Besides the rush to do the same routine over and over to make money for, whatever reason... it's a nice game.
It's a great game (so far) and I am quite enjoying it, but of all the mechanics I've used so far I am not happy with firestarting, cooking and combat and I will now explain why. Firestarting. Sticks, while plentiful to begin with, rapidly disappear and end up in short supply in the immediate area. If you start a fire and there are planks nearby, which you and I would simply drag to a roaring inferno to catch alight, you can't do that, you must first hack it to bits with a hacket before it can be used. Sames goes for small tree limbs. This also highlights how silly tools are treated in this game. Hacking away at a chair to get reclaimed wood takes roughly 1 hour 30 minutes, lots of water and calories and it does about 3-4% damage to your precious tools - this will bring me on to my next point about cooking and harvesting from animals. Cooking: takes huge amounts of time. Snow seems to take a ludicrous amount of time to melt - boiling is fine. Knives, hatchets and scrap tools are way too easily damaged by harvesting from animals and bizarrely, cutting up a cardboard box with a knife does lots of damage to it as well. No details are given in the cooking window about what things do, instead to be sure (if you have forgotten) you must back out of the cooking menu and go into the inventory, which is a mess and find the description you are looking for. Other annoyances are, while this game fast forwards everything as you cook/eat/harvest, etc, you cannot do anything whilst that is being done. I'd of prefered to be doing something else while cooking something, like repairing clothes or using the whetstone (which also breaks too easily). Combat is just outright broken. I fired (on many occasions) a flare gun at the face of a wolf and it adhered to the wolf (blood splats galore) and it ran around for 3 minutes until the flare wore off and as I followed it, shooting it again, the flare and the wolf did absolutely nothing. Great potential but long way off being memorable.
Nice little game, ruined by that indestructable Ghost if you take too long.
