Need outside opinions, not sure if I should buy the game.

[Sledge]

Hello all, just registered.
I have a bit of a dilemma...
I have always wanted to try overgrowth, but
after reading the steam reviews, many say the game has
been in alpha forever (years), is laggy on lower end computers (like mine),
and that it's not worth the 30 dollar price...
I just added said 30 dollars to my steam account,
but I want to know the opinions of the community itself.
Is Overgrowth worth spending 30 dollars on?
Does this SUMlauncher I've read about help much if the game doesn't like my computer?
And will it ever get out of alpha and into beta? (Not concerned about this much,
the editor itself blew my mind, what with the potential stuff I could create,
and the mods I could utilize...
I love creating worlds...

Or should I just save my money for something else?
P.S Played lugaru a long time ago, loved it. Pretty much **** a brick for excitement when I saw this game...

[halzoid]

I bought the game 2 years ago now and I haven't reconsidered it.
So far I have really enjoyed the freedom of it, the modding capabilities and the community that all came with it. The combat of the game is really smooth and it can be fun just to spawn loads of enemies and fight them for a while. The games files are completely open, so it's easy to mess around with files and edit them to alter your gameplay, which can be great! I actually taught myself how to animate and how to utilise basic coding skills simply through opening random files within Overgrowths folder. The editor, as you said, offers near complete freedom when it comes to making maps, there are billions of choices available to making maps, and if you're good at design, you can create almost anything, and I mean anything, and even if you aren't good at design, there are hundreds of community made maps that are available for download, from Boats to spaceships, primitive villages to modern rooftops and serious plotlines to wacky multi-coloured racecourses! there is also soon to be a large story-based mod released called Therium 2, Link to that in Timbles' post beneath V (plus the remastered edition of the Lugaru campaign).

As you mentioned you have a low end pc, and recently Overgrowth has started acting a bit weird with them, my old laptop can no longer run the game as it can't run the shaders and I've heard a lot of people complaining about the Fps running low on their game, it's a thing to watch out for if you are considering this. Alphas come out very regularly, though before this, there was a 9 month gap between alpha 209 and alpha 210, so I'm not sure how long this frequent update system will last, though so far it's been pretty good and progress is visible in every update.

I can't really go into much more detail right now because I'm currently walking through the city, typing on my phone, on my way to college (which I'm already late for...) though I'll try to elaborate on these points when I have time

[EDIT]
(I'd love to elaborate... But the internet cut out when I updated this after a lot of changes had been made and because of this, I lost all progress... Soooo... Yeah, there's a few more things that the game offers which I really don't have the time to add now)

[EDIT EDIT]
I felt it necessary to add what I had missed, and have done so...

[Constance]

Admittedly, it is an alpha game. It has been in development for a very, very long time.
If you don't get bored of modding, a cool combat system, and a wealth of custom maps, you'll enjoy Overgrowth.

Right now the performance is pretty bad, but that's just because of alpha stage: as time goes on, the performance & amount of bugs will decrease. If you buy the game now, then just be ready for stuff like 30 FPS and uncommon crashes (I say uncommon crashes because most crashes come from new scripts & map editing, but in stable gameplay, crashes are uncommon).

But if you just want to play a complete game, either wait until Overgrowth is finished (or its Arena/Campaign mode), or get a better computer and wait for (shameless plug incoming) Therium-2. Also check out Lugaru, Overgrowth's predecessor.

Edit: Halzoid just told me I'm a complete idiot and that you already beat Lugaru.
I'm smart.

[Endoperez]

The combat is already fun. You can have a few hours' worth of fun just experimenting with the combat system.

The parkour system is nice. If you're interested in that, that's another few hours' worth.

That then leads to challenge maps and whatever. However, there is no organized system or progression between maps. That's the "Alpha" thing. A fun game, but you need to seek out the fun parts actively and intentionally; it isn't readily served.

If you're interested in the modding, that too works, of course.

How many hours' worth of content do you want out of a game with nice and innovative combat and movement system? The novelty has its own value too, after all. Once you've decided how many hours you want, approximately, you can ask questions about that. If it's just 3-5 hours, you'll easily hit that. If it's 40-80 hours, it's a risky choice - you'll basically need to use the level editor at least a bit to adjust or fix the content to your liking, more or less.

If it's not worth your money yet, you could wait a bit and see how the Arena mode turns out. That's going to offer content, progression and all that. So, even if you don't think it's worth it now, you could check back in a few months (autumn? around Christmas?) and see if the situation has changed.

Personally, I pre-ordered to follow up on the development and the modding stuff. The game itself has taken much longer than I expected, but I was never here for that, so I got my money's worth and have no complaints.

[Thomason1005]

to be honest, developement is sometimes slow
performance isnt the best.
there is not a huge amount of finished maps

on the other side: the combat is really fast and challenging and you can have a lot of fun in the arenas, and the 1v1 is really fun with a friend. the blood effects are nice, swordcombat is unforgiving, and the parcour is a nice touch.

BUT i myself spent most of the time in the level editor, its so fun to push some stuff around, add some enemies and make a map which you can play with your friends. find some unused assets and objects in the game folders, there is really a lot of stuff you can do there. trying out weapon combinations, throw stuff around. after that you can download some mods.
its just a game where you can mess around for hours.

so

if you like to play in a sandbox and spray blood all over it, this is the game for you

if you want a packaged campaign and 30bucks is a lot to you, maybe it might not be

[yoshinoya2016]

Hello all, just registered.
I have a bit of a dilemma...
I have always wanted to try overgrowth, but
after reading the steam reviews, many say the game has
been in alpha forever (years), is laggy on lower end computers (like mine),
and that it's not worth the 30 dollar price...
I just added said 30 dollars to my steam account,
but I want to know the opinions of the community itself.
Is Overgrowth worth spending 30 dollars on?
Does this SUMlauncher I've read about help much if the game doesn't like my computer?
And will it ever get out of alpha and into beta? (Not concerned about this much,
the editor itself blew my mind, what with the potential stuff I could create,
and the mods I could utilize...
I love creating worlds...

Or should I just save my money for something else?
P.S Played lugaru a long time ago, loved it. Pretty much **** a brick for excitement when I saw this game...

I'm Aaron from Coventry West Midlands. Just signed up today after several hours of playing. It though it was silly at first but my good the satisfaction of slashing a bunny from behind run up the wall, kick off a wolf's head and knocking out your opponents are just amazing. I'm not fond of seeing animals in battle games nor even liking with animals before but with the lugaru i started converting my perspective about them. In terms of the alpha years forever. Well there are Pre-ordered a long time ago based on some folks as well as constant content updates so in my opinion they will release the full game sooner of later. At first I Have the second thought but I downloaded the latest build after my shift and ended in a few hours and give it a shot.

[Swordarm]

On the other hand, the lack of sensible development progress MUST NOT BE underestimated.

Steam has a refund opportunity and the devs are also pretty liberal with that, just saying.


I backed the game yyyyyeeeeaaaaarrrrrsss ago... today, I probably would not have done that in all fairness. I wanted to support David and company and what they were doing back then was very impressive. And somehow, it got stuck.

[Spadkins]

Honestly?

I can't recommend it.

As you've most definitely heard from other people in the community, development is basically sluggish at best, radio silence for half a year at worst. The combat is exciting and new when you first load it up, and it *more or less* stays that way. It's certainly the punchline for this game, the most interesting innovation and brightest selling point. There's a disappointingly low skill 'ceiling,' meaning you get better at it but they haven't deepened it so much that every fight is an immensely satisfying, gritty, hard fought victory (although of course it's much more so than, say Assassin's Creed). Besides that and a move set with no real variation the past 5 years, the biggest issues I've had with the combat is that A) sometimes it is simply to short to appreciate what is going on, even though that's probably mostly just me, and B) fights more-than-rarely devolve into counter judo throw on top of counter-judo throw, which is especially frustrating when you're trying to have a nice fight with just weapons.

The different personalities, cultures, technology, etc. of the different races is a pretty fascinating bit of lore, and Wolfire will occasionally release a blog post on that very topic, but said article doesn't change much per instance. The game does not run well on even lower-middle machines, and if you worry about your computer running it 100% smoothly, odds are it won't. Also takes ages to load up a single level. Freerunning and platforming components aren't huge draws for me, and like a lot of this game, it feels like a good foundation that hasn't had much built on it in over half a decade. Doesn't flow as well as the combat. The physics are cool, I've probably spent a couple hours over the years ragdolling myself down hills or doing a front flip trying to land on the back of my skull to break my own neck. Locational damage is something they talk about but I don't see often, really only comes into effect when striking the head (or flipping onto your spinal cord). Big issue where this comes into play is armed combat, where big swords will one shot you even if you jump away and they only clip your leg.

Besides agonizingly slow-developing potential literally everywhere for this game, highlights include the modding community, although sadly the fan base really isn't big enough to regularly spit out polished, fun mods. You'll find a couple of good ones if you look. The editor adds playing time, if clunky and confusing. Challenge/"Campaign" levels do too, when they don't crash. Absolute best time I ever had with Overgrowth was when I had some buddies over and we played versus mode in a couple PC games with Xbox controllers. If you can wire up controllers to your computer and if you have friends, that's your best bet at getting your money's worth.

I hope the devs can get this game on track schedule-wise, and I want to support them in making a beautiful finished product out of this alpha version two hundred and twenty-six, but I wouldn't pay $30 for it again. I realistically can't see this game polished and complete with a campaign, arena, challenge mode, slimmer editor, and new features, while also being bug-free, before 2022, in about 5 more years.

TL:DR, A+ potential, B- execution so far, F--- in timeliness or even slightly regular updates, and D+ communication with fanbase. Make of all that what you will, but I would venture to say that a minimum of 75% of all the people who bought this game are unsatisfied with how development has gone since alpha 0001.

[EnderDe]

I bought and I am satisfied. Each user has their opinions.