I've struggled through 6, glitch filled, laggy hours of this game so far and I can at least preface with this.
PvE shooter fans, this game is NOT designed for you, If you were expecting a horde shooter with a bit of momentum like L4D2 or KF2, this is not it.

My problems with this game are very peculiar, so to try and put them across, I'm splitting the game into 3 categories, the fundamentals, the bugs, and the robots to try and narrow down my irks with it.
-----------FUNDAMENTALS-----------
To start with the fundamentals, it's just... meh. (WARNING: a lot of this is in the perspective of dealing with the bugs, who suck. A lot of this is a lot more fun in perspective of the robots due to a bunch of issues not happening with their AI/environments)
To start off, you've got your movement, running around feels good enough and doesn't have annoying weighty turning to it, but praises for it end there, you cannot jump and instead have to rely on an autojump from either sprinting or holding down a key, it is NEVER helpful, and only manages to get you out of 1ft ditches after a bit of scraping around the edges and getting stuck.
The diving is a shit system, it's fun to play around with ragdolls for a few minutes, but this is never EVER fun to deal with for more than a few hours and quickly devolves into total jank, you think you're going to jump a barricade to get into cover? Nope, you're going to bump off of it and get stuck in a ragdoll state for 2 seconds, you think you're going to jump over some bugs and shoot at them as you go? Nope, you're going to get stuck on one and be aiming the wrong way.
By extension the ragdoll system is extra annoying in combat, if you ever get knocked down, just give up, you're going to be torn to shreds if you're playing against bugs.

Combat? It's really not good, the guns that you'll get around your first 10 levels kind of suck, you've realistically only got 3 you can rely on, the starter AR, the marksman rifle and the auto-pistol, the shotgun is terrible and the pistol is just a straight downgrade.

Shooting feels like shit for a simple reason of that it's just imprecise, you will almost always be shooting from a third person perspective, and your aim can drastically be off center for a multitude of reasons, if you're spinning around your aim needs to catch up, if you're moving around your accuracy decreases heavily, and the third person perspective generally just causes a lot of missed shots.
You might be thinking, oh, but you can just use the first person camera!
And why yes, that is an option and is vastly more precise..
It sucks.
Not because of any accuracy reasons, but because of the presentation first gameplay later design of the areas and the visuals and the fog they constantly layer in on you (and also the FOV setting moving the scopes AWAY FROM YOUR CAMERA) You cannot see shit in such a cramped environment.
There's a melee system, not that you'll be using it due to never EVER wanting to be near enemies at any time.
Stratagems are a neat system, punching in codes to spawn in airdrops, but there was a common bug where you would just get the wrong thing, so you'll throw down a machine gun and end up carpet bombing your entire team, did I mention there's friendly fire? Because yeah, there's friendly fire, another thing they added for "teh lulz" ignoring the fact that "hey wait a minute! this is incredibly frustrating in practice, and will be insufferable to deal with in matchmaking!"
Also they just generally have a problem with the stratagems of just not being thrown far enough, you throw it as far as you can and maaybe it's like 10m away from you, it makes it way too difficult to take out armored targets, especially with the fact that you already have to wait on a delay for them to launch anyhow.

The stims are a pointless system, I don't know why they included this in the game other than that "well we have resource management so we should have medkits" but WHY do you need them? Any time you're taking major damage you're probably jammed in a corner or being instakilled, it just feels like it's there if you get scraped by a few zergs you forgot to kill, why not just roll all that health into your max HP and only let you refill them with specific drops/specific locations? It'd be a lot more intense instead of just "whoops got ragdolled gg" or dying instantly because you got hit by a Bile Spewer/got lit on fire for 2 seconds.
But I assume being tanky goes against this shitty idea of being expendable, which is why they give you like a thousand lives and never punish you for dying other than the fact you'll have 1 life less, you can easily push through high difficulties as a low level player just because as long as you get to the ship, it doesn't matter how many people died in the process.
Just makes it all really unsatisfying, you're expected to die, and you WILL die, so you're just dealing with the frustration of getting killed by bullshit reasons over and over, but it's okay apparently because they balanced the game around it so it's still playable, just annoying.

Presentation wise, shit just sucks, as mentioned before it's just impossible to see in front of you very often, and the "LE DEMOCRACY XDDD" stuff gets so annoying super fast, it feels like they're trying FAAAR too hard to just be Starship Troopers, but miss the mark because they made sure to give all the dialogue a pass so that they sound like idiotic American conservatives, just short of saying "HEIL EL PRESIDENTÉ"

Lastly, the progression system sucks, who the fuck thought that putting core gameplay progression behind some shitty slapped together battle pass system would be a good idea? Just because it's free doesn't mean it's good.

Core gameplay gets like, a 6/10.
-----------------BUGS (ENEMIES)------------------
Onto the biggest annoyance of the game, the bugs.
These will be the things that you have the biggest problem with, they will be the ones that just swarm you and jam you in corners, these will be the ones that constantly dip the areas in green fog, these will be the ones that barely take damage from small arms, but yet are too fast to get hit by airstrikes that you don't lead them into killing yourself in the process.

It's really easy to roll up the problems for them, they have no identity. I assume this is because they were designed first.

All the small-medium ones are generic zergs who don't do anything interesting other than that they sometimes lunge at you, and all the large ones are jack of all trades.
Focusing more on the large ones, you'll commonly encounter packs of the Chargers and Bile Spewers, and they're fast, they're insanely tanky, and can easily instakill you.
The chargers won't always instakill you, if they slam down on you which they seem to just do at random, you'll just die, but normally they just charge into you, which if there's more than 0 other enemies around you, you're likely to get killed while you're downed.
Bile spewers just deal insane damage if they hit you at all, if you get hit, you're going to either die or lost 80% of your health.

Again, these things are FAST, TANKY and SPAWN IN LARGE GROUPS.

Fucking atrocious design, at least dealing with bullet-sponges in other games you're not put at a risk of them suddenly catching up and instakilling you because you stepped in the slightly different piece of shrubbery and are now slowed by 70%.
5/10 and a walk of shame for whoever designed them.
------------------------ROBOTS-------------------------
The robots on the other hand, are where the gameplay shines, you're commonly going to have vastly better visibility, and outside of like 2 enemies, which are RARE you aren't going to struggle with taking them down with just what you have lying around, 1 of those 2 is easily defeated by just getting another ally to spin them around but can also be defeated by using anti-armor weapons, and the other is incredibly slow but also vulnerable to anti armor weapons.

Their enemy types in general are far more diverse, you'll have your regular zergs, your suicide bombers, your moderately healthed rushers, and enemies armored from the front except the very top of their head pushing in, there's a lot of variety and outside of the generic zergs/rushers you're going to approach dealing with them differently, and it can get hectic (but manageable!) very quickly.

Also, they have actual fucking bases! and use ranged attacks! So you're actually now taking advantage of the cover in the game.

There is some annoyances though, if you ever get lit on fire you're going to be dead in seconds if you don't stim or whatever, but it's not even close to as frequent as the Bile Spewers, and the flamethrower from the mech enemies doesn't do as much damage as being lit on fire from another source, though it still hurts.

And with that added visibility, and them being more glass cannons with added ranged, it allows you to play strategically, you can split up into groups because you're not going to be doomed if you're alone with the bugs, and you can take vantage positions to assist players all around, it's pretty fun to fight through them, but a bit on the easier side.
8/10, The gold standard for how this game should be designed, and this game will be far greater if they design enemies in the image of these ones.

In closing the game is a bit of a dud as a horde shooter, a surefire dud as a love letter to Starship Troopers and with dealing with the bugs, but a great experience with resource management and strategy mixed with action when dealing with the robots.

Reviewed on Mar 02, 2024


2 Comments


2 months ago

Nooooo!!! the bugs swarm me and my dive doesn't go 10 feet in the air!!

2 months ago

I would assume you would be able to jump over an enemy less than half of your height, yes, especially when the game seemingly constantly encourages running rather than standing your ground.

In reality it's just another thing the dive just sucks at, it's just a shitty error prone dodge roll.