A huge disappointment and an unfortunate departure from the first game that's more reminiscent of Dead Island than The Forest.

• No massive claustrophobic interconnected cave system that you can get lost it like in the first game. The caves are just either a short corridor that ends in a dead end or a tunnel with another exit.
• The cutscenes and story are nonsensical. While The Forest feels like a well-written horror novel with meticulously hand-crafted elements that all fit together, Sons of The Forest feels like a bizarre fever dream of a B movie director with random nonsense haphazardly thrown together.
• The map is bigger than the map in the first game, but is also super boring to navigate. The game gives you a golf cart right at the start that never runs out of battery and then a paraglider, both of which make you feel invincible.
• Most caves are marked on your GPS at the start. Everything is marked on the GPS. It honestly feels like a Ubisoft game, where the vast open world exists solely as a backdrop while you run around ticking off tasks on your checklist. Tedious, just tedious.
• No sense of exploration.
• No sense of survival.
• AI is dumb and easy to kill.
• You get tons of explosives and ammo.
• You can just run past most anything, even in caves, and it never feels like you have to fight for your life. I've never even been chased or stalked by cannibals past 20 meters.
• Crafting and building are completely optional. You don't even have to hunt, you can find plenty of food lying around. And you don't have to collect any resources. You have an AI buddy to do that for you now.
• You're never in any danger. There are a bunch of spots on the map where you can skip time and avoid playing at night entirely. And they've added stealth mechanics as well, which let you avoid pretty much anything. I once built a bed in the middle of cannibal territory and just slept until morning undisturbed.
• There's no feeling of scarcity. Resources respawn after you close and reopen the game.
• The game is just not scary. It's not a survival horror game, it's a walking simulator with FPS elements.

A boring unfun slog that's designed to overextend your playtime rather than deliver a fun experience.

The creators of this mod had a unique opportunity to improve a deeply flawed and overly grindy game - turn it into something different, but instead decided to stick to the tedious formula of the original game, and even make it worse in some regards.

What an absolute disappointment.

Overall a massive downgrade from the first game.

Instead of adding new features some brаindead moron 1000 IQ genius at Telltale thought it was a brilliant idea to completely remove the player's ability to skip dialogue and subject them to half a minute of incessant autistic noises that at least two characters in this game make from time to time.

AI appears to cheat almost every hand and is inferior to the AI in the first game. You also can't change difficulty to stop opponents dunking on you with a flush/straight/three of a kind time and time again, because they removed that setting for some reason. It's absolutely ridiculous, they took a near-perfect game and made it worse in almost every single way.

The cast of characters is better in this game, I'll give it that, but other than that I have nothing positive to say about it. The whole drinking mechanic seems pointless and gimmicky and omaha poker frankly blows.

2.5/5

Disclaimer: I got the game for the social aspect and was extremely disappointed by the lack of it. No one in this game ever interacts with others. The world feels empty and dead despite hundreds of players romping about.

It's essentially a single-player game masquerading as a multiplayer experience. It looks great, I'll give it that, but if you don't have friends who play ffxiv, steer clear.

Everyone probably talks in linkshells or discord. Because why would you ever interact with someone outside your circle of friends in a multiplayer game right?

Total garbage (I guess this applies to all MMO's now).