Diluvion: Resubmerged

Launch day: A game I mildly enjoyed. After the Resubmerged update: Wow! What a turn around. The devs had been working hard to retweak the game's formerly notoriously bad controls, but with the latest 1.2 update, Diluvion feels like a brand new boat. New graphics. Changes to quests. Changes to the map. Changes to the save feature. Changes to almost everything. Even many of the old bugs are gone. It's not quite a 5 star game. There are still some minor nuisances. But Diluvion is now worth a dive.

While the idea of this game is neat and I like the execution, I did not see much of the game due to two gamebreaking bugs, which are known but not addressed by the developers:+# 1. If you start selling loot it can happen that said loot will stay in your inventory, so you sell it indefinitely. You will have to limit yourself. 2. But then on loading a save game you will realise that ALL of your inventory is gone, including the money. there are also a lot of minor bugs. but these two make the game unplayable. Stay very far away of it, which is a pity, because otherwise this would have been a nice game.

I like underwater games so I went into this one blind just for the setting. When I started it the first time I thought just to give it a little try and I accidentally played for 6 hours straight. The game itself looks nice enough for a unity engine game and at least for me plays smoothly. The team has done some great stuff with the atmosphere with just lights and music, especially when you get to dive into the deeper depths. Navigating with the map using landmarks and compass is a must in this game. My personal biggest problem was getting to grips with the controls. Camera is from 3rd person and it is really close to your ship. This will cause some headaches in close quarters as the camera can clip into walls and other graphics. Also sometimes my ship just became unresponsive to my keyboard inputs, but that lasted only a brief moment. The difficulty can be a bit too much for some players from the start. You get thrown into enemies very early on and torpedo hits wreck you health quickly. Death is not really that much of an issue as you can simply respawn at last checkpoint, but collecting money in the early game can feel like a pain if you keep dying all the time. One real issue with the game is that after you respawn, all the quest markers and crew discussions seem to reset and just hit the screen all at same time. Going throught those several times is irritating, but not game breaking.

God-awful controls, god-awful user interface, horrible tutorial, just a terrible experience, if you get motion sickness from games then avoid this one. This game is such a amateur hour experience they can't even get save game names to work right, if you save your game for the first time you simply input a name and its fine, but for every time you save thereafter the game adds "copy" to the end of the name of your save game, so even after only saving for like six times you can no longer distinguish your saved games by name because they all say "copy copy copy copy copy copy", absolutely pathetic that they can't solve something this simple.

I own the game on Steam, which is undergoing some major changes as regards UI and balance. Major gripe is that screenshots and game have nothing in common. Your sub is in the middle of the screen blocking the view on anything else. You may have these views by moving the camera and taking a screenshot, you will never have this kind of nice views, which amounts to false advertising. This alone deserves a negative review. Many game mechanics are half done. Commands are awkward, the default ones are unusable, foreign keyboards are not recognised, sub accelerates strangely, docking makes you sick : the grapple explodes, then your sub is jerked towards the dock sidewise. Combat means clikcing as fast as you can to sink the enemy before they sink you. Combat does not stop while you try to manage your crew. The crew stacks in the rooms, you can't move one crew member at a time. The sub moves while you are trying to manage your crew, while you already can select the crew member you need to move. Game is composed of 3D underwater canyons and 2D click adventures. Combat inside bases amounts to clicking on one icon or another. Piloting your submarine offers some eye candy, if you can see it through your submarine, that is.