I'm just so glad that a studio out there took such clear inspiration from the Half-Life franchise, and yet it's almost like a curse upon this game. I just couldn't stop making comparisons in my head and wishing I was playing Half-Life 2 again instead.
Not the be too harsh with this either, it's actually quite impressive what such a small team was able to achieve, especially as a first project. There's a lot to appreciate here. Some environments and set pieces are simply gorgeous, the gunplay is relatively fun and there's some great artistic/dreamy sequences sprinkled throughout the game.
On the other hand, the pacing is way off. You unlock almost all of your weapons in a 20 minutes timeframe, making you go from "guy with an axe" to "fully geared up army man". Since the game lets you know how many empty weapon slots you have left, it's clear that there's not much waiting for you in term of progression pass the 1 hour mark.
The fight encounters are also weirdly balanced. Sometimes you'll be fighting 2-3 enemies at once, and sometimes the game will throw 25 enemies at you, seemingly out of nowhere. There should be nothing wrong with this, but it's just not satisfying. You don't have a gravity gun or any other creative tool/skill to make each encounter unique. So you'll just spam your guns and alternate between them when they are out of ammo. There's some explosive barrels here and there so the devs clearly thought of some other ways to approach the fight, but it's just not enough.
The story, I'm sorry to say, is not really griping and the ending will leave you with more question than answers. Things also seemed to have been rushed in the last 20 minutes unfortunately.
The music is passable, even pretty at times on its own, but I felt like it rarely meshed well with the game itself. It's a weird feeling, like I just re-listened to some of the songs on Spotify and liked a lot of them, but never felt like they enhanced the experience while I was playing.
There's other thing floating in my mind but I'll stop there. Still glad I tried it, I'm wishing for more stuff with similar inspirations and references in the future. Also saw that the devs of this game are teasing something new on Twitter so I'll surely be on the lookout for whatever project they'll release in the future.
Not the be too harsh with this either, it's actually quite impressive what such a small team was able to achieve, especially as a first project. There's a lot to appreciate here. Some environments and set pieces are simply gorgeous, the gunplay is relatively fun and there's some great artistic/dreamy sequences sprinkled throughout the game.
On the other hand, the pacing is way off. You unlock almost all of your weapons in a 20 minutes timeframe, making you go from "guy with an axe" to "fully geared up army man". Since the game lets you know how many empty weapon slots you have left, it's clear that there's not much waiting for you in term of progression pass the 1 hour mark.
The fight encounters are also weirdly balanced. Sometimes you'll be fighting 2-3 enemies at once, and sometimes the game will throw 25 enemies at you, seemingly out of nowhere. There should be nothing wrong with this, but it's just not satisfying. You don't have a gravity gun or any other creative tool/skill to make each encounter unique. So you'll just spam your guns and alternate between them when they are out of ammo. There's some explosive barrels here and there so the devs clearly thought of some other ways to approach the fight, but it's just not enough.
The story, I'm sorry to say, is not really griping and the ending will leave you with more question than answers. Things also seemed to have been rushed in the last 20 minutes unfortunately.
The music is passable, even pretty at times on its own, but I felt like it rarely meshed well with the game itself. It's a weird feeling, like I just re-listened to some of the songs on Spotify and liked a lot of them, but never felt like they enhanced the experience while I was playing.
There's other thing floating in my mind but I'll stop there. Still glad I tried it, I'm wishing for more stuff with similar inspirations and references in the future. Also saw that the devs of this game are teasing something new on Twitter so I'll surely be on the lookout for whatever project they'll release in the future.