I admire this game. It was designed by one guy, and a music artist and a handful of voice actors contributed talent to it. It tells the story of a supersoldier who finds himself in the middle of a national, wartime conspiracy.

The game itself is a first person shooter, but with a twist: firing your gun doesn't directly harm enemies. Instead, you have to knock them into walls, obstacles, or even yourself to damage them. It's also a Metroidvania, with a bunch of items to discover, an interconnected map, and puzzles to solve.

Its story is told through dialogue and finding tape recorders to listen to. The voice acting is actually pretty decent, though one could give the argument it's far from stellar. I thought it did the job well.

I played this game because there were no reviews on it on Steam. Wanting to provide an honest review is what kept me going on this game, and the story helped.

Because the game is...very undercooked.

The visuals, for starters...Low-poly is a good choice. Low barrier to entry, little optimization needed, and less worries for materials and shaders. But execution is crucial, and this misses the mark. The character models are basically all the same, with some minor variations in color, costume, and occasionally limbs. I think this could have been mitigated with textures, but I've done enough 3D work to know UV unwrapping is a chore.
The lighting is the worst part of this. Shadows are almost entirely black, and the world is rendered in greyscale except for interactables, enemies, your guns, and color coded doors. It looks fine indoors, but outside it's very hard to see, and sometimes the indoor lighting borks up and makes things impossible to see, because everything is in shadow.
I want to say he was going for a noir- or comic book-style, but that didn't translate well to user experience.

The combat mechanic, while definitely unique, and occasionally making some satisfying moments, was frustrating, especially as enemies got more health pips. Some rooms just weren't built with this mechanic in mind, with barely wide spaces between walls and zero obstacles besides the player. I found out only on the final boss that the auto turret could knock enemies backwards quite a ways away, but they only have five shots with (seemingly?) no way to upgrade it. This made combat a drag, and I just elected to skip past it when I could.

There were also a few foibles and stuff that just increased frustration or were just odd. The game would softlock for seemingly no reason if I threw out the minibot at certain points (it happened at least three times). It was hard to tell if activating things worked. Hacking points had no distinction between access levels. Entering a certain area would trigger the same dialogue sequence every single time. The rollermine-like enemies (which I actually kinda liked) would fly towards you if they were locked on and below you. I got stuck in the collision in the room with the stairs after the first save station. And at one point, there were three battery slots in the main building that would unload the batteries if you continued further on. The gamebreaking issues were easily solved with reloading a save, but that shouldn't be the solution.

I admire this game, but only to the point of appreciating the effort that went into it. It needed a little more time in the oven, probably some QA testing, a bit of polish on the visuals, and an adjustment to the combat system. Perhaps keep the bouncing mechanic, and reward the player with biobucks and maybe even vending cells if enough are chained together, but allow for more conventional gunplay as well. Also, the puzzle-shielded enemies are too much. Fairly sure an autoturret shield spawned the turret target in a wall somewhere at one point.

Best part of the game was the grappling hook, though. That worked pretty much flawlessly.