Surviving the Aftermath

“The storyline is boring and almost nonexistent.”

“The story is very thin and there is very little lore or investment in making this a unique experience.”

“After a few hours of play, everything becomes boring and repetitive, and all you have to do is wait for new specialists to arrive so you can advance in the story.”

“The graphics are actually quite low for a game in this era.”

“Halty performance, except the graphics aren't that good or inspiring, just lots of lines all crammed together on top of each other, predominantly trees swaying, which is unnecessary and doesn't help make the map more readable.”

“The graphics are bleaker than a vulture’s tinder profile—your colony’s a monochrome pile of junk, like a landfill threw up on a spreadsheet.”

“Research, unfortunately, is tedious at first, not yielding anything if you're unlucky enough not to find research nodes, while useless after you've unlocked everything (though it's unclear how or if you can unlock the highest tier weapons/clothes, maybe you need to trade for a blueprint).”

“First you have to research it (more on that later), then find it (because the nearest spawn is always outside your initial scouted area) by placing a scout post far away and hoping you went the right direction, letting a colonist wander past deadly pollution on their daily commute. Then you have to wait for your scrapper to travel long distances to collect it... it's a tedious chore and never brings in a satisfying amount of resources.”

“The micromanagement of the colony is also tedious; you can't go off to make some tea without rats or bugs deciding now is a good time to mess with you. Hence, I classify the game as a disaster simulator where you must prepare for disasters and sit ready to handle every situation on the go, even at 3x speed, as the game is extremely slow with bottlenecks in progression.”

“Almost complete lack of replayability, uninteresting late game except for achievement hunting.”

“Poorly optimized and the game isn't polished as it should be, but there's a lot of content and the pacing is okay from beginning to end; still, I don't see myself coming back to the game, poor replayability and there's not a lot of space to express your creativity.”

“Once the primary quests are completed, there really isn't much by way of continuation or replayability, but the journey to victory was worth it.”

“It isn't stylized in that way either; it's literally poorly optimized, with blurry images and low-resolution sprites.”

“Technically speaking, it's a bit of a mess, starting from performance issues – CPU and GPU aren't maxed but FPS rarely goes over 45-50 and is very variable. Also, panning the screen over the edges stops working depending on clicks, requiring alternative methods to fix.”

“First and foremost: the game is not optimized at all. Every 5-10 minutes the music clips over itself and everything slowly freezes until pausing for 20 seconds, after which it catches up and works fine again.”

“The music is alright, but nothing I'll ever want to hear again.”

“- There's an option to select a 'radio' but the radio is only one song looped so it's super lame listening to the same thing all game.”

“It created such a disconnect for me that I had to turn off the in-game music and play ambient post-apocalypse music from the YouTube channel 'radiostalker,' which salvaged the experience somewhat.”

“Once colonies hit a certain size, the game becomes unstable and freezes, crashes, or ceases to respond to interaction while still running.”

“The game is not playable after 2 hours of gameplay; survivors and buildings become extremely buggy, people die of starvation despite having tons of food in storage, vital workshops stop producing even when all requirements are met, and resources such as medkits/pills are not used properly when there are many survivors.”

“I'm currently 48 in-game days and 55 population into the game, and at a specific point, the game just freezes up where game-time moves but colonists get stuck running in place and I can't open build menus or even the main menu to save and reload.”

“Nothing about this art direction creates an atmosphere of 'a bunch of survivors scraping by in a hostile world'.”

“It didn't add to the atmosphere of the game.”

“Positive things are graphics, possibility to build so many different buildings and i really like this post apocalyptic atmosphere, what i don't like is music it is really bad also no mini map, world map also feels empty, many characters look same, can't interact with storage's like delete something etc.”

“Played the beta before the game was released and it didn't crash nearly as much as it has since release. Another greedy cash grab. Paradox DLC template in full effect with this game, pushing out DLC after DLC while the game still has tons of bugs and crashes for no reason. Sad part is I, like most, keep giving this company and these greedy devs money for game after game. I also have this for console and experience the same problems. For a PC Master Race game, there is no excuse for the crashes. Graphics are so-so and there is no modding scene. Just horrible after all this time. Do not waste your money!”

“Would be a good game if it didn't fall right into Paradox's monetization scheme.”

“Just another Paradox cash grab, low quality, un-fun game made for a quick buck.”

“If you want us to care about the characters at an individual level, then there really needs to be a narrative, there needs to be growth, there needs to be risk. Reference XCOM for character development if the goal is character development without a story. If specialists really don’t matter, then don’t make them any different than colonists with extra benefits. As they are now, they are just elements of a non-existent story, and they are a constant that never change, which is boring.”