Ok so here is my review. I love this game! Awesome crafting, zero lag, building and breaking into bases. Gun boats jet ski. Fishing, whaling. (yes Whaling). Machine guns, Diving. Basically you build bad ♥♥♥ bases where you craft boats ships jet skis ,and all your stuff , then you attack or defend your base. Servers are starting to fill up now to. I wish more games had as much thought put into them as this little gem! OH yea! Helicopters and planes too! AND ITS STILL IN ALPHA! did I say no lag at all!

10/10
You get what you pay for.! Simple as that.

Devolopers listens to you. Which is rare these days, game is going where they say it is.
it would be a huge mistake not to give it a go! :)

Build that boat!

First thing first, this game is fun. It is a LOT of fun. That said, it does need a whole lot of work. That is stating the obvious, as the game literally just came out a few days ago. Do not get discouraged by the glitches and bugs, as these are very normal. That said, my experiences have been mostly negative.

I started the game, which loads amazingly fast and runs like a dream for me, and found myself a nice quiet server to play on. The people on the server were extremely kind and quick to help me learn how to play and what to do with things. So off I go, mining up debris from the shore and being completely lost and confused in this amazing archipelago when I realized.. I'm about to starve! But that's ok because I have a busicuit! So I eat my tasty little bit of bread and realize.. I also have a raft! Sweeeeeet!
A tiny bit of trial and error and a few embarassingly silly questions into map chat later.. and lookout world, I am afloat on the most AWESOME rigged up raft ever! Then things get even better when I find floating trash. WOO HOO! I got myself some string and a car battery, couple other odd things.. and now I can make a fishing stick! I won't go into detail on how long it took me to figure out that cooking the fish makes them much better to eat.. but it took a while. I will go mention that at one point when I got off of the raft, I was attacked by a shark. I know what you are thinking.. "Hey, stupid, you just get out of the water." but no.. I tried that. You see, this shark was ON A MISSION! So there I am, squealing in panic, as this shark HOVERS out of the water and up a hill after me. It was very intense for a little while, but I did manage to pickaxe said smiley shark in the face.. to death.. and got some super tasty "Shark Chops" for my effort. Yummy.
Now at this point I have a pretty good stockpile of resources from my adventures, and I will tell you now that it does not take long at all to build in this game. Four hours into the game and I had enough resources to build anything I wanted. So I build a small base and figure out how to make a small shipyard, and I made a jet ski. That's right! SPEEDY BOAT! And boy is it fun. There are whales too.. and you can jump these beefy guys with your jet ski for almost endless fun! And then.. get shot in the head from half way across the map by someone with a sniper rifle who you never even saw. Well that's ok, it is a "survival" game after all. Just.. you don't have to survive the world, you have to survive the people. That's fine.
Back to the base finally because I forgot to build a cot, but the devs are kind enough to respan you with another super raft AND A BISCUIT! I found my jet ski again and got it home and then built myself the big ship yard. Now things are getting VERY good. Took me less then two hours to be in the big gunboat. I got to say.. driving that thing is FUN. It actually takes one person to steer while someone else runs the engine for you, making it a loooot of fun. Puttered around for a bit, refueled it at the refinery, went to head back home in the pitch dark. Now I didn't think much of this because I had a friend on the front of the boat with a flashlight.. then I am suddenly looking at the respawn timer again. Another headshot.. IN PITCH DARKNESS INSIDE THE CABIN OF A BOAT!
By now I am somewhat annoyed.. but what the heck.. My buddy and I respawn and get the boat home.. only to find two guys waiting for us outside the base. Only.. we didn't know they were waiting for us. Because while we leave our game settings normal, meaning when it is night time it is DARK.. some people can still somehow see well enough to get two head shots almost instantly. They kill us, steal our boat, and leave.
This should give you an idea of the player base. There are diamonds in the ruff, but within four hours I have been killed a half dozen times and every sintle one was a headshot. That doesn't seem like a coincodence to me, so be ready for that if/when you do start to play. All the same, we trundle on. By now I have about.. 12 hours in the game and I've built and driven pretty much every single vehicle in the game. Some are more fun than others, but all of them have their uses. I've also had most of them stolen from me. The game desperatly needs some sort of anti-cheat. Not to mention that the moment you log out, someone will come by and somehow demolish your metal walls in a few minutes, take everything you worked for, and be gone before you get back.
Pros : The game is FUN. Really fun. Even if you do loose everything, it doesn't take long to get it back. It is fast paced and when you loose something, it really is not a big deal. Aside from the sea plane, the vehicals are realistic to drive and a lot of fun to use. Flying sharks! Yes, I am counting that as a pro because it was so absolutley terrifying and hylarios to see that I think everyone should experience this.
Cons : Cheating. Watch out for the players. A lot of them are legit.. but the cheaters are out there. No lights for your base. This means the cheaters can see you in the dark but you will not be able to see them coming for you. Base defenses MUST be manned to work. There is no automation so the moment you log out, everything you have is forfeit and will be taken from you. Not might be.. not could be.. but WILL be. You will have to start from scratch most days.. but at least it doesn't take very long.

I would gladly promote this game to anyone who wants a nice fast pased game, but I would never label it as a survival game. It's very much more a FPS game with construction elements in it and a food bar you have to keep full with a very occasional bite to eat.

I imagine this is whats happening out in the waters of rust.

I enjoyed this game a lot so far.
The graphics are average, but ok. The balancing (weapons, strength of walls, rescources, Sharks etc.) is very well done and the amount of content is absolutely ok for an early access alpha game that has just been released. On top of that, patches come out very frequently and the devs and admins in the forum seem very friendly and communicative.

But I'm not going to recommend to purchase this game atm, because it is absolutely overun by hackers. I played a lot of survival games and I've seen cheaters in a lot of these games, but this is far beyond playable. I played on very different servers (PVE only, Official Servers, private PVE/PVP servers) and there were hackers around at least a couple of times a day. I lost all my stuff by flying/through walls going hackers so often that I'm forced to stop playing this game. It says that with the latest patch the anti cheat system got improved. It took less than an hour to loose all of my stuff to a hacker after I downloaded the patch. You can't release a game that is obviously so vulnerable to cheating. I'm really happy to change my review into a positive one if this is solved, but for now I'm forced to avoid this game.

This review is done on (4/14/2016)

Alright... where to start... I honestly have never wrote an honest review before but here goes...

DAY 1: It was just me, and I get my bearings of how the mechanics work and this is what I found out...

1. Resouces come from only scrap piles, floating logs, sharks, whales, floating garbage piles, and other players.
2. press tab to build or craft
3. boats are your friends, if you don't have one so is land
4. The community is friendly to new players
cool right?

DAY 2: So I got my bearings and started on a swedish server and made my first hut.. not a bad hut but a shabby one made of sweat tears and a whole lot of resources. At the same time I buy two more of this game for my friends so they can see what I talk about on how cool this game is.

DAY 3&4: My friends join me in my hut we build walls, weapons, and finally jet skis, which in turn made gathering alot faster and more profitable. We met some friendly Canadians, and we weren't ready to defend ourselves so we didn't engage alot but we held firm, we got off for awhile and when we get back we realize we have been looted while we were gone and I realized I didn't build any windows to stop people from crouch jumping into our base so I did some remodeling to plug up the gaps. My compadres decide to use their newly built guns to exact revenge but hilariously they started this while there was a 3-faction war happening in the middle of the map between the "elites","UWS", and the "DOGS" and boy they had the guns. shortly after they lost our skis and their guns and whatever they had on them at the time, a raiding party of the "elites" had a massive ship and two skis come and loot us. The next part was hilarious to me when the second raiding party of the "UWS" came with a gun boat and two skis, we had to break the news that we were recently raided and had nothing to give them and pointed out that half of our tower's walls have been blown to smithereens. So in turn they went on their merry way east back to the warfront.

DAY 5: From experiencing the previous days I decided I was going to be the leader and vouch that we would have no personal weapons outside of our base other than harpoons and it has been peaceful since then so far. afterwards we focused more on electricity and base defenses rather than personal arsenal. the first defense was a tier 3 anti tank turret that could fit on a warship(we put it on a tower) and its ammo is stupid expensive but at least its devastating power is gruesome, plus if we don't have ammo at least its daunting. we made a windmill and now are currently focused on whale hunting and agriculture because we have realized we are actually not the biggest fish in the sea.

So those are my five days of gruesome playing and when I look back on this, this seems to be more of a story than an actual review... hopefully this gives kinda a picture of what it is like such as progression and for now notice these days are not real days but game days. We have actually been playing it about 3 days now and only 2 of them was with my friends so the progression and mining isn't too bad. I hope you enjoyed my drearily long review/story and I HIGHLY recommend this game more than most I play and definitly more than ark and this doesn't require a supercomputer to play.

ENJOY!

-JangoXIII

Hide and Hold out is a game very similar to rust. the progression system can be slow at times but it is very rewarding with access to ships and planes. This game is great with friends and you can have fun for hours exploring the wasteland, building, raiding.

Also this game isnt very demanding and should run on most pcs and still look nice which is awesome.

overall i rate 10/10 and i hope this game goes places

-Pros
*Gives that "rust at launch" feeling.
*Waterworld type premesis is more interesting than the other dayz/rust clones offer.
*Fair amount of stuff in underwater, giving you a new way to explore.


-Cons
*Hackers, Hackers as far as the eye can see. This game runs on Unity which has boatloads and boatloads of hackers, both figuritively, and litterally.
*Advertised Battle mode is not in game, which was a main buying point for me.
*Virtually no game population. I saw a peak of 8 players on the most populated official server. Theres 30+ servers, and maybe 12 players online in the whole game.
*Many exploits and bugs that happened in H20 are indentical to ones in Rust at launch.

Verdict : I want to play this game, I really do! But the same reason I left Rust, H1Z1, Aftermath, and such games remains. There is no effective anti-cheat, and it looks very much like this game will be plagued by hackers for its lifetime.

*Note - As of this writing, Hackers can do the following, Spawn any items, Instant kill whole server, teleport to players, and ESP. Furthermore, according to offsite game forums, you can use cracked versions of the game to play online, grant yourself admin powers, and disable showing your steamID. Bans have no effect, as hackers can just generate themselves a new fake ID to continue playing.

I jumped into this game purely out of curiousity and my experience was alright actually.

First thing I noticed going into the game was the graphics. I definitely felt like most of these textures and objects were some of the default textures but I looked past the graphics since the game is in alpha. The server I spent my time in was nice and quiet since I am not big into PVP in survival games so I was really able to explore and figure out the mechanics of the game since there is not really any instruction or tutorial to the game. The next thing that caught me off guard a little is the fact the if you get sharks close enough to land they will literally begin to fly around in the air as though they are swimming and will follow you relentlessly which one did to me for a lot longer than I appreciated. The day and night cycle is nicely spaced out although nights are VERY dark and whenever I tried to go into options I was instantly faced with a "Are you sure you want to keep these settings" screen which left me unable to actually change anything. The game is nice enough to start you off with a pickaxe and a flashlight at least so you are not completely alone in the dark. The game follows pretty much any other survival game mechanic in that you must salvage metals and wood to build however one thing I really appreciated about this game is that you do not need to build every tiny item in order to build your goal item. If you want to build bolts to build a door you can, otherwise if you have the material needed to build the bolts and the door already then you can just build the door and the bolts will be constructed automatically as well. It took me a while to figure out how to build a base in order to fully feel safe in this game but I appreciated how blind I felt to everyhting. For still being in alpha I can recommend this game. It is the right amount of challenging and fun and as long as the developers keep to their word about the future additions I can see myself playing more of this.

My review is based off of my playthrough. Everything I talk about, including the flying sharks can be seen here:
https://youtu.be/l2dYxFukfyw

Got killed by a flying shark.