Camera is awful, poorly optimized game, needs a lot of polish to be playable, definitely not worth $15 usd (got it in a bundle)

https://youtu.be/OLAWE5d8oGI

Whilst the graphics and sounds are decent enough the biggest challenge in this game is the cumbersome UI and sloppy camera. Everything just feels laboured and slow. The combat is pretty abysmal as is the scavanging mechanic which consists of shaking trees or opening boxes, and while there is at least crafting, there is a pretty limited amount of items to craft.

The only real highlight is the fact that this game actually has an ending, unlike most survival games, but its not really enough to salvage the overall experience. There is also dynamic weather, which is a nice touch but again not enough to raise the overall enjoyment.

Probably best to grab this on a sale unless you really love survival games and can live with the cumbersome UI and camera.

This is a pretty terrible survival game. First off, the game is super ugly, yet I only was getting 25-30 fps regularly on my high end computer, even with decreased graphics and turning advanced options off, showing terrible game optimization. Theres no map, and nothing of the game is explained. I died because I didnt know I had to go around shaking trees 7x in a row to get items, because why would I since that makes no sense. the crafting menu is terrible, showing pictures of what something takes, but no labeling items needed NOR what you're making (for some inexplicable reason) so its pretty pointless. I went the entire time unable to cook meat because I couldnt find sticks, and unable to find water, because even though I had a water bottle, I wasnt able to fill it with the water all around me. The interaction menu is terrible, as you have to hold right mouse to then click left mouse to interact. Half the time you need to be standing right next to something and looking at it in the perfect way, so you usually have no idea what you can interact with, and of course the game doesn't explain any of its mechanics. The tab buttons shows sometimes what you can pick up, but its hard to see and is inconsistent. The vitals UI is terrible. Running filled up my stamina bar, walking around outside on a tropical island when its not raining filled up my coldness bar, yet swimming in water made it go down (huh?). I had a sickness bar almost immediately going up, for no reason, then sleeping for 4 hours suddenly made it go away. The combat is terrible and you will suddenly be forced into it when you couldn't even see the enemy to begin with, and running away is impossible. Your thirst and hunger bars raise quickly and start killing you pretty soon into the game, in an unrealistic way and amount of time.

All in all, theres nothing positive about this game. Lack of direction, terrible UI and vitals system, bad crafting, lack of mechanics explained, terrible interaction system, ugly graphics, bad optimization, and everything else terrible. If you die you lose everything. I found dying liberating because it meant I could quit this game and never play it again. Sweet freedom!

2/10.

Better Late Than DEAD is a survival adventure game developed by Odin Game Studios, being published on Steam in July of 2015 on Early Access.

As we have come all too familiar with the survival genre of games; you start off as a single character, dropped in the middle of nowhere and you are expected to survive. Games of this genre are often a hit from the start or just flop straight away. Unfortunately Better Late Than DEAD does not have a very bright future in my eyes.

Gameplay is…well, almost none existent. I started out in the ocean and had to swim at least five minutes before I got to any sort of land. I spent almost an hour exploring the island, finding a couple of houses, and that is it. Whilst exploring the houses I found that each of them had their own loot, strangely enough, the houses were all an exact copy of each other and the loot was spawned in exactly the same place. The loot that I found were again, everything you would expect to find in this type of game, cans of food, bandages, knives, etc. As far as game play goes, that is it. There is absolutely nothing else to do in this game; I didn’t find any animals, enemies, nothing.

The graphics are bad to say the least; the screenshots really shows the game in a different light to how it actually looks in real time. Awfully low quality textures on almost everything, the water certainly doesn’t look like how it does in the screenshots, and neither does the skybox. On top of the poor graphics, the animation side of the game is horrible; your character has just an awful run cycle that looks like some sort of jelly man was used to rig it – also this game features possibly one of the highest jumping ability I have ever seen in a game, I swear I was jumping up entire flights of stairs in one go… It should also be known, that from jumping, I managed to break my leg in the game twice and die from it once – lord knows how.

At the beginning of the game, I was presented with a cut scene that sets up for a quite interesting story; but that is it. After that intro, I found no other plot elements, or anything. I was particularly disappointed as I would have really liked to have seen more of it. Hopefully the developers will be adding something in via patches in the future on this aspect.

Better Late Than DEAD also has some audio problems. Whilst playing the game, you will have the same repetitive soundtrack playing in the background, and when it loops, boy do you notice it. There is an obvious cut in the track, and it just starts playing again; this for me seemed like a really basic issue which should not be seen in the game, it really ruined the game’s immersion (the little it actually had).

I really expected the world I was in to be full of interesting environments and buildings to explore, but sadly due to the copy/paste nature shown in the game, it all seemed to blur together and nothing really stood out as interesting. All of the buildings are exactly the same layout, tress look exactly the same, it just looks like someone has gone in and press CTRL A CTRL V over and over again to make it seem like the world is huge.

Sadly the game is very poorly optimized. Whilst the game has the options to run on all resolutions up to 4k, it certainly doesn’t run well. Playability is none existent at 4k, so I had to drop it to 1080p, and even then, I was not able to reach 60 fps and that is with my monster rig. This needs to be the top of their agenda at the very least.

At the time of writing this review, I have been playing for just over two hours; I honestly don’t see myself jumping into the game any time again soon, unless there are some major changes and improvements on what the game currently has. The last update to the game from what I can see is 18th November 2015, and even then, only two new additions to the game were added. If anyone is interested in the survival genre, there are definitely games out there that are still in early access, and are in a much much better state than this game at the moment. Even though the game is retailing for £6,99, I still cannot recommend this game. It may improve, but it is going to take a lot for it to be even worthy of that low price.

Tom's Score Card
1) Stay away
2) Not Recommended
3) Only recommended when on sale
4) Recommended
5) Highly recommended
6) This is a must play

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http://store.steampowered.com/app/352950

An impressive example what can happen if you buy early access games. Changed rock skin, but not the important parts of the game. Game felt like brutal early alpha version and now they launched it, because "it is finished!" Cash grab. Nothing more. Avoid it.

:(

TL;DR
Better Late than Dead is too early access to recommend spending your hard-earned cash on, unless you're a die-hard fan of survival games (like there aren't enough to choose from).


Better Late than Dead is a game that is still marred hugely by it's early access state. For those familiar with survival games, BLTD is the quintessential example - but with too many flaws currently to rationalize the price.

BTLD is a game of too many button presses. In most games, you could press E or F to pick up a nearby item. In BTLD you must right-click to zoom in (on an already slightly off camera angle, another thing that bothered me), pan over to the item in question with a slightly unreasonable amount of exactness, and left click.
The inventory systems mirrors this as well. Clicking an item current brings up a context menu, but the only options currently are to drop or equip something. This means that all food, water, bandages, etc must be used from the quickbar, when in many cases it could be more easily used straight from the inventory. This issue is exaserbated by the fact that there are only 4(?!) quickbar slots. Eating a mango should be a quick trip to the inventory, but it is instead a matter of equipping it, activating it, and THEN eating it. Pressing the relevant quickbar key doesn't automatically activate, you must click another time before watching your character enter into an awkward eating animation.

Speaking of animations, that is another thing this game does poorly from what I saw. The character runs in a very goofy fashion, especially if he becomes injured. Injury seems to be incurred too easily - I walked for several in-game hours on a broken ankle or whatever caused by jumping off a rock that didn't come up to the character's knees.

Lastly, the character model is pretty ugly. His beard doesn't look even the least bit natural, and neither does his butt. It seriously looks like the left side is twice the side of his right, which is made worse by the aforementioned running animation. You're probably thinking, "I could seriously care less about this character's butt", but lemme tell you, you'll be looking at it for the majority of your time playing BLTD.

Another Surival game where the screen shots look cool and make you think the games going to be good but it's actually just ♥♥♥♥. 0/10 rather be dead than late.

[FEB 14, 2016]
As of now the game has not undergone any update since last year, now the game is looking more dead than ever. I suggest that you stay away until it more work has been done on it or it gets finished.

[OLD REVIEW (JULY 30, 2015)]

[Recommended = 32 of 50 people (64%) found this review helpful 1 person found this review funny]

[THIS IS AN EARLY ACCESS REVIEW, CHANGES ON THE REVIEW WILL CHANGE OVER TIME UNTIL IT IS FINISHED.]

This game shows promise, however it's in early alpha so there is not much to do yet.

mechanics that need improvement(in the short amount of time i played):

player movement,

combat system.

graphics.

key bindings.

camera.

though playable, it's still not recommendable to many.

The first game I used for a refund, works great, got my money back in like 3 days.