crafting system. For me and my fellow crafters, this is nirvana. I only hope they introduce quality levels later on based on how well you succeed or fail. Yes they are still working out bugs like making items you craft at a higher skill level actually have better stats. But that will come.

Housing: I love it. You pay for your plots, fairly and build on them. No horsecrap making them rare and difficult to purchase like Shroud of the Avatar.

Combat: this is my one sore spot, but it is mine alone, as I am a solo only player. This is on me. Here goes. There is currently no dynamic difficulty system for encounters with NPCs. Therefore if you are a solo you can forget about killing anything humanoid, or even above a wolf. I have just made the first two handed longsword and have not tried it out, in conjunction with my simple spear and bow with iron arrows( and sadly I will never know as I am leaving this game due to the monthly fee they will be going with). But with my broadsword and the other weapons I cannot kill even a single Humanoid MOB in the starter areas let alone go into a cave or a ghost forest. So I say SOLOs beware you will either need to find a PUG which I don't see any chatter on, or accept your lot as capped at wolves or the occasion Bear if he gets stuck on some scenery for you.

so what is my recommendation? IF you are ok with a monthly fee business model, and if you have a team or will go join one this game will be rich and full of gaming goodness for you.
IF you are ok with the monthly fee and a Solo, this game will still have gaming goodness to a point and may be worth it as time goes on
IF you are not ok with a monthly fee system, don't buy this game.
IF you are a solo player and are not ok with Solos being stuck in the starter area and killing only rabbits, deer, boars, and singular wolves and never seeing even the mid-level content. Don't buy this game