It's a great game and worth the 5€ purchase BUT the downside is not having some kind of a checkpoint mechanic. The game is pretty long and hard, but by design choice (roguelike) there's permadeath. As you die you will see yourself doing the same things troughout the game, and it becomes a bit repetitive after 20 times.

You can hack trough the save games though and if you're not a hardcore player you might just have to do it to see the ending of the game.

While it seems simple on the surface, it has led to more intense moments then some triple A games.

Nothing can get more viceral then trying to bash someone's head in with a rock because you are freezing to death and need some clothes.

You will die in this game. A lot. Even after you get good gear and a gun. You think you are fine then you wake up with a blue frog standing over you and then it is a mad dash to find a cure for a deadly disease.

reach the city or die trying

INCREDIBLY enjoyable game. Who needs Graphics. This game has so much in to offer.
Its simplistic and complex all rolled up into one amazing ADDICTIVE package.
I dont know why. no matter how many times the wasteland kills me, or i am eaten by Dogmen. Or beaten to death by a badmutha with a sauce pan, or Stared down by a mellon head, Or killed by a Robor in an arena, or starve to death or freeze to death, or die of food poisoning, or bleed to death from blistered feet or am shot to death from some thing i didnt even see, or have all of my limbs crippled. The game just does not get old.

I just dont get it. I should HATE this kind of game. BUT I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!

Seriously. See past the Graphics.
This game will hook you.

Would die again 42/10

Extremely fun and challenging. Would Recommend.

EDIT 10.9.15:

I love this game. One time, I got shot by an arrow. I ducked under cover, then pulled the arrow out. Then I stabbed my assailant to death with it.

One time, I was attacked by two dogs immediately after starting a game. I was naked (save for a thin hospital gown) and I had no weapons. As they charged me, I grabbed some shards of glass on the ground, and following a lengthy battle that I ultimately won, I used said shards to skin the dogs' carcasses and then made gloves out of them. Then I died of blood loss.

One time, I was attacked in the middle of a stormy night by two mutants trying to steal my shopping cart loaded with supplies. After I brained one of them, the other scattered. I gave chase, and dispatched it following a cross-tile pursuit. However, upon return to my camp, my cart was gone. The mutant corpse, mysteriously absent as well. Using my tracking ability, I followed the thief several tiles down, and discovered it was another mutant, slowly pushing my cart southwest, his deceased comrade most unceremoniously stuffed inside with the rest of the contents. I moved in and caved its skull in with one fell swoop. I felt no pity, no remorse. I really needed those 5 empty bottles.

10/10 excellent post apocalyptic hobo simulator

It's worth noting that there are a lot of mods available that greatly expand the game's potential.

Extremely recommended. One of the best game I have recently played.
Keep reading, or download the Demo and try it for yourself. Yes, there is a DEMO available.

You see stuff from above like, isometric map perspective: you navigate the lands from one hexagonal tile to another. All the time.
This costs points. When it's rainy or dark, it will cost more points.
When you reach a city hex, you can loot the location. This, also, will costs you points. Sometimes you will find amazing stuff, and sometimes only scraps of paper. But even those could be useful. Actually, when you start to know the game better, every gôddåmn item is useful!
You will find more stuff if you use a crowbar, or have a light source with you. But beware as this will make more noise and attract people towards your location.
Looting can also just hurt yourself... like roof collapse. Shït happens right?
So you loot, equip yourself with what you find, and stroll around. Until some dude approaches and gets to your hex.

The combat is textual. You won't have the map view anymore. But instead, you'll be presented with an interface showing your dude's and opposition's status, and a list of actions you can execute. Everything you will do, like throwing a punch, will have a narrative text describing what's happening. So it's mostly READING ya hear? No explosions there.
But don't be fooled... you can trip on the ground and fall. While on the ground you can try and grab the hostile down, you can crawl back and try to escape, drop your stuff and run like hell, etc. A lot of realistic possibilities here. It is extremely hard. Your first encounter will probably be your last.

Getting hurt, bleeding, being cold, drinking shït water... these will have consequences. Try to disinfect your wounds, patch'em up and don't let 'em getting infected. Be careful of what you eat too... could be POISONOUS you never know muhahah.
Unless you are a doctor, in which case you will have a clear descriptions of your symptoms like, "Cholera 3; final stage; certain death", you won't know what illness you just caught... you will have "stomach cramps", you'll be like "vomiting"...
So just act as in real life: grabs antibiotics, clean every wounds. Don't take any chances. Ever. Why? Because the game has...

Yep. Die and restart the whole game. No save point, and that is intended. You won't bring stuff with you from your last play. Nope, nothing. It's up to YOU to level up. And this is where I disagree on the game mechanics. I am fine with dying and learning. But ya know the beginning of the game starts to be boring once you know it. And redoing the same stuff is just a waste of time. Hence I created a little tool to actually still save and, well, cheat. I advise players to die a lot first, and when you feel you are ready, just use my tool.
But even if you use it to reload an old save, it won't matter much, because...

The map is randomly generated. But not when you first start the game, nope. It is randomly generated as soon as you discover a tile. So saving the game and loading an old save will still yield something different :D
This is why I am a little "against" the permadeath. Loading an old save is not THAT bad. You will experience a whole different game. I would've liked just... ya know, an auto-save every night or something.
Anyway except for a few spots in the map that will never change, all the rest is random. Random but fair. You won't like be in a desert without cities for miles ever. They are spawned correctly.
Even if you are a new player, you CAN make it. Yes because in the end, it's just logic.
Contrary to Faster Than Light (FTL) where there is NO WAY a new player will make it to the end because the randomization is too... random. In NEO Scavenger, the RNG is just right.

As I said all the items there are useful. Somehow. Because you can craft and even "uncraft" stuff. If someone is giving you stuff, or if you finally found something of value... maybe you can try to "reverse engineer" it and discover HOW IT WAS BUILT. How awesome is that uh? Found a bow arrow? But you have no idea how to create one yourself? No problem!
There are also a lot of crafting recipes there. And many different combinations will work. Like you could use your crowbar to roast meat when you don't have a wood stick! Doesn't matter, both categorizes as a kinda "shaft." So it's extremely smart and flexible. If you are lacking you favorite saucepan to boil water... just think a second... can't anything else, more common, be used as a saucepan? Eh, when I found that out, I literally doubled my lifespan. No shït. Think hard.

It reminds me of Fallout 1 & 2. You had that little description box in the lower left which would describe what was going on. Here it's a bit the same. With random encounters or special places being very well described. There is a lot of dark humor too. If you are not averse to reading you will like it and also find that it's well written.

There is a story. Your first goal will obviously be to survive, and so, to find something to cover your feet :) But after that painful initial phase, you will meet strange people. You will find places of interest. Or you will find new recipes that... use high tech items you had no idea were in the game.
The story is interesting and is closely related to the narrative part of the game: the only way to tell you stuff is through old newspapers and stuff. Those are funny as well...
OX news reporting hoaxes ;)

Every single one item has its own sound effect. Which is played when you grab the item from you inventory. That's it. But that's HUGE. There is a little music, but it gets a bit repetitive.

If you like Fallout, post-apocalyptic worlds, a good narration, turn by turn mechanics and a pretty realistic game then don't hesitate. It's a masterpiece.
You still unsure? --> try the demo and make your own opinion.

I've played this game on and off for nearly two years. I've followed it's development since it was first announced, and every time I come back I fall in love again. This game combines the brutality of dwarf fortress, the atmosphere of fallout, and world layout of civ to create a true masterpiece. This game is in a class of it's own.

Neo Scavenger is like leaving school. You are thrust into the real world, with no idea what to do. Everything is strange, but you learn. You Survive. You thrive. Then you die of hypothermia.

I don't normally write serious reviews. I'm one of those undesirable ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that uploads the "11/10 uninstall function works great" review, but NEO Scavenger will be my exception. You have no idea how hard it will be for me to not write "I murdered a naked guy while wearing a clown mask", but I will get through it, for this amazing game.

Let's start with the basics; you're some random guy (avoiding spoilers) that has just woken from cryogenic sleep during the apocalypse somewhere around the city of Detroit. After a friendly interaction with a lovely creature known as a "Dogman", you step outside to experience the outside world of Michigan... and dang, it's cold. Like, "Oh my God I can't feel my feet and I'm feeling really sleepy" cold. After a few deaths and several hours of learning the basics (don't eat random berries or mushrooms you find unless you know they aren't poisonous, that guy with the broken bottle really wants to eat your leg, and yes, it's cold, put some pants on) you really get into this game.

As others have said, however, an ungodly amount of time can be spent on this game, and it can never be taken back. In a sense, it's like DayZ. You spend 3 hours finding a weapon, finding your friends wherever they are on the map, and end up faffing around until some gruesome death by either a glitching zombie or a player that only speaks Russian. This, I believe, is another selling point of NEO Scavenger. In the beginning, you get used to dying. After a while, however, you end up living longer and longer, until one life lasts you hours of real life time. Everything is peachy until that one night you decide to sleep in a forest and forget to set up a noise trap or hide, and you're stabbed to death by some plague-ridden nutcase in your sleep. After a day or two of angry avoidance of the game, you decide to give it a second chance, innocently, you pour more hours into it, only to die in a similar manner. It's a beautiful circle of life (death)!

With such extensive content already and more updates to come, NEO Scavenger is one of my favorite games of all time. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys hardcore survival games, and/or murdering innocents with his/her bare hands whilst wearing nothing but a Ronald McDonald lookalike mask and a hospital gown. (Damn, I said I wouldn't write that.)