The Signal From Tölva

It's a fresh indie project. Lots of creative Sci-Fi gameworld and game design elements! Once the combat clicks with you it turns addictive, constantly spicing up the world exploration. Pros: +! story (refer to the Lorebook!) +! art style + art style twists: the game is often erie, completely diverging from initial impressions one might get from screenshots +! AI driven robot faction interactions ; opportunity to leverage the fact during the actual gameplay + AI uses tactics and have its own goals - both, the enemy factions and the allied faction ; prepare for teritorial wars! + unlike with the weapons, there's a great deal of variety in robot design; robot chassis equipment vary even within a single faction +! the scope and functioning of the player's equipment translates into solid, interesting mechanics; the game encourages agressive approach which nicely contrasts with the dominant exploratory nature of the game + good weapon hit effects, with some great ones! + free "DLC" campaign + (audio) soundtrack (available on bandcamp, for both campaigns) - erie, climatic, greatly complementing the game + (audio) great sound design, especially combat sounds, distant combat, weapons etc. + no forced bullshit "world interactions" ("digging", "constructing") or "crafting" Cons: - low replayability value (apart from the additional, free campaign) - (audio) no heaphone audio mixing which makes the audio panning subpar (use Dolby Headphone if your soundcard features it) - (audio) some ear-hurting sound effects/sound balance (e.g. the scanner) - I personally dislike mazes (altough I must admit TSFT takes a creative approach with the element) Notes: A. I refuse to include "lots of walking" in the cons because the "teleportation" mechanism in the game balances it out completely and is available from the first minutes of the game. B. I highly recommend getting the weapons stats spreadsheet from gog.com forums. C. I higly recommend remapping the crounch and run controls to toggle

There is a nice game hidden somewhere in here, and it touches some write points, but it gets repetitive and empty after a while. Gameplay is nice and fluid but the guns lack a bit of oomph, and the open world and enemies get are not varied enough. Still it was an enjoyable low budget experience.

The game is a mixture of exploring the planet to collect build material or story clues and fighting robots from other fractions. Capturing outposts allows fast travel and upgrading guns and shields. Nothing to complain here as the the game mechanics work well and I liked the graphic style a lot. There are some quirks though. Like enemy robots tend to spawn behind you while you try to sneak on a base. The few bigger enemies (bosses?) are slow and stupid so they can be always killed easily from a distance. Also while there are dozens of weapons you could build, there are actually only a few different models and there's not enough crafting material in the game to build even half of the guns (unless you'd invest hundreds of hours to kill thousands of enemy robots). There are some indoor levels which I found quite annoying as they are somewhat ugly and maze-like and most of them actually have an "impossible" layout where you exit one door and arrive in the same room again. Unfortunately, while the story sounds interesting at first, the game ends quite abruptly with two possible end sequences which are basically the same and leave you with no answers. So while I enjoyed the game despite of its limited size and some minor issues, I felt like the developers owed me a proper ending.

Ubuntu Mate 16.04.3 LTS - Nvidia 960 GTX with driver 387.34 - 16 GB RAM - 1 TB SSD - The game runs flawlessly on max settings for me. It has an excellent atmosphere. The lore behind the game is fascinating and will have you engaged in What If? and What Happened? here scenarios around the game's world. If you are looking for a single player experience with a touch of adventure and exploration this game hits those notes on the nose. If you are looking for a run and gun game, this may not be the title for you.

I was attracted by the sci-fi settings and the exploration side of the game, and at first the FPS side was frustrating, I don't play FPS often, but once I got the grasp of the game combat, it became almost too easy. The whole experience is well balanced, the game is atmospheric, graphics are excellently cartoony, progress is fast enough even if you'll never need all the weapons made available through exploration. Walking is tiresome at the beginning though it becomes faster once your armour improves. Main game is around ten hours, the Polar Missions adds 3 hours, which is fair enough. It was worth it.