So you've played the game?
I may have put in a 'few XXX' hours into survival mode over the past year… Much less than Factorio overall
Lets be clear, I love survival mode and it can be a freaking difficult game. The Xulima team that created desert rats that wiped your complete party in the first 3 minutes didn't disappoint when it came to difficulty.
Tried the campaign today. I'm split between two opinions.
First off, I was expecting an easy ride like most campaign games start.
Resource management starts off easy. Wacking a few Zombies is easy. Then you get a difficulty spike realllly early on. A few missions in I realized that the campaign colony goals were all the same, and badly designed.
!!Timed missions based on population increase.!! I was hoping for more!!! Or at least alternative ways to achieve victory. They do start off easy (assuming you've got some knowledge of how to play) but it literally seems like there is only ONE strategy to finish these. Set up minimal effective defense, horde resource, no offense whatsoever, then spam housing to hit goal before you get overwhelmed. If you don't min/max you likely won't be completing these on higher difficulty or more.
An example of bad design - I wiped an entire map of zombies… but still had to wait out the game time and have the correct population at the time. 10 minutes of just waiting because of the arbitrary timer……
The hero missions are terrible cross between point and click pixelhunt adventures and the the hero missions from Starcraft. You have the option of collecting background items. But there isn't a visual cue (Edit: apparently there is a visible cue on lower difficulties, I just didn't play on that level) so you literally have to scan your mouse back and forth hoping it lights up as a collectible. These are 'optional' but they give XP to spend in upgrade trees. For a tactical completionist like me that makes them mandatory, not optional. If they provided me with a character skin or some equally useless pixel crack, I wouldn't give a rats furry behind about skipping it. But… XP for talent trees that continue from campaign to campaign can't be skipped for me. Terrible design.
The horde missions are a pretty heavy source of contention apparently. Personally I love them, but I'm used to survival mode and I have a good idea what skills are effective already, so I havne't encountered much issue. For new people I can see this being a real pain in the ass. If you've gone jack of all trades, or specialized exceptionally poorly, you are boned in some missions. There is no skill respec (that I could find anyway) so you pretty much have to restart if you've screwed up talents too bad. If you've played some missions at 500% difficulty (more difficulty success = more XP = more talents = stronger) then these missions manageable, which they should be, they were ripped right from survival mode. Love it.
No story, minimal 'lore' if you can call it that. The trailer had more story than I've found in game so far.
So…. if I had to rate the campaign mode I'd give it 4/10
If I had to rate survival mode over the last year, I'd give it 8.5/10.
Its worth buying for survival mode only.
Edit : For those of you who like drama, apparently they are deleting negative comments from their forum and telling people to its a hard game so get over it. Which, as you can imagine, sets off all the pretty snowflakes because they havne't felt 'heard' and demand rights to post anything on forums. Personally I don't care what comments of mine they delete, they already have my money and I'm not getting a refund so I don't care if they acknowledge any of my opinions. Apparently I'm in a minority
(Do I get special minority funding if this happens often enough?)