Reviews - gervasius

I always felt that the game was a tad too easy. Maybe easy isn't the best word, as at times it can get excruciatingly difficult. I could fight through hordes by holding the right mouse button and spamming potions endlessly, or get destroyed in a single hit by a boss that is roughly my level.

But I did thoroughly enjoy Torchlight as a "portable" dungeon crawler. Being a guy who's almost never at home for most of the time, solo play amidst titles like Path of Exile and Diablo 3 were a Godsend. So after beating the game twice, I decided to get a little bit more content via Runic's generous decision to enable modding.

Synergy not only added a ton of new content, many of which I have yet yet yet to experience, but I can say without a doubt that the best change is hands down the battle system, which has dramatically changed the stats values to ensure that, while you're still absolutely smiting massive hordes of enemies, you're always on your toes, every battle, no matter how small. Enemies took way more hits to be brought down, but simultaneously, it took way more hits to bring you down, too. It makes it far more fair when taking on a single enemy, but that is quickly rebalanced to make the game challenging by providing much, much larger hordes which absolutely fill the screen and attack you relentlessly. To those who found Torchlight difficult, or just right, this mod may be hell itself, but to those who wanted a more traditional ARPG challenge, it's heaven. Highly recommended for the latter.

The only thing it lacks is more convincing voice acting but the overall design of NMRIH is just... phenomenal. Just about everything has been taken into consideration and feels like the survival horror experience I always felt that the L4D franchise should have been (as much as I love those games). It is excrutiatingly difficult and practically forces co-op play, but in a good way, not through gameplay mechanics but through sheer design. I have never played a game that brought about this sense of comraderie since Killing Floor and it was an absolute blast to log in to a server with friends who really knew what they were doing, and still couldn't succeed without getting scratched.

It really was one of the most twisted experiences I've ever seen.

Don't let the lack of 3D Graphics and first person perspective fool you; Project Zomboid is about as true a zombie game as it can possibly get. In Project Zomboid, you're not supposed to kill zombies. They're not your real enemy. Instead, your own body turns against you, torturing you with things such as hunger and sleep deprivation as if your own physical form wants you to end up as a midnight snack for the zombie horde. Granted, there's plenty of zombie killing if you so feel it necessary, but Project Zomboid rings out what zombie games were truly meant to be: survival in its truest form.
Even in its alpha stages the product is almost fully playable, minus the story mode and online co-op.