Posted on: September 16, 2018
imranf1
Verified ownerGames: 73 Reviews: 22
Short spinoff cover shooter
Development controversy aside, how does this game ACTUALLY play? It's... decent. There's a workable story in there, but the campaign is just too short - within a handful of missions you're already storming an alien world. The designers should've fully embraced the whole "prequel" thing instead of apparently arguing and finally compromising with the feedback they got. Make a great game and people WILL buy it - who cares about the few diehard haters. Releasing a crap game only proves them right. Unfortunately the game isn't good enough. As mentioned above, it's short. There's barely 3 tiers of equipment, and the majority of upgrades are just backpacks which each give a different passive. There's no research - which MIGHT have worked if there was something else to do, like perhaps expand on the whole Red Threat thing that was simply relegated to lore. There are so few "side missions" I was initially afraid it wasn't possible to level up the rest of the squad, but turns out the level cap is so damn low it doesn't matter, not to mention the squad cap itself is literally just a dozen or so soldiers. You can't save, the game autosaves... which might've worked except for the fact you need to explore the base to unlock stuff. So how do you know this exploration was saved? I had to resort to fully finish exploring then launching the next mission and quitting there, to make sure I didn't lose any progress. No manual saving is idiotic design, not to mention if it bugs out you're completely hosed. There's decisions to make in the final few missions which determines the outcome - and since you can't save, you can't view the other endings unless you REPLAY THE WHOLE GAME despite the choices only relying on the last hour of play. WTF Design issues aside, it's actually decent in action. I found myself wanting more levels despite the shallowness. It feels like a tech demo instead of a full game. This game isn't a total loss, but don't buy it unless STEEPLY discounted.
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