I really had hope that this book would improve the system, but somehow it's biggest impact is making it worse.

There is some good to it. Some of the items add cool functionality and character options. Some items fill niches that were sorely missing in the corebook, some are just cool flavour items that are nice to have or just funny jokes to look at. The economics section is cool, though a little short compared to the rest of the book.

However, the good items are mostly overshadowed by what takes up the vast majority of the book, which is mostly pointless items that do nothing but pad the length of the book. The weapons are all exotic weapons that don't interact at all with the existing modularity of the system and most of them don't really add much to the existing options. The vehicles are too pricy for non-nomads and don't do much for nomads beyond allowing them to get more upgrades per moto rank. Some of the cyberware options are fine, but many of them suffer by how poorly designed the max humanity mechanic is. Worst of all, nearly all the fashion items are either terrible, or just simply recreate mechanics that already existed in the core rulebook by just making them needlessly more complicated.

Beyond the options that are useless, even worse are the options that actively make the system worse. Cyberpunk Red already had an existing problem with balance. There are options that simply vastly outperform all other options which have a tendency outside of a very good group to produce the same characters over and over again. As well, the bullet dodging mechanic grinds combat to a halt and makes it much too easy to simply trivialize encounters and turn them into effectively rocket tag. For some reason, this book includes items that make all these options even better or easier to achieve, while doing nothing to improve other possible choices. Where once you had to sacrifice stat points to bullet dodge (Which nearly everyone did), now you simply need to pay an incredibly cheap amount to do it. Linear frames are now not only the most optimal piece of cyberware in the game by far, they now also carry the functionality of other cyberware at no further humanity loss and you can make them immune to EMP. The end result is that the system is an even less balanced one as a result of this book.

Overall, it's incredibly dissapointing. If this shows the direction the system will continue to develop in, I think it will ultimately fail to live up to its potential.

I say this as someone who played this game religiously when it first came out, this system is an example of wasted potential.

When the corebook came out, it was a great example of a modern take on a cyberpunk TTRPG. It was simple, elegant, easy to run and captured the tone of the genre well. However, it was extremely simple, poorly balanced in some areas and had a tendency in practice to produce largely similar characters as players started to realize how unsatisfying many of the game's options are. The effect of is that if you GM for enough players, you tend to see the same character build repeated largely because it simply breaks the game in how powerful it is.

Part and parcel with this simplicity was that some of the game's features were incredibly lacklustre. Certain abilities and options, such as the lawman's backup ability, just didn't really add enough to justify their existence. The netrunning system, while commonly praised for its simplicity, is incredibly limiting to the creativity of GMs and players and by and large feels samey once you've hacked enough turrets.

While these downsides were very clear and understood by much of the playerbase, there always remained the possibility of improvement, and with a few changes the system could have become a masterpiece. Unfortunately, however, the developers' priorities don't seem to lie with this sort of improvement. New content for the game has largely followed two main streams: Joke options that largely add nothing to the game besides the entertainment on initially reading it, and options which, rather than fix these underlying problems, actively make them worse.

The developers have all but rejected any idea that there is aspects of the corebook that could be improved. After 2 years of errata, PDFs and their first major sourcebook, they have leaned into the idea that the best way forward is to accept these flaws and add more items the the system that are by and large either useless, or game-breakingly powerful, simultaneously doing nothing to round out weaker options while making the strongest options in the game even better.

The end result of all this is a system that, at first seemed to cleverly balance combat with social gameplay and other forms of storytelling, but now largely focuses on wargaming style combat with very little happening outside of that. This would be ok if Red had a particularly compelling combat system, but instead it is slow, painfully simple and with very few tactical options that actually consistently feel good or work effectively.

It really is unfortunate that this is the case. I was excited to see how this system developed, especially alongside RTG's other current major system The Witcher. After seeing what RTG is putting out to support this system however, I can't really in good conscience recommend it.

I've been following this game since the kickstarter, and have had a chance to try out both the preview and full rules. I genuinely have nothing but good things to say about Fight to Survive. The system perfectly recreates the tone of the movies and games that inspire it in a way I've seen very few systems pull off.

The combat system is one of the most unique, innovative combat systems I've tried in a long time. Rather than rely on probability for resolution, the combat system focuses on the ability to read your opponent and guess what moves they will pick, keeping in mind your own character's strengths. It provides a great mechanism for storytelling through conflict, the mechanics weaving the fight into the overall story in a very seemless way. I can't offer a greater example of this than after finishing a playtest session of the combat rules, my group and I continued to play individual one on one fights because of how fun it was. It felt as though we were playing a fighting game, but in TTRPG form.

Outside of the combat, the mechanics encourage amazing roleplay and storytelling. The focus on telling a long story of a martial legacy over 100 years creates fantastic dynamics of mentor/successor. The mechanics encourage roleplay focused storytelling over character optimizing, while still providing enough mechanics to separate characters into their roles in the story.

Overall, get this game. Play it. You won't regret it.