Absolutely in love with this base-building system. Putting something like this together is bold after your last game went with the conventional approach of click-to-place prefab structures, but I respect it. The whole idea of building your own base is now its own puzzle that requires advance planning, and I've spent basically my entire playtime in the game so far engineering modern marvels and then lecturing my friends when they interrupt my Lunch atop a Skyscraper moments by demonstrating their poor understanding of terminology any 5-year-old would know 💅

There aren't any robust physics calculations happening, but being forced to build custom structures brick by brick means that you'll develop an appreciation for even slightly large structures and will take way more psychic damage IRL when some graceless goober manages to knock them down. Any friend who plays these #EarlyAccess #Survival #Crafting games for the base building will get sucked into this like quicksand, developing a terrifying fervor for the proper procedures of placing struts/supporting beams in order to reclaim the materials later.

Coming at this one as a guy who never played the first Forest title and jumped right into the sequel. This open-world survival horror sandbox makes a pretty strong first impression as you try to survive the mutant freaks around you with little supplies and get your bearings. Unfortunately, the game quickly lost its luster for us.

I think my main issue with this game is that it's actually too easy, because your backpack is just ridiculously big. There's no real motivation to make a fort. I get that in a lot of survival sandboxes, the base-building is a "make your own fun" sort of feature, but in a game like Sons of the Forest I was hoping for it to actually have some utility, where I'd need to store stuff there and pick it up later. I realized how undangerous this world felt when I randomly decided to make a trek across the map and the mountains at its center without a care in the world. Why spend time building a shelter or managing your resources when you can just carry everything on your back and build a makeshift tarp tent with a clicks and survive the night that way.

Sons of the Forest is at its best when you're exploring the caves to find new items, or the secret lab bunkers spread across the map. I liked exploring these areas that give such a stark contrast to the look of the rest of the game, but they are all very linear. There's nothing stopping you from just going all the way to the back of the cave, finding your item, and leaving. The progression is simple and after a while my friends just said screw the survival element and made a beeline to the end.

The climax is rather poorly designed since there was nothing stopping us from running by the enemies and not engaging with them at all, and then you get an utterly wacky final reveal that didn't make any sense at all and I can only assume is teasing lore for a third game, and credits.

Sons of the Forest looks great and has moments where a really quality survival title shines through, but it is ultimately just too easy and forgiving since I could just carry everything I could ever need at any time, and generally didn't feel at peril out and about in the world. Just didn't really get into this one.

The game has a lot of immersion mechanics that make it seem intimidating to get into, but it is actually pretty simple. Step-by-step guides and even a helper NPC will get you thinking more about what you want to build vs trying to survive and gather the supplies. The game gets ruined by the constant swarming of your new base that lead you to abandoning it to go build another new base, making a cycle of having a bunch of half-built bases you don’t want to go back to. The game fights between wanting to build a base camp to horde all your survival items and exploring various landmarks to progress it’s story. Best with friends but hard to keep everyone invested enough to complete.

Very similar to its ancestor. It's a fun game but some things have changed. I got the early access version so there are still a lot of things that need to be fixed (hopefully they have now that we have the full release). So far, I've seen objects disappearing, namely my Kite and my GPS locator. I've also marked some places that got unmarked on their own.

1. You've got a new member of the crew (actually two if you count with Virginia. She fights while Kelvin assists you in building).

2. After dying, you don't need to spawn in the same place where you started the game. You will be reborn near where you died.

3. This sequel is more difficult. I am not sure about enemies strength or the usefulness of pills but you die way more often. One of the difficulties present in this game is that when you die, sometimes you reappear at the Cannibals' camping site. This makes your escape more difficult, as one blow from the Cannibals kills you (you start with the lowest HP).

4. The map is much bigger. Caves are not marked after you go inside one so you never know which caves you have explored. Your houses are not marked unless you use one of your GPS locators - something that wastes materials...

I am not sure if they have changed any of this but I will edit my review once I try the full release. In terms of enjoyment, I am liking the game so far and you can still play it with friends, which helps immensely. I guess a bit more complexity, even in terms of building, would help a little bit with my final consideration.

played on and off with some friends for a bit, but now that i havent returned to it for a while, i gotta say that it's both fun and disappointing. the ai companions are a neat idea, but i never really got much use for them. coop definitely hampered that, but even when kelvin was still alive he was mostly there to jumpscare my friends and i (which i missed after he died). paranoia is still very good. besides the survival mechanics, paranoia is what this game continues to do good from its predecessor. the woods feel alive, the wind is ominous, the night darkness is an engulfing evil to be avoided. the one improvement i like the most is the building system, it feels very intuitive and promotes curiosity in what can be achieved through it. it's very formatted. the building is almost like rust's walls and foundation system, but it's more intricate in that you can carve out windows and doorframes or build ramps versus stairs instead of walls, and more. so aside from being more of the forest and a more fun building system, the biggest downsides are progression pacing and the fact that the game's still unfinished. back when i played, it felt like there were some missing things like animal head trophies. they added these back in though so eh, but i felt like i had seen pretty much all that was added. i think in my very first play session i had already gotten my hands on the pistol which was insane because in the forest i hadnt even ever gotten the crossbow. granted i never finished that game, but it felt cryptic and rewarding to find any new equipment in the first game! here, the pistol is just laying out in the open in a raft offshore instead of a hidden cave or buried box. its obviously unfinished, but since i enjoyed the first forest and i like this new building system i just hope that it can leave early access in a good state. really only get this game if you LOVE the first game and crave anything like it.

after putting about 50 hours into it, i have not finished the story, in fact i've barely progressed in it, because this game is so cool to just build around and fight occasionally, the building is intuitive and gimmicky but in a really cool way, it's also never really all that annoying as getting materials doesn't feel like farming as much as other games, given that the materials that you use are reallistically reflected on the buildings as opposed to, idk, needing x number of fictitious wood that's in your inventory to make random chair, the building being tree trunk and stone based makes it simple and satisfying and eliminates the dissonance caused by other building systems in other games. the combat and survival mechanics are good enough too, and the exploration is also fine, the caves are somewhat punishing but it's not all too bad, maybe frustrating sometimes. it's really the type of game to dump your time into and chill out building and finding cool items around the map, which is surprising for a game about cannibals and mutants

survival games without needless complications that i can just chill out in are my bread and butter really

i figure i'll try to beat the story sometime but idk, i'm fine the way i am

also the game is getting regular patches since it's on early access so about every two weeks there's new cool content and it only gets better really

I ultimately don't think the tale is that great since I don't think this game is as amazing as The Forest game. Even though it is in early access, this was my first experience with the survival game genre. The gameplay is ok, nothing to get too pumped about in my opinion. It gives away enough about the overall plot of the game, so I doubt I'll play it when it's fully released. I was disappointed to learn that this is a sequel to The Forest, even if I just had the opportunity to watched the plot and gameplay of that game. I don't want to draw any comparisons. I just did not like it.

I gotta love how they spent so long trying to make the cannibals these haunting figures that react to you on the island. They stalk you, raid your bases, mount giant posses to hunt you down and scream at you while you're walking through the woods. And for all that effort, these little dudes are actually just like kids that mess with you for attention. It's actually kind of cute in a way. They're all hanging out in a big group wearing their dorky masks and one of them will run up to your base and knock a log over, and you're less like "OH NO, HERE THEY COME", and more like, "Aw, little Gollum wants to play." By the end of the game, they're so inconsequential to what you're actually doing that they're just mild nuisances that take potshots at you while you're trying to figure out where 90% of the random crafting items in your inventory are.

Cannibals aside, this is basically the exact same game as the first, except it's much easier because you get weapons capable of one-shotting enemies from the offset. Every mechanic on show here just sort of contradicts another mechanic. The survival stuff is fine, but it becomes more annoying than immersive when you're in the middle of a huge boss battle and you need to squat behind a rock and eat some cereal because your hunger's low. The combat is weighty and awkward to show you're not a fighter, but you have to do so much of it by the end because the game shoves countless enemies at you while you explore, making it tedious. The building mechanics are a huge part of the gameplay and have some interesting (albeit MEGA janky) systems, but enaging in it actually sets you back so much, because the island's huge, you need to explore it all and getting back to your base takes so long that you might as well just not bother.

Overall, it's fine. I'll probably jump back in when it's been updated, but it's nothing to write home about currently. I do like the lady with a trillion legs that turns into a sentry turret with infinite ammo when you give her a gun, though. She's cool.

Leider in allen Belangen schlechter als Teil 1
Es gibt WENIGER zu craften?!
Die Insel ist größer, aber dafür nicht voller. Dadurch ist die Basis immer zu weit weg und man muss ewig rumfahren um zu entsprechenden Höhlen zu kommen.
Die Höhlen sind richtig lang und richtig leer.. nur generische Items, kaum Gegner.
Für keinen Gegner sind besondere Waffen nötig.
Besonders mit dem Katana wird alles zu Brei.

Die Story ist ne Frechheit...

Na klar macht es immer noch Spaß, in ner Gruppe auf der Insel rumzubauen und rumzuschnetzeln, aber.. es wirkt alles nicht rund.

Played this months ago with Wheeler and never got around to finishing it. It's extremely jank, just as clunky as the original if not more, with the most gamer-bro attempt at storytelling possible. It's very shit.

However, there is a little unicycle. A little unicycle that goes Mach 10. If you hit a small rock you go flying for miles and take no damage. You can drive off cliffs, fall a hundred feet, and keep on chugging like nothing happened. You don't need to refuel it, or charge it up. It's infinite. It's amazing. I don't know why they included it. They'll almost certainly patch it to make it go slower or require batteries or something. But for now, it's masterful game design. 10/10.