Recent reviews by FT

Overall there are aspects of the game I like, but it just wasn't for me, despite my reasonable amount of time spent in it.

People online recommended new players do Wintermute, the story mode prior to trying survival which I hear is the main part of the game. I left a brief negative review for Wintermute, as although there were elements of it that made me keep playing to discover more about the story and world, the presentation, and the gameplay was just bad, the writing was rubbish, as was the voice acting, and the missions were incredibly dull.

So once I completed that I expected survival to be the real deal, and having done the story mode and feeling confident I choose the Stalker difficulty, one up from the most popular one. The point of survival mode is to survive, it's permadeath, and you can't save scum. Now at the start there's a brief period where you're trying to find clothes and supplies to survive, but once you've settled into it, there's really not much to it other than looting every cabin you see, and this is on the harder difficulty.

You could say 'Why don't you try and even harder difficulty?' or 'Why not set challenges for yourself?', but the main issue is, there isn't anything to do. There's a large map split into smaller ones for you to explore, and although I haven't seen all of them, what I have seen is all the same, lots of snow, cabins, and the odd building. What are in these buildings? Cans of pork and beans, cloth, and antiseptic, nothing interesting, and if I have enough supplies why bother exploring?

I think the weather, food, and hunger system are brilliant and the best I've seen in a game, but the gameplay itself is lacking. Most survival games have an element of creating a base and becoming self sufficient, and having a reason to explore, this doesn't have that so you're left with 'just survive' but when you have enough food and water, what does that leave you with?

Overall this game isn't for me, if you are interested, get it in the sale, and skip Wintermute.

A long, tedious, and pointless story mode. I saw people recommend you do this before starting survival, I do not recommend you do that.

A brilliant map with a lot of depth and great, exciting, and challenging hunting. Though initially you might think a snowy map like this could get dull, the regions are surprisingly varied and the story and missions are good fun. It often feels like everything is out to get you on this map, as there are many aggressive animals that can attack you. I've had many moments where I've jumped out of my skin because a bear burst out of a bush, or I've been followed by wolves and managed to fend them off just in time.

I have unfortunately experienced animals getting stuck on terrain or running in circles, which is probably the only downside.

I would definitely recommend this map

I first played this on the free weekend, and initially wasn't a fan, but upon getting past the fortunately brief intro the game really opened up and I'm having great fun with it.

The good:
- Good selection of cars, they're unbranded but it doesn't matter (too many BMWs in my opinion though)
- Lots of visual customisation from body mods to liveries
- Surprisingly deep tuning, the higher tier upgrades have a lot of tuning options, and you'll find yourself regularly going to the mod shop to tune your car
- The map is great, there's a surprising amount of detail, the city is great fun to drive around, high traffic is a must, and the mountainous touge section is a joy to drive in
- I think that the came looks nice overall, especially at night
- On hard I feel the difficulty is just about right to have challenging battles and excitement in races

The bad:
- The AI isn't great, though the AI cars are fast in a straight line, they're rubbish through corners, brake too early, take terrible lines. They still put up a good fight on hard, but often they'll just crash due to taking bends too fast
- The car sounds vary a lot but aren't great overall
- I would like to see the ability to have custom routes in multiplayer, just a simple A to B race, and racing with bots as an option
- The game is missing drag racing! You can absolutely make cars made for drag racing in this, I think a DLC expansion with a drag strip, drag clubs, and some new cars would be perfect

The handling:
I think this might put people off, the cars have a tendency to understeer at speed, which is expected, it makes sense for a modded a car to not handle like a GT3 car around bends at 100mph. The tuning is very in depth and this can be adjusted and tweaked depending on the car and driver to manage this.

Overall this game surprised me, it's like a combination of NFS and Burnout Paradise, and is a very reasonable price. I would recommend it.

This game looks more fun than it is by far. A Finnish life simulator combined with in-depth car mechanics and racing? Sounds great, but unfortunately the game has been designed to be as un-fun as possible. People will say that this is part of the charm, but it really isn't, it's just frustrating. It has been made to be as frustrating and boring as possible on purpose, and the reward for slogging through all this isn't really there, it just feels like a pointless waste of time.

My Summer Car is an in-depth car mechanic simulator with an incredibly frustrating and tedious life simulation aspect attached to it. If you do fancy being annoyed and bored and want to play the game then I would suggest using guides and don't feel bad about using cheats, the game doesn't tell you anything on purpose because apparently that's 'fun', but it isn't, it's just stupid.

Overall I think it's a shame as there are fun parts to it but are ruined by a strange development ethos to punish the player to the point of making it completely unenjoyable. For this reason, I cannot recommend this game.

This DLC doesn't deserve the hate it gets, I understand people wanted a DLC that added to the main game, I wanted that too, but the DLC itself isn't bad and I enjoyed it. I believe people dislike that there are ships in it that require missions to unlock and time spent to do it, I can understand that to a degree but you only need to get at least level 1 in a mission to get the ship, and only need to do the missions that unlock them.

Most of the missions themselves are enjoyable, with the best ones being the story missions from X's past. The main story of Timelines itself was interesting and I appreciated the work Egosoft put into the environment and the music is fantastic. I have seen people complain about the AI voice acting, which was definitely wonky in places, I'm quite surprised some of it got through QA. I did not like the trading missions, they shouldn't be in the game, and there was a series of interconnected missions that didn't make this clear which caused frustration.

Overall if you like X4 this is a mixture of a new story, revisiting X lore, and a challenge mode.

A very enjoyable game especially with friends. It has a reasonable story but the crafting mechanics apart from the irritatingly fast hunger and thirst are great and satisfying. It's a shame that there's not really anything to do post-game, but I enjoyed my time in Raft nonetheless.

A fantastic game and a great sequel to My Time At Portia. Like it's predecessor but unlike other games in the farming/crafting game genre, My Time At Sandrock prioritises story and characters over pure crafting. It really is special to see how Sandrock and its inhabitants grow and change throughout the course of the game from your interactions and quests.

If you enjoy cosy farming/crafting games this is definitely the game for you, there is a lot of content so be prepared for it to keep you entertained for quite a while.

It's the building game you've always dreamt of. You can make any vehicle, and create one as simple or as complex as you want. If I was stranded on a desert island with a computer that had one game on, this would be it. I'll be playing it for years to come.

If you like engineering games, this is for you.

I really don't understand the negative reviews for this. The DLC is in two parts, the first part showing the events of the start of the game from the perspective of another character, the second is a new quest line. The stories for both are very good and engaging and I enjoyed them thoroughly.