izigame.me

TL;DR
Is this game worth the buy? YES
Here's my considerations of the game in a more deep detail (for A21.)
Pros:
Extremely fun with friends (PvE, not PvP)
Entertaining, allows you to play the game with a lot of different builds, weapons, strategies.
-Amazing gun play with guns that are really satisfying to use and have nice sounds and animations, both world and 1st person ones, some of them however could be DRASTICALLY improved or reworked.
-Weapon attachments, unique ones with unique improvements.
-Drone/Vehicle/Tool mods.
-Vehicles, but there's a lot to improve on this field.
-Mods, amazing ones (thanks modders!)
Cons:
-Terrible optimization, really, it's just bad, people with rigs that have some of the newest components having it struggle to keep the game at stable FPS during blood moon or POIs.
-There is almost nothing to do at night, especially if you just started the game and you are playing on high difficulty, feral zombies are way too tanky, but this isn't the main problem, the main problem is the melee weapon system, refer to the next point.
-Melee system is kind of garbage. At the beginning of the game, it is better to use a melee to get kills, especially since guns and ammo are kind of scarce. Now, your melee is coded to work this way: if your crosshair is ON the enemy hitbox when you're swinging then you will get a hit off, BUT if your crosshair is NOT on the enemy hitbox, you will just miss the hit at point blank, your melee just goes through the zombies, but the hit doesn't register, because THE CROSSHAIR SAID SO!
-Doing quests at night can be extremely frustrating due to the spawning system, ESPECIALLY in the wasteland. The game is coded so that at night, in this specific biome, zombies instantly respawn upon getting killed, making you feel like you're into a bloodmoon. Now, this is positive AND negative at the same time. How? Well, the positive side of this, is that wasteland becomes your MAIN exp farm at night time, the negative side(S) is that trying to do a POI becomes frustrating since you will get zombies constantly coming from behind, zombies that are NOT part of the POI. If you try to adapt to this issue and block the pathing of the zombies off, they will keep piling up until your framerate will be SO low that you'll have to use a console command to get rid of said zombies, this is just unbearable at times.
-When you do a POI, you are forced to follow the path designed by the developers. You can destroy blocks to get a shortcut in, SURE, that works on fetch missions, but infested clear? or just clear? If you grab a tier 5/6 quest and the game sends you into a massive skyscraper, boy, don't you fucking dare to skip parts of the map, follow the path, kill the zombies as they show up, or else, you will end up and the end of the quest, loot grabbed, but the quest is still not complete, and the game doesn't tell you where the last amount of enemies is UNLESS there's really few of them.
-Trigger spawn system: the game is coded in such a way that whenever you cross a "trigger" line, enemies will spawn. This can be figured out rather easily because you can go into a building guns blazing and nothing will happen, but the moment you cross that line, boom, the game freezes and you hear zombie noises. This makes clearing point of interests really frustrating if you decide to ignore the devs path, also, enemies spawn out of thin air in front of you, realistic at its finest. Oh you didn't get into this room? Too bad, zombies aren't there. The concept of zombies being attracted by NOISE like gunfire or running/jumping around is amazing, but is ruined by this horrible spawning system, and, of course, there's no despawn system. If the zombies are in the same loaded chunk as you, they'll never despawn, so they can just pile up and destroy your FPS, great job devs.
-Dogs
-Vultures
-Bikers
-Zombies that you have not seen yet will not make any noise. Has it ever happened to you that you're just chilling, minding your own business, then suddenly you get hit, you turn around and there's a fatass zombie slapping you. You question yourself: "hmmm but... it didn't make any sound? Ah, maybe i was distracted." No you weren't my dude, if a zombie comes up to you from behind, it will NOT make any sound until you get it into your fov. It's a problem that Deep Rock Galactic had a while ago, i think it has to do with the enemy not being rendered by your client when it's outside of your fov.
-Some skills are complete garbage, the progression revolves heavily around meta perks and skills if you want to have an easier time. The archery for example is completely not noob friendly especially at the beginning, your arrows require way too much lead and are way too slow to hit zombies in the head unless they're standing still. A simple solution would be to make arrows fly faster, even if there's a few books or attachments that fix this issue, but i would never carry on with a bow build when after looting for 5 minutes and doing a quest i can already get a pipe pistol and 100 9mm bullets easily. The bow lets you stealth, but it isn't worth early on, basic bow can't oneshot even with bonus damage.
-Traders can sell you stone tools ranging from 2000 to 7000+ dukes (worth based on their level), but you cannot sell them any stone tool
-Vehicles are made of paper, they break too easily.
-There's way too many books to read to max out a single tree, by the time you get 100 rifle world books, you'll have already reached tier 6 quests and probably already have your tier 6 sniper rifle, it just makes no sense and needs to be reworked.
-During blood moons, the game FORCES you to fight the zombies, trying to use a vehicle will result in the game spawning overpowered (radiated) vultures that fly super fast, slow your vehicle down when hit apply massive debuffs, and if you decide to get off, said vultures will stop in the air literally harrier style, and start shooting you acid like the cops do. Me and a friend had barely finished a quest and we got swarmed by zombies due to the blood moon, nonetheless, we managed to hop onto our motorcycle and run off, we were GOING to reach our base to fight the horde off, but the game simply doesn't like you using vehicles. We both died and vehicle exploded.
-poorly coded wild animals AI. Wild animals such as wolves, mountain lions and bears are part of this game. They are coded in a special way. If they spot YOU from a mile away, they are going to chase you down and do their best to try and kill you, but fighting a zombie? hell no man that thing has to be like an inch from their nose for them to realize "oh wait, zombies are food too"
-Some (non zombie) animals can infect you.
-Animals (but mostly snakes) and crawlers can give you a concussion.
-Fast enemies refuse to give up on chasing you down if they're fast enough to keep the aggro on you, really annoying to deal with.
-Zombies can go into a dumbass animation that makes them crawl on four limbs, especially when they're trying to destroy a door, this makes it extremely HARD for you to hit them with a melee, but extremely EASY for them to hit you (THROUGH SAID DOOR) And remember when i talked about the melee crosshair needing to be on the enemy hitbox? Well good luck with that because 9 out of 10 times if you're trying to hit an enemy behind a door (and said door having a hole in it) you will hit the fucking door no matter how precise you are.
-Drones teleporting system, it's just terribly implemented.
-Stamina, more specifically, melee. Doing a power attack will for some reason completely stop your stamina regeneration for a few seconds, making you completely defenseless if you make the mistake of powerattacking when you have barely enough stamina to do so, same goes when ADSing.
-Crawlers can swim (LMAO) and can hit you even when you're a block higher than them, clearly out of their range.
-if you or your friend crash during a quest, you won't be able complete it unless you restart it.