I will start with the good stuff before getting to the really messy things. First of all, the concept of the game is really good. The atmosphere of the run-down station city where people fight for survival is very well done. The main story is also good but at times I was getting lost in what am I doing. Thankfully the journal is actually helpful in guiding you forward. In the travel map there are random encounters that I found at least initially really nice. Later on not that much, too many too often. The combat mechanics is also very good, a nice mix of long range and close combat. Nicely done. The pinnacle of pleasure hits when you are allowed to pilot a suite of power armor. This is just so good that it is hard to describe. Daka daka daka :) You are not indestructible by any stretch of the imagination but it is still fun. Now the ugly parts. The game is in many aspects unfinished and in couple of places outright broken. Aside from truly horrible inventory management, imagine items disappearing from your backpack, like for instance a key quest item... . You have to load an early save and pray you still have the item. I have lost 14h of game play this way. Do you like your chest armor, or a shotgun? Yes, they can disappear too. When you load earlier save because you stuff disappeared, some of your side quests get locked out for ever, or your companions disappear as well, for ever and you cannot recover these by earlier saves. In some locations the automatic reorganize inventory button triggers all items to pile up in one spot... .Achievements are broken too, all the way. Now, let's look at walking. You have to walk a lot because the exit points are far and fast travel does not exist. Moreover, I have fallen though texture gaps into the nothingness... . If you die in the power armor you get loaded back in the same location but in empty map... . At the very end it took me ages to get through the door to the one of the endings... . Seriously... it is g a r b a g e. On top of that, some animation sequences in random encounters trigger immediately upon loading the map so if you read in the encounter description "it is too quiet" and you see armed guys that supposed to ambush you running to the middle of the map and just stand there I thought ehhh and shot all from the distance... many times over. Finally some texts are in ru. I understand this thing but I do not want to see it mixed with civilized languages. So here you have, the game has some nice elements but is barely playable.
The game looks really well given its already advanced age. Back then this was a top notch graphics. The graphical design of worlds and the ambient atmosphere associated with them is very well done. So this was about all what was good. Sorry. The story is unfortunately very bland, at best. The protagonist is fighting number of enemies though long linear sections with some arenas in between. Very uninspiring. I think the only place here the boredom somewhat receded was the desert planet where some timing puzzles have been added. Otherwise, the enemies feel spongy, at times making battles just plainly boring. I found the sky people particularly annoying. You can hack and slash thing or cast spells. All feels underwhelming. The final battle is again, boring. Hectic and not very rewarding. All in all, it is an old good looking game with a very simplistic story and rather boring mechanics.
I’m more of a casual platformer player so take this review form such perspective. First of all, the game is wrapped around a very simplistic story. Everything is then sprinkled with somewhat comical, may be sarcastic dialogs but at least for me these were bland and totally not funny restroom wall humour type. I think I’m getting old though. Moving on, you run around though several areas with a good variety of enemies and visually pleasant level design. There are shops, side quests, possibility to get maps of the locations and quick travel between main areas. Each area may have a secret or two locations that give extra goodies. Nothing revolutionary but still nice to have. Generally, very light entertainment. Now to the game mechanics. I was playing with a PS4 controller and the layout was fairly intuitive. Fights were short and to be hones the enemies were actually not hard with two exceptions, more annoying than difficult exceptions. Bosses were also not exceedingly hard but fights were not really engaging. Small space and very limited number of attacks. On top of that I was missing some key combination to have a quick access the backpack during battles. Usually, I had to run a bit away and frantically use buffs and such. Mind the game was not paused in this time. Platforming was ok but at times the placement of platforms or spring platforms was lets call it odd… . Because of that in the early game I have got trapped in deeper holes and could not get out in the “obvious way”. Now a couple of really big minuses: I absolutely hated bombs placement, basically guarantee to get hurt at some point. Shops where not refilling the stock and farming for cash was at some point getting boring. Secret places do not update on the map so if you go for the achievement, you must start making notes the old way. Some breakable floors were very difficult to notice thus robing you from some of the best stuff in the game. All in all still a very decent entertainment.
The game is rather a simple progression driven rogue RTS. The party is put on the train that travels always forward along fixed branching paths between locations where some event or combat is happening. Nothing special. Maps are simple and repetitive. The combat is a primitive RTS and very repetitive. You can sneak but you cannot really tell if the enemy sees you aside from the music change… . You cannot even say that a cover is a cover. Remember the mechanics from Commando? That was good, this here sucks. Regardless, it is all pointless if the enemy is usually attacking you from the edge or beyond the screen so yeah, dumb all the way. At some point our party gets killed and you start over again. Do the grind again, get some resources, do mini upgrades, die again, upgrades and so on. I think you get my drift here. The game is a repetitive grinder that gets boring rather quickly. There are some aspects of building on the train that get transferred between the runs. I think it supposed to be challenging and entertaining but for me was just overly annoying and truthfully just amplifying the grind, that I sincerely hate. So yeah a very poor game, unfortunately.
The game is incredibly short as other commentators wrote. The same is for very very very valid criticism of the movement control. It is just terrible, slow and clunky. Try to run and you get into another world of pain: The movement direction depends on the camera view and this is just a basic recipe for frustration when you change locations. On top of that comes the graphics that is nice but my gaming PC was coming close to overheating even if the visuals were not all that demanding. The code optimisation is (you guessed) just bad. In summary, I the code optimisation was trying to set my PC on fire, I was getting frustrated because of the clunky controls and at the end when the story was actually taking off the game ended… . If this is not enough to discourage to get this title then you can equally well sign into a club for adults that uses leather and chains to provide some quality spanking. You may enjoy that more than this game.
The game is advertised with absolutely stunning graphics and indeed this is the case. The atmosphere of after the world ending event is achieved with a perfection. The game ambiente was also nicely supported by voice and text logs with the lore. BUT, in game you cannot really zoom on anything. What? You say that the developer put so much effort in the ambiente and you can barley appreciate it? This is odd but hold on to your britches because the weirdo train is just leaving the station. Imagine a PC game that uses controls ripped out of a console game. Perhaps for some it is not an issue but for me it was a punishment. Then we come to the story... .ah the story. Really poor story that is. For me not really engaging. So you basically are led on a rope like 90% of the time. Great, linear game ;). You start fighting frogs then bandits then bad family robots, more robots and the game finishes with a very lengthy linear chain of fights. Very much uninspired idea. At the end there is admittedly a twist where the main protagonist turns to be a bit of a whacko that you have to get in line again but that is it. I think the worst part for me was rather unhandy dropping the "bad family" as the main villain. Lastly there were surprisingly many bugs and crashes and I do not run a weak system. The most funny case was where my robo friend after a run&gun order ran though the walls, left the battle zone and continued to the far edge of the map... where, I guess, he opened a can of some nice mineral oil and enjoyed the battle from the distance.. ;) Not all was bad though. The combat was actually ok, sometimes even fun. Like X-com but with whacky controls. The selection of skills is decent and the choice of characters is ok. I also enjoyed the modding of weapons. All in all this was a good part. The miasma powers were ok but limited by energy so I relied on the conventional piew piew. Do I recommend the game? If it sells for 5€ or less, it is ok. For more, no not really.
