I hope to eventually replace this review with a positive one as I do think this game is better than the original in a lot of ways and I have been having fun with it, but there's some technical and QoL issues that are badly kneecapping it and leading to a very frustrating transition into the late game. And for some reason, a lot of indie devs have been saying reviews are a great place for feedback, so here it goes. Quick edit: Some of my concerns have already been patched out and thus have been removed from the review. First, there's a memory leak that's not been fixed yet at the time of this review. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with items as the symptoms are most visible when a lot of items are on screen at once after a long gameplay session. Using the faith maximizing prayer is an easy way to witness the game suddenly crapping itself once the memory leak has progressed far enough. Second, I've had an infrequent but repeated issue of zombies getting stuck. They'll often be playing their "doing work" animation, but I'll find them standing in the wrong location with no progress being made. I have to pick them up and place them back on their station. The clay zombie has been the one to break most often. Then there's the QoL. This first one is a doozy. The PR mechanic, zombie limit, and factory power mechanics are calibrated frustratingly bad and are my biggest pain point. I feel like one of them needs adjusting, although I'm hesitant to say for sure that I know best which one should be. I'm not against the mechanics themselves, but I have to wonder how much playtesting was done of the mid-game. You need 3 squads of zombies to not be kneecapped in one of the final battles before steel because the mercenaries aren't available due to it being an immediate second battle in a sequence. It is an ordeal to get access to steel and thus bump the limit up beyond 40 zombies (that's with a perk improving it) before your sermons drop down to giving you peanuts, but my experience is that 40 zombies was almost exactly the amount I was needing to keep all the goods flowing while barely touching the labor-voracious factory. You need 3 zombies to automate sand and clay, a minimum of 2 zombies to automate woodcutting and that will easily prove insufficient to keep up, 2 for iron ore, 3 for stone because that for some reason requires an extra middle man, 2 for melted fat which is needed in large quantities, 2 for turning grape juice into wine (sanity and eventual mercenary payment), 3 minimum for manufacturing and delivering cloth bundles for a reliable minimum weekly allowance of favor, 1 or probably 2 zombies to grow the flax to fuel that cloth industry, 1 you rotate between making iron bars, clay bricks, and glass in the factory since that will be less labor than on the surface, and 3 or more zombies providing mechanical power to the factory depending on how efficient you can lay everything out. That's 22 or 23, over half the pre-steel limit already, purely taken up by these most essential roles. There's so many time consuming crafts a player will want to accommodate as well, and a need to set up production in the factory for the sake of reliably getting enough favor for the big faith prayer each week. Building in the factory pretty aggressively demands more zombies be added to the treadmills. Before steel, it just doesn't feel like there's a lot of wiggle room... and the zombie skill trees heavily discourages moving zombies between multiple kinds of jobs and even cuts into work efficiency if you want to make them stronger at combat. Reduce the number of zombies needed on treadmills, remove the need for logistics zombie, bumping up the baseline zombie limit by 10 or even just 5 are all ways to alleviate this pain point. The most important change to bring about would be to reduce how much the player has to run around gathering zombies for Sloth Day battles, and make it feel less like investing their skill trees in combat kneecaps their labor. Just a few more zombie slots so a squad can be left in the barracks is all I'm really asking for. Having the mercenaries stick with you for the final water gate battle would also help, but frankly not as much as being able to set and forget a squad of zombies. Then there's the lack of chest filtering. You can use the factory chests to sort items and there's no fear of mixing inputs unless you do that intentionally, but you can't set other chests elsewhere to whitelists. This is a problem when so many resources come in pairs or worse. Sand and clay, stone and marble, iron ore and coal, hops and grapes, and then of course there's the variety of crops. All of these have the same issue. If consumption of these duos is uneven, then the storage at the production site will gradually fill up with the other resource until eventually every chest slot is full, then you have to go out there yourself and perform the tedious task of deleting tens of stacks of items, potentially even hundreds of stacks, to reset the equilibrium. You can stall the issue by building more chests in many of those locations, but that only stalls the issue and makes the cleanup take even longer when it is finally needed. That tedious cleanup wouldn't be needed if chest could be given whitelists, and if the produce silo in the factory was segmented. Misc. things: You cannot set a zombie on the compost bin, and there's no incinerator to automate disposing of the plant matter from the farm and the vineyard. It has its uses, sure, but it piles up and turning it into peat would at least mean fewer items to manually delete periodically. You can't hold shipments in reserve without a lot of micromanagement. There's no way to simply instruct your zombies to only deliver the things you have orders for. You at least seem to get money for the extras, though. You have to go to the warehouse to check delivery progress. It would be very nice to be able to see that from the factory if a player did want to micromanage order fulfillment. If there's a way to respec the zombies, I haven't found it. Seems like if you invest a skill point into something you decide later is preventing your zombie from having the full build you want, it kind of seems like all you can do is burn them and raise a new one. Zombies can't be given custom names to help you remember what you were using them for once combat is over and you need them to go back to work. You can't set a crafting task to endless, which means every crafting task eventually needs to be refreshed, and it's pretty slow to set the maximum amount to minimize how often you need to refresh it. Combat potions don't go in the Alchemy bag for some reason. A waypoint actually in the barracks would have been a godsend for not missing Sloth Days by a sliver of time. You have to get the zombies into the squad positions, arm them, and then get to the battle location. Even with the carry-four perk, I often ran out of time if I was in the middle of something when Sloth Day began.
