the gameplay loop is fine, i enjoy that well enough. i downloaded it honestly because i thought it would be a fun idle game and i could look at some decently attractive men in the process but honestly it just ended up pissing me off.

the writing is horrendously annoying. i know this is personal preference, but my personal preference is not this. there were a couple good gags, but otherwise the characters repeat the same 5 lines per relationship rank and it gets old fast. also, the designs are uninspired at best - they share basically zero characteristics with their animal forms other than eye and hair colour. you really made the wolf guy a skinny white twink who wears pristine dress shirts? really? at least three of the characters look near identical and at least two DRESS identically.

then there's the pegasus, eli. he is literally a homophobic stereotype, and i don't accuse writers of this lightly. it's actually genuinely offensive. you can really tell from the get-go that this was made for straight women and not gay men and it's incredibly unsettling to play as a gay man.

anyway, bad game! do not recommend. make something interesting with this gameplay loop and maybe i'll come back.

OPEN BETA REVIEW. i have played act 1 twice at this point. shelved since i don't own it and can't drop 80 bucks on a game rn lol.

current state, game's glitchy as all fuck and is probably going to be like that on release unless the poor devs are crunched to death, which i sincerely hope they are not. we literally could not play the finale of act 1 because the hoards wouldn't spawn (both times lol).

DESPITE THAT, the game is extremely fun. like, EXTREMELY fun. i like the card system a lot and i think it's implementation is smart - it matters, but not THAT much. your build isn't really going to make or break you or anything, at least not on normal. it'll just give you a little bit of an edge along the way. same with the character picks. in my opinion anyway. i can see certain ones being broken on higher difficulties (like mom's instant revive), but we didn't play any higher than normal, so.

the gunplay feels REALLY good. like, REALLY GOOD. it's not often you find an fps game where shooting feels as good as in this, honestly. the guns have a real weight to them and can seemingly jam, which sounds annoying on paper but is sort of neat to me honestly and generally isn't a huge deal since you just have to reload sooner than usual. i like that there are rarities of guns and that you can customise them with addons. i like that A LOT.

melee is a little lacking, but i can see them paying some extra attention to that later and fixing it up a bit. i can sort of live without it, personally, since i rarely go with melee in shooters lol. so any flaws here don't bug me that much.

i enjoy the characters a lot, can't really complain that they're a little one-note because the ones in l4d were too lol. i do think the dialogue is entertaining enough although there ought to be either more or less of it because hearing the same cues repeatedly does get tiring.

the game appears to be pretty well optimised and despite what brain poisoned graphics chuds online will tell you it actually looks really good.

a minor complaint is the tone of this game is a bit all over the place? it hasn't quite found its footing, writing-wise. turtle rock seem a bit scared to get too serious or too goofy with it. my personal preference would be leaning into the goofiness, but either way would clean up the tonal messiness a bit.

i do also think this game is overpriced. i'm really not sure why they're charging full AAA price for this (USD$60, CAD$80). i wish it was 20 dollars cheaper, at the very least. i think a lot of people would take a lot less issue with it if the game was, like, base USD$40. 60 is a huge ask for a lot of people.

anyway, i'll be getting it at some point, barring a horrible crisis with the game or the devs lol.

i loved this game a lot. i liked the story and the characters and i enjoyed the changes to gameplay and progression from bl2/tps. i like that there are less sidequests that are given more time to shine. this game relies more on absurdism than just "lol random meme" humour, which suits it well. the writing allows more room for serious moments too i feel. i don't have a whole lot of complaints honestly!

i will say i wish the boss fights were more interesting and that there were more of them. that's something i remember from bl2 and tps that really stands out, and 3 didn't really deliver on that front.

my biggest complaint is that optimisation on this game is atrocious, which is the main reason i'm knocking a star off despite really loving it. if you have even slightly a worse computer than me (rtx 2080, i7 processor, 16gb ram - i should be running this flawlessly on highest settings) you will have to start lowering the graphics settings and even then idk how well this game will run for systems with lower specs. the game made my gpu run at about 70c too, which is quite warm for me and not my favourite thing ever. the framerate was very inconsistent. so, be warned if you have an older system.

i enjoyed playing this game a lot. it runs beautifully on my modern rig, and the gameplay holds up pretty damn well for a shooter from 2006, especially since the game was in development for 11 years. it looks good too; you can tell it's old, and there are some places it hasn't aged well, but overall it looks great.

i do commend them for hiring actual native american voice actors, and michael greyeyes is great as the lead. the writing of tommy's dialogue is also very funny and entertaining.

i will say that i am not native american (i'm asian-canadian), so i can't really speak on that aspect of the game? HOWEVER, in doing research i found that prey 2006 seems to have employed cultural consultants and sensitivity readers, and that everything has basis in real cherokee oral traditions. i also haven't really found major complaints about its portrayal of cherokee people, just points about minor inaccuracies. to me, it feels as though the game was really trying to do what it was doing respectfully, although again i am not native so i'm not the authority on that.

all in all, i think it's a really enjoyable game. i was pretty surprised at how much i liked it.

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

i like the gameplay a lot and how tactile things feel, but the writing is just not for me personally. it's extremely cutesy, to the point where i'm struggling to figure out who this game is targeted towards? if it's children, it's patronising; if it's adults, it's tiring. there are a lot of made up words (humans are 'oobin'), deliberately misspelled words (reconstitooter), or things are bizarrely renamed (drippy can instead of watering can, dirt scraper instead of hoe). this is fine, but not for me.

also, currently, there's not much to do, due to it being in early access. i'd stave off on this one for a little while. my 3 stars will hold even for future updates, though, unfortunately.