Boring. Samey. Same three, four enemies repeated over and over again. Boring. Pick up a card, spawn some enemies. Boring. Levels look and feel awesome, it's great to see the Build engine pushed to the max. Shame all you see in those levels are the same combat encounters, with the same enemies. Same shootout scenarios, ad nauseam. Punch some garbage bags and thrash cans after you've cleared the bad guys, riveting. Did I mention how boring and tedious it all is? Guns are hardly rewarding. They pack some 'oomph', but they just fail to deliver the same kick in the nuts guns in Blood or Shadow Warrior did. They're just . . . functional. Boring. Secret-hunting is r[edacted]. Purposefully designed to cater to the most mentally-disturbed obsessives out there, people who are willing to comb the same combat arenas for hours, humping, pressing, jumping on, and shooting every stray gray pixel. More power to those people -- personally, never felt compelled to seek out any secrets, apart from the few I stumbled upon on accident. Because the game is fvkking boring. Ain't even gonna critique the corniness of the god-awful one-liners and what little story there is, since the game purposefully hides behind the excuse of being eye-rollingly, tongue-in-cheek retro-throwback ironic. In fact, the whole thing feels like a tremendous exercise in corporate cynicism, banking on people's nostalgia and the retro shooter revival trend that's been going on for years now. Yes, we all know "corporations bad", they were never good, and we shouldn't expect much of them. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Ion Tedium fails miserably to deliver the zany, designer-centric, balls-to-the-walls jank of those shooters from a long-bygone age. It's by the numbers, tired, tedious. Cynical. And boring. Mostly boring.
Not awful; instead, it commits the ultimate sin of being a technically functional yet thoroughly dull experience. The art style is stellar, and the setting seems captivating – but that's it. The potential for a great story is hampered by horrible writing. Meeting NPCs aboard the derelicts is an utterly dry affair: the dialogues are borderline MMO-ish. Datapads found in the wild spout exposition in horrific walls of awkwardly-worded text. There's no voice acting, flair, or emotion behind any of the writing. Then there's the main gameplay loop. There are loads of mechanics on display here, none properly introduced and explained – instead, we are referred to a horribly unengaging codex. Behind the caked layers of mechanics and walls of text, the main gameplay loop boils down to staring at a blocky map, dark, minimalistic and depressing. You move your team (that is: a dot) from block to block, expending energy in the process. Only when you encounter an enemy or a place to search, does the game switch to a full view of the place you're in. Now, those sequences look phenomenal (and are the elements of the game showcased by the devs, go figure), but why the hell do we spend 90% of the exploration in the map mode?! This removes any immersion, any option for bonding with your characters. In battle you play your cards, cards, reduce the enemy's shields, then the HP, then win. The fights are strangely forgiving; your mercs can be revived at the station if they fall in battle, removing any tension that might have been left. There is no sense of desperation or urgency, no constant risk/reward management that made Darkest Dungeon such a phenomenon. After some exploring, you'll run out of energy. Return to the station. Continue to explore the derelict (the map layouts are fixed) until done. Rinse, repeat. To call the game "barebones" would be an understatement. The amount of potential squandered is agonizing. The vision was there, but the raw dev skills just weren't.
