The Signal From Tölva

Default controller bindings leave out good chunk of controls (including necessary controls such as crouch) and, though the game gives the option to rebind, it's bugged. Couldn't find solution after quick Google + search of GOG and Steam forums. I did find a forum thread on the developer's website that acknowledges they're aware of the issue (https://forum.big-robot.com/t/inverting-y-axis-with-controller/201). Their acknowledgemnt was eight months ago. Because I have no life, I dove into the game files myself. Output logs show a Unity game engine error that only occurs when I press a button (ANY button) in the controller rebind screen. After searching all the game files, I couldn't find an .ini that would let me edit controls. In addition, my file dive revealed a directory named Analytics. Within the folder is a config file. The config file is one line of code: {"prefs":{},"analytics":{"enabled":true},"connect":{"limit_user_tracking":false,"player_opted_out":false,"enabled":true},"performance":{"enabled":true}} Presumably, you can disable analytics by setting True to False, though I don't have any way to test that. There's a folder in the Analytics directory labeled "ArchivedEvents" with several files, but the contents can't be read by a text editor. I've spent an hour trying to get this game working, and I'm done. Game looks decent if you can use a keyboard, but it's unplayable on controllers due to technical problems on the game's end despite the store page promising controller support. It also tracks the playerbase to an unknown extent without permission or reasonable disclosure. This might be someone else's dream game. For me, it's a broken product.

I got this on the strength of Sir, You Are Being Hunted and a handful of reviews that painted a picture of it being an atmospheric game about picking through the wreckage of a ruined world trying to unpack its mysteries. And there sort of is that, but buried under a game that's about 95% the same ten minutes of bad early-2000s shooter repeated indefinitely. Every hundred feet there's another fortress of bad robots, take your pick of the four guns in the game (each repeated a dozen times with marginally higher stats, so you can feel like you're progressing somehow) and shoot the four bad robots hanging out around the fort, who will oblige by standing right in the open a few yards away shooting back. Victory claimed, push a button to scan the spinny geometry thingy for that sector and get your snippet of vaguely ominous text, and then repeat in the next zone. For hours. The rare hints at something more interesting, where you find yourself in a maze that's quietly teleporting you around in circles or encountering something much nastier than the generic bad robots in the radioactive wreckage of an ancient spaceship, only last long enough to frustrate you when scant seconds later you're dumped back zapping them four bad robots for another hour or three. There's the core of a really fascinating game in there, but Big Robot padded the margins and played with the font size and threw in every adjective in the thesaurus to stretch it out to $20 of "fun", and in the process ruined the good thing they had.

Normally I don't ussually play fps games because they all feel the same to me. The Signal from Tolva seemed to have something special about it so I decided to give it a shot, and it turns out I was right. It's not your traditional crazy-action-fps game as a lot of people might have initially expected, but a rather more serene, exploratory and aesthetic experience. From the first moment it becomes clear that the game was made by artists. Personally, I found the game's alien sci-fi setting and presentation to be perfect for me. It really felt like I was there, exploring an alien world where something weird is going on, not having a clue and having to figure out everything myself, all in the middle of a conflict between local robot factions. The exploration of Tolva will require a lot of walking around, collecting materials and scanning for artifacts. For this reason, I can see why some people would consider it to be a walking simulator, especially the ones who thought they were in for a more action-heavy experience. But this wasn't an issue for me at all. Tolva is anything but dull. It was a pleasure walking around, searching for clues and enjoying the scenery. The combat itself is quite satisfying. Basically whatever you would expect from a standard fps, but as I said, it's the setting that really makes it stand out. It felt a bit like Star Wars droids fighting each other. Interestingly, weapon upgrages come as a reward for exploration, creating an interplay between combat and exploration, which I found to be quite original. The game also comes with a free DLC called "The Polar Regions", which is besically more of the same thing, if you enjoyed the main campaign. PS: As of 2021, any issues/bugs seem to be resolved, at least it plays fine for me. My only "complain" is that it runs on 45ish FPS on my GTX 1650 SUPER (on the highest settings). From a game like this, I would expect better performance for my hardware, which means perhaps poor optimisation issues.

What a boring game... Grpahics are very nicely done but then the gameplay hit you immediately in the face. The robot is slow, even when running and your faction is rarely helping much against the other two, making the game very unfair from time to time. The story unfold before your eyes and this is an interesting feature but it kills teh appealing as we do not really know what we do there but to investigate on this signal and for that we have to wander around A LOT! Walking from a point to the next one in a game suboptimized (prepare to hit several slowdowns and a map that strangely only displays at 1920x1080 for me so I can't speedup the game). If you are interested in a contemplative FPS (the environnement's very nice) wait for a promotionnal sale.

You're a robot. Wander, shoot stuff, take over a base, shoot more stuff, take over another base, then do it all over again. The sandbox is large for an indie game and flows well; nothing feels copy-pasted. Story-telling is done entirely through collectible text logs, so there's not much to it. There are two different endings, and you'll sort of know what is happening, though depending on if you actually read all the text logs, you might not know why. Enemy AI is decent; game can be hard if you want it to be. An agreeable way to spend 10 hours if you like exploring open worlds and want to support an indie dev. 7/10 The Linux port (OpenGL) suffers from frame-drops when rendering long draw-distances, but otherwise functions well.