Poly Roam Reviews

If you like The Long Drive you will probably like this one.

Some of the most half baked, low effort, mind numbing game design I have ever seen. Initially the game seems kind of interesting, you have to maintain your vehicle and can swap parts, the distance is a 1 to 1 scale which you don't see very often, and there's all kinds of loot to be found if you know where to look. That's about all the good things. All the NPC's have cold, dead AI voices and sometimes the entire voice will change for a single line (i.e. Zappy the wizard shifts from an American accent to an English accent out of nowhere). There's an easy way around this, and we've been doing it for decades: just use text. The NPC's don't have to be voiced, and the fact that any amount of extra effort went into making that happen, rather than refining literally any of the games other core systems, feels like an insult to the player. The looting becomes repetitive and your personal inventory doesn't get upgraded until you travel 1000km, and remember this is 1:1 scale for distance (for reference I played for 27 hours and didn't even crack 500km traveled), so you have to find ways to expand your inventory within the game's parameters. Not a horrible idea, especially when you can store loot in the trunk of a car and compress it to store it in the trunk of your main car, but being that literally no other container can be compressed while it has something in it, the game doesn't exactly teach you about stacking cars for storage in any meaningful way, or even really hint at it. Whatever, the player has to figure something out for themselves, not a huge deal, but when the main mechanic of the game (if you can call any of them "main" mechanics) is looting shouldn't inventory size be a bigger priority? Vendor drops seem to be biome-specific, so if you're in the winter area you won't find the engine mechanic, if you're in the summer area you won't find the battery wizard, etc. Again, fine idea on paper, but the biomes stretch on for 40-70km each, and the player is rarely incentivized to stop and get out of their vehicle unless they see a structure. So basically, unless there happens to be a vendor zombie at a structure, you'll have a bit of a rough time finding them. The biggest problem with vendor drops, however, is Upgreta. I hate Upgreta with all my heart, she appears in every biome like she's the most important vendor in the game, yet she can't provide you with any upgrades until you pass 500km. Why on earth is she the earliest vendor you find? Her upgrades aren't even that meaningful until you pass 2000km (which... why? Why would you play this for that long?) The only meaningful vendor is Earl the engine mechanic, and again he only appears in the summer biome, so if you get a run where summer doesn't appear until the third or fourth biome then have fun swapping out 3 different engines as they all run down to 0%. If engine degradation is going to be so punishing then have Earl appear in every biome, if you don't want Earl in every biome then increase engine durability over time, it's a game about mindlessly driving let me have a mf engine. Addressing the other vendors quickly: Why is half of this stuff even in the game? Why is there a construction vendor? Who is out here building a base in that tiny fenced off circle? I truly want to know, if you did the base building in this game leave a comment and tell me if it was any good, I'm not booting this crap up again. There's a license plate vendor (kinda fun), and then somebody who sells base decorations (again, why?). The battery wizard is okay, but batteries aren't that hard to find so he's minimally useful. Carl is good too, he sells cars and car parts (I think it's only parts you've picked up and it's only the most recent 10 or 12 parts) but the game currency makes Carl feel expensive. In addition to zombie tokens, you need wood and stone to buy things, so if you don't have the 2000 wood you need to buy a car then you have to go out and chop down trees. Trees drop about 50 pieces of wood each, so have fun chopping down 400 trees if you want to drive that Shelly. The currency is honestly where the game's biggest issues start to show through. Everything in the game is the same as every other thing. Each tree is going to take the same amount of hits and drop the same amount of wood, no matter if it's a tiny birch or a towering oak, so there is no incentive to search for more valuable trees to obtain more resources. Rocks are the exact same way, same amount of hits per rock, same stone per broken rock. Every animal drops 5 pieces of the same kind of meat, so it doesn't matter if you shoot a penguin to death or track an elk through the forest with just a hatchet, it's the same result. You know what else is all the same? The enemies, the bosses, the speed of you car (it's based on the engine and nothing else I believe, so the van moves as fast as the sports car), the weapons, everything. Every single thing in the game is just a small handful of assets reskinned to create the illusion of variety. The enemies all hit for the same damage, regardless of size or weapon or speed or any variable whatsoever. Some of them run, some walk, some throw axes at you, but they all drop the same thing: a single token. Kill a big guy who takes twice as many hits to take down? One token. Kill a special miniboss who explodes on death and spawns adds? One token per kill. And the tokens only exist as something for the player to pick up, the game tracks the player's kill count, so we could have had a system wherein you simply obtain currency for killing zombies, but instead you have to walk around and find it and pick it up for some reason. Also you can pick up every single thing in this game. 99% of it is absolutely useless and just gets in the way of the thing you actually want to pick up. I'm not taking a grass patch back to my base you stupid game, I want to pick up the shotgun! Also ammo can only stack so much in a single inventory slot, why? Just let me have bullets. The most offensive aspect of this game (aside from the thing as a whole) is the boss design. The game makes a big deal out of finding and killing bosses, like it's the main thing you're supposed to be doing, but guess what? Every boss is the same guy. They're in a circle arena, they drop bear traps to stun you, they have a ranged attack, can summon adds, and they all have the same life drain ability. This realization is the moment that I quit playing. This game is nothing. It feels as though it was made for five dollars over the course of a weekend by somebody who was half asleep and the only game they've ever played was Skyrim. If you made it this far in the review, thank you for reading, and truly, for the sake of your time and your sanity, avoid this game. Do not give this dev any money for this project, try Pacific Drive if you want an actually good driving game.