So I bought Second Extinction and decided to give it an initial first day review of the game. I plan to write a more comprehensive review sometime in the next few days after I’ve played with a few people and looked at all the items, guns etc. Just a fair warning, a fair amount of text is here so it’s a bit of a read!
Starting out
The game runs great, with very few graphical issues, no real frame drops or stutters and very few bugs initially witnessed. Gameplay is fast and enticing, weapons and classes feel good but needs some balancing and the technical stuff like animations for weapons and dino’s all look pretty damn good for an early access release, especially like the gore which normally would kill the frames when used in ultra graphics, it definatly shows the game has promise.
Gameplay
I found the gameplay to be one of the best parts, playing Solo is a challenge but Co-Op feels a little too easy in spots. Solo is challenging because you need to stay constantly on the move, Ortega is the best in my opinion for Solo play while Jurgen is a close second once you’ve unlocked some decent gear for him. Rosy and Amir are great for Co-Op but the use of their weapons often make playing as a group too easy for certain scenarios, also the 3 player Co-Op is my biggest issue but I’ll get onto that later.
At first coming into the game I expected a Class based Left 4 Dead Style Co-op with some mission-orientated elements. In retrospect it actually feels more like Monster Hunter where you choose a mission and get sent to a play area (this case a massive open world) with various optional missions you can complete along the way.
Classes felt good but sometimes not overly balanced. The problem classes at first seemed like Amir and Jurgen, Amir’s grenade launcher is great against crowds but the lack of contact or impact grenades actually making using him a bit tricky on larger dinos unless you just spam-fire grenades like crazy, his abilities are also insanely powerful, perhaps a bit too powerful. Jurgen’s abilities are powerful but his weapons are lacking, I actually did not use Jurgen until I unlocked the SMG at Level 3 a day later. Ortega and Rosy felt fine but some of their weapons and abilities need a some adjustment I think.
Weapons felt good, punchy but inaccurate, the shotgun felt inconsistent and the spread of the Assault Rifle was atroscious if your not standing still or crouched. The Minigun early on runs out of ammo super quickly and the Scout Rifle felt underwhelming. The pistol, well it’s a pistol and I didn’t expect much out of it.
Granted, these are not bad things in my eyes, starting out it’s natural that your firearms are designed to be weak and maybe a bit crappy, the upgrade system is a nice touch but it was a little confusing at first, I didn’t release that I’d need to upgrade both the perks AND unlock tokens to install said perks, realize my mistake when I pumped X amount of upgrades into an Assault Rifle but couldn’t install any.
Issues
The few bugs and technical issues I encountered were mostly ones being sound not playing in the correct spot, audio that would play again and again after respawn or sometimes the UI would play up and leave something from the main menu on screen during play. These were the most common.
While infrequent, during Co-Op play I often was subject to game-breaking crashes notable towards the extraction points and online disconnects that unless I restarted the game would plague me regulary when attempting to play with friends. Granted I attribute this more to my ISP and issues with the global internet revolving around the mass use due to current events.
While not a technical issue, I have a general issue relating to the player count. Why only 3 players? I constantly had messages from friends asking to play and always had 4 players ready but it was kind of sad to say no to that last player because the game limits you to 3 players for whatever reason, granted if I found it easy with 3 players, it’s bound to be a cake-walk with 4.
Conclusion
The game has great promise the future, the first 24 hours was great and fun and refreshing for me, it’s clear the Dev Team has some great ideas for whats to come. There are some things I will say, for one definatly increase the difficulty and player count, give us that 4th player. I’m sure in times the general bugs will be sorted in time, after all it only JUST released. Look forward to more content and will be writing a more comprehensive review later in the week.
