Talk:UnReal World
Review
This is an excellent, and challenging game. Quite unlike most roguelikes (a little like Wayward in some aspects).
It could do with some more depth of detail in some areas, though. It's great that you can make stuff and barter it for other stuff. But all the stuff you can make is pretty crap, and the shop keepers know it. It would be great if you could start to learn smithing, for example, after enough practice crafting other stuff. The addition of basic optional missions (trade, diplomacy, hunting, etc.) would be nice too. PaulBlay (talk)
Review
An absolutely fantastic wilderness survival simulator but pretty poor as a game. The interface is very convoluted which makes most of the many tasks you need to accomplish very tedious and not very fun at all. There is a high degree of challenge but it's actually pretty difficult to die - unfortunately most of the difficulty comes from struggling with the interface itself, not necessarily in-game scenarios. Take tracking for example: it could have been implemented as a "tracking mode" in which you walk around and search for animal tracks but instead you need to 1. walk one or more steps 2. select skills 3. select tracking. Doesn't sound like much but it quickly grows old if all you're doing is tracking for a day or two (which you need to do if you want animal resources). Combine that with things like ENTER and spacebar alternating as the default "OK" key multiple times when you're trying to make even a single action like dropping a set of twigs to the ground to start a fire. These are the kinds of things you'll be doing over and over, at least in the early game - some roguelike fans have pretty incredible skill with complicated controls but it was way too much for me personally and I honestly did do my best to try and enjoy the game.
This is probably the moodiest roguelike I've ever seen, and that is a great compliment. It's clear that a lot of love was put into it. Even if it looks like a game from the early 90s, it feels like a very mature game (it doesn't control like one though). The semi-random generated world is fascinating and beckons you to explore it. Certainly a very different and unique roguelike but despite it's complexity and huge number of features it fails to be fun to play. Trying too hard to make this game realistic (and it does feel ultra-realistic, down to dietary nutrition mechanics and a very precise combat system) comes with the high price of focusing a lot on lowly, repetitive tasks - tasks that actually would make this game fun, were it not for the interface getting in the way of doing things that should be simple a lot of the time. Sometimes you can even spend a good half hour of real life time mostly failing at simple actions, like trying to successfully find and hunt an animal. Realistic, yes, but the fact that the realism drains away your play time in repetitive and unrewarding tasks makes it very hard to play.
For example: spending an entire day gathering resources and food is not as dull as it would normally sound - it's actually a relatively brief period of time in which you get yourself prepared for the days to come and you only have to do it once in a while, so it even comes as a good respite from whatever else you're doing. Like in Minecraft, gathering your resources is half the fun, right? Except there are very precise actions you need to do for 1. gathering branches/twigs 2. felling down trees 3. fishing 4. making a fire 5. roasting your food. And this is the very basic gameplay which you need to do on a constant basis for survival - which would not be terrible if it was not the case that each of these actions may very well require you to press 10 different buttons (like building a fire), and many of the keys you need to push all the time are not intuitive at all. I guarantee that you'll still be struggling with controls after playing 80 hours of this - it's just the case that things are often counter-intuitive and you're constantly switching context while the interface seems to always be working against you.
There are many little things that would help the game a lot in regards to user interface: pressing TAB in sequence to filter through item types in the inventory, instead of TAB opening a filtering menu which you then need to operate by arrows or keys before you can get back to your inventory; deciding whether the spacebar or ENTER means "ok" and sticking to it; letting you use your wielded item for contextual actions (for example pressing 1 to activate your wielded fishing rod if water is nearby); auto-selecting items for you (like selecting your best fishing rod by default for fishing, instead of opening a menu in which the rod is never the default item every single time); using + and - arrows in the inventory screen to decide item quantity to drop (or take or cook, etc) and otherwise just use the maximum value by default. Many of these things seem obvious but the developers failed to notice it up on version 3.32 (current version)! Anyway, a game with awesome potential, lots of personality and I'll happily rank it well above Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft, despite it's very, very annoying interface.
I almost wish this was more of a world simulator like Dwarf Fortress, in which you could take control of a tribe and assign jobs and tasks to your people. It would make use of the vast game world's wilderness system in a much more interesting fashion without losing it's appeal as a super-realistic simulation, and the artificial intelligence would take care of performing tasks without you having to suffer through the interface. I have every hope though that the developers can turn this into a better game, if they're not afraid to jump right into the interface and make many and fundamental changes. I can see that they wanted to focus on realism, which requires the user to do things in very specific ways - but you don't need to sacrifice realism in order to make easier for players to perform tasks.
One last one: many things seem to be way too hard to recover from or unnecessarily limiting. If you make a tribe unhappy it's very difficulty to become reputable again, if you run out of food, or get too sick/tired it's a really tedious process to get back on your feet again. Even if you fall down it's hard to recover - if somehow you don't notice it the game will let you crawl for kilometers on end without even getting up! Also there are a few limits that feel arbitrary and run totally opposed to the sandbox, realistic nature of the game, like not being able to craft nets/fishing rods even though you can create pretty much anything else.