Played in early access between 07.13.2023 and 07.15.2023
I picked this up because after playing the System Shock remake I've been on an immersive sim kick. The game was designed to be an intentionally clunky old school immersive sim, right down to needing to reload your weapon manually when you are out of ammo, along with having limited slots in your quick access bar, and limited inventory so be prepared to stockpile your loot somewhere near a trader. You're only allowed two weapon slots; the first can fit all weapons, the second allows only the knife, pistol, and weapons of similar sizes. You also have three accessory slots for healing items along with Molotovs and drinks that give you specific bonuses.
The aggro system is odd. Enemies are able to hear your footsteps and see you if you are in their line of sight. They cannot however hear your gunshots. Once you aggro one enemy, every single one within several meters of it will be aggroed as well, so you will be ambushed the moment you are spotted. The enemies will chase you until they can no longer see or hear you, and they are able to follow you eons away from their placements. The gunners will always lead their shots, so you have to be mindful to change direction after you hear them fire or you will run into the bullet's path.
The basic ammo have almost no punch aside from getting headshots. The enemies in the second map are spongy as all hell, able to soak up to about four bullets from the upgraded revolver I got from the first map, and about three non-headshots from the double barrel shotgun. Headshots are pretty much mandatory to kill. I don't know if the guns' ironsights don't line up to the center of the screen or I'm just bad at aiming, but I've had an easier time getting headshots from the crossbow than any other weapon since the aiming reticle doesn't disappear when I ADS. I've had better luck with the knife in the first map which has a surprisingly long reach and has even the headshot function if you knife the opposition in the head.
Keep in mind you'll be facing more than three enemies at a time if you aggro any one of them in the crowd so it's absolutely not advisable to start a firefight, which is odd since the steam page advertised that it is an option for progression. The game throws a lot of different enemies at you when you aggro them, and you are left to basically shimmy through a maze of lead on bullet fire while trying to headshot the running melee rushers. With the limited HP you have, you are brought down in about a total of four hits from enemy fire unless you upgrade your HP, then it's maybe five.
Death in the game is incredibly punishing. When you die, you will suffer a penalty towards one of your attributes unless you have a trinket that protects you. Die three times and the penalty becomes a curse that penalizes you further. You could have less max HP or make more noise when you sneak, or various other things. You are able to heal the curses through drinking a specific potion, or by doing a task that the totem in the respawn point gives you if your penalty becomes a curse after three deaths.
I would have been fine with how the curses worked, but the game punishes you further with how far some of the respawn points are. In the second map, there are very strong and spongy enemies that ambush you if you aren't stealthy, and I was only able to find one respawn point, which is the one you start at when starting the map. So not only will you suffer curses, but you will have to traverse back all the way from your respawn point to where you wanted to go with all of the enemies you've killed along the way respawned. You are put at a further disadvantage each time because you are spending money to keep yourself stocked with ammo along with the trinket to protect you from the curses. Eventually you may run out of those resources effectively making the game needlessly more difficult and tedious to get through, forcing you to grind to kill the respawned enemies to gather up the money needed to remove the curses and keep you healthy.
Mechanically the immersive sim portions work pretty well and the game has an interesting world to explore, especially the second map. The issue is that the game is brutal and expects you to take a lot of punishment. However instead of designing it in a way where you learn from your mistakes, it punishes you further with a very questionable enemy design where you are effectively playing a lead on bullet hell with far away spawn points. It tested my patience so much that I essentially save scummed to circumvent its mechanics rather than to use them as intended, because after awhile, trying to get through an area's long slouches of walking from point A to B without dying to bulletfire had stopped being fun.
Another point I should make is that the game has no real way to save either. You're only given two options to save your progress; either at a respawn point or you can quit the game through the pause menu and it will save at the exact location you're standing at. Your progress will be overwritten the moment you respawn, so the way to circumvent its long and tedious grinding is to force quit the game between the time you die and the moment you respawn. That way you are able to resume the game without losing progress if you've saved through quitting the game through the pause menu.
With the way the save system is designed, it's very likely that the devs do not want you to create your own checkpoints and quicksaves, hence why I'm a lot harsher with my criticism of the game. However the choice is your's. Either you waste time to manually save the game then resume, then alt+f4 and resume the game quickly after dying, or waste likely more time to grind to get back what you've lost and find your way back to where you've died.
As this game is still in early access, I'm hoping the devs will iron out and balance some of the shortcomings to make this game worthwhile to return to when chapter 3 rolls around in December.
I picked this up because after playing the System Shock remake I've been on an immersive sim kick. The game was designed to be an intentionally clunky old school immersive sim, right down to needing to reload your weapon manually when you are out of ammo, along with having limited slots in your quick access bar, and limited inventory so be prepared to stockpile your loot somewhere near a trader. You're only allowed two weapon slots; the first can fit all weapons, the second allows only the knife, pistol, and weapons of similar sizes. You also have three accessory slots for healing items along with Molotovs and drinks that give you specific bonuses.
The aggro system is odd. Enemies are able to hear your footsteps and see you if you are in their line of sight. They cannot however hear your gunshots. Once you aggro one enemy, every single one within several meters of it will be aggroed as well, so you will be ambushed the moment you are spotted. The enemies will chase you until they can no longer see or hear you, and they are able to follow you eons away from their placements. The gunners will always lead their shots, so you have to be mindful to change direction after you hear them fire or you will run into the bullet's path.
The basic ammo have almost no punch aside from getting headshots. The enemies in the second map are spongy as all hell, able to soak up to about four bullets from the upgraded revolver I got from the first map, and about three non-headshots from the double barrel shotgun. Headshots are pretty much mandatory to kill. I don't know if the guns' ironsights don't line up to the center of the screen or I'm just bad at aiming, but I've had an easier time getting headshots from the crossbow than any other weapon since the aiming reticle doesn't disappear when I ADS. I've had better luck with the knife in the first map which has a surprisingly long reach and has even the headshot function if you knife the opposition in the head.
Keep in mind you'll be facing more than three enemies at a time if you aggro any one of them in the crowd so it's absolutely not advisable to start a firefight, which is odd since the steam page advertised that it is an option for progression. The game throws a lot of different enemies at you when you aggro them, and you are left to basically shimmy through a maze of lead on bullet fire while trying to headshot the running melee rushers. With the limited HP you have, you are brought down in about a total of four hits from enemy fire unless you upgrade your HP, then it's maybe five.
Death in the game is incredibly punishing. When you die, you will suffer a penalty towards one of your attributes unless you have a trinket that protects you. Die three times and the penalty becomes a curse that penalizes you further. You could have less max HP or make more noise when you sneak, or various other things. You are able to heal the curses through drinking a specific potion, or by doing a task that the totem in the respawn point gives you if your penalty becomes a curse after three deaths.
I would have been fine with how the curses worked, but the game punishes you further with how far some of the respawn points are. In the second map, there are very strong and spongy enemies that ambush you if you aren't stealthy, and I was only able to find one respawn point, which is the one you start at when starting the map. So not only will you suffer curses, but you will have to traverse back all the way from your respawn point to where you wanted to go with all of the enemies you've killed along the way respawned. You are put at a further disadvantage each time because you are spending money to keep yourself stocked with ammo along with the trinket to protect you from the curses. Eventually you may run out of those resources effectively making the game needlessly more difficult and tedious to get through, forcing you to grind to kill the respawned enemies to gather up the money needed to remove the curses and keep you healthy.
Mechanically the immersive sim portions work pretty well and the game has an interesting world to explore, especially the second map. The issue is that the game is brutal and expects you to take a lot of punishment. However instead of designing it in a way where you learn from your mistakes, it punishes you further with a very questionable enemy design where you are effectively playing a lead on bullet hell with far away spawn points. It tested my patience so much that I essentially save scummed to circumvent its mechanics rather than to use them as intended, because after awhile, trying to get through an area's long slouches of walking from point A to B without dying to bulletfire had stopped being fun.
Another point I should make is that the game has no real way to save either. You're only given two options to save your progress; either at a respawn point or you can quit the game through the pause menu and it will save at the exact location you're standing at. Your progress will be overwritten the moment you respawn, so the way to circumvent its long and tedious grinding is to force quit the game between the time you die and the moment you respawn. That way you are able to resume the game without losing progress if you've saved through quitting the game through the pause menu.
With the way the save system is designed, it's very likely that the devs do not want you to create your own checkpoints and quicksaves, hence why I'm a lot harsher with my criticism of the game. However the choice is your's. Either you waste time to manually save the game then resume, then alt+f4 and resume the game quickly after dying, or waste likely more time to grind to get back what you've lost and find your way back to where you've died.
As this game is still in early access, I'm hoping the devs will iron out and balance some of the shortcomings to make this game worthwhile to return to when chapter 3 rolls around in December.