DYSMANTLE

As someone who lives in the country and often drives to or from work at dawn or dusk, I have often wanted to chase down whitetail deer with a crow bar. Now I can

Because I tend to only write negative reviews :( The game is mostly fun and enjoyable, but it does so many things terribly wrong/badly. First of all, locking fast travel between camp fires behind paid DLC? That's just wrong. You can fast travel between some towers, but there are only so few of them and the locations can be awkward. If you die a second time before reaching your corpse, the new corpse overwrites the previous one - you lose the loot. Switching between tools is incredibly tedious and frustrating. Maybe a compromise for controller support? I mostly equip two tools to avoid switching, but I'll need to manually equip situational tools every time. Same for trinkets (passive bonus). Bugs around controlling your tools/weapons. Sometimes you swing at the cursor's direction, sometimes at the direction the character is facing. Sometimes it happens in combat and you keep swinging at the air when you run away from a monster behind you because your character somehow doesn't want to face the monster. Speaking of running, you can toggle running so you don't have to hold the Shift key all the time to run, but it can change to walking in combat, inconsistently too. WTF? Some tools can do AoE, but sometimes the game thinks it knows better and automatically turns the character to a different angle, incredibly annoying. You can force the correct angle by manually clicking once per swing/attack, but then sometimes due to timing the attack might not register so the character stands there like an idiot for a second before you click again. It also makes auto attacking useless (by holding down left click). A few things that require a lot of resource to upgrade but become obselete very quickly. Once end game comes there is no use for pretty much anything :/ Boss fights are boring. Although it's not really an action game. But random turrets on the road can 1 or 2 shot you. Have fun! The view angle and distance don't help. The trip back to your corpse can be a long one.

It's seemingly an "open world", but it's not open at all. You need to loot certain items from certain places to get that upgrade, so you can advance to next area. Also, it lacks the "base building" and "sandbox" features nearly completely – at least I could find them. Picking up has weird delay, you need to run back and forth to pick up. On the plus side, it's very good and polished in its own area: smash & collect tube runner. Combat is all about tactic.

The middle (post gas-mask) is a little grind-y and fetch-y, with the weird mana story starting to open a bit more. All in all it's a decent timewaster. I've bought GoG copies for two friends, I hope eventually there's online co-op.

Great game for its genre!