This game looks and feels exactly like the orignal turn-based Fallout, but set in Russia... and I love it.
The idea of a perspective based puzzle solving game is unique and pretty cool. It was fun for a while to play around with the perspective. After the initial wow factor, most the puzzles were kinda boring to solve. Some were just downright annoying - especially the one with the misleading exit sign where you have to move in opposite direction of the exit sign. That puzzle mechanic had nothing to do with the prior established perspective mechanic. There was one puzzle that stood out that I found very enjoyable, and that was the one involving the house in the swimming pool. This particular puzzle made good use of the perspective mechanic. It was damn cool. Too bad there wasn't more of it. Of the puzzle games I've played, I rank this one in the bottom half, despite its cool idea. Portal 1 and 2 are my favorite for story + puzzle mechanic. I love Talos Principle for the story, and the puzzles are good too. Turing test has decent story and puzzles. Antichamber was just weird. Superliminal ranks somewhere between Turing Test and Antichamber. I guess I have a preference for consistent, logical (as in the game sticks to its internal logic), well-explained puzzle mechanics over weird and random anti-logic type puzzles. Superliminal seemed like it was going for a consistent and logical perspective-based puzzle mechanic, but ended up feeling weird and random like Antichamber. Come to think of it, Superliminal started to feel a bit like Stanley Parable towards the end, and Stanley Parable isn't even a puzzle game - it's a parady game where the mechanics deliberately don't make sense. Overall, good idea, good initial impression, a few good puzzles, but got weird and boring halfway through.
This is the most unique RPG game I've ever played, but maybe that's because I've never played card games before. This was very fun. Loved playing Gwent in Witcher 3. So glad they made a whole game based around this.
The combat and base-building feels like XCOM, which I love, and the campaign is RPG-styled, like Fallout 1 and 2 (the original turn-based Fallout). I think that's an excellent combination and feels very fresh to me even if the individual gameplay elements aren't innovative on their own. I like the story. I like the main goal we're given, and how every quest/sidequest contributes to the goal, so no quest ever feels like some pointless chore. The only thing holding this back from a 5/5 is one specific minor bug that I found very annoying. Occassionally, the hird member's abilities list gets all messed up with duplicate abilities, or some abilities not showing up. It forces me to manually rearrange all the abilities to the way I want every once in a while, which is annoying because we can only do this during combat, and you can't save during combat.
The good: -Graphics -Music -Art/visuals -The idea behind the gameplay mechanics, but not its implementation The bad: -Boring, cliche story, uninteresting characters -Repetitive, environment never changes - every level looks basically the same -Too difficult, zero margin for error, no ability to adjust difficulty -Frequent crashes that force you to redo extremely difficult levels over and over Angry Rant: Never before has a game made me feel visceral hatred towards it. When it's not crashing, it runs very smoothly and looks great. But then it crashes. I had over a dozen and a half crashes during my 14 hours of playthrough. My GPU is GTX970, the recommended card, and my cpu meets the minimum requirements. I dialled down the graphics settings. Still, it crashed multple times, forcing me to redo extremely difficult levels. It was enraging to the point of torture. The gameplay is so extremely difficult that it is punishing. Every level, every step you take, everything has to be perfectly timed and choreographed to make it through the level. One mistake - boom, you die. Instant death. No margin for error. You are forced to redo the same segment over and over for over a hundred times per level. How is this supposed to be fun? This is a game for masochists. Perhaps I wouldn't hate this game so much if I didn't force myself to finish it, but once I start something I have to finish it, so I endured the torture. Also, I already dumped money on it. To the level designers: what were you thinking when you designed that spinning laser thing? Heck, the entire game. What were you thinking?!! And to think there's a hardcore mode after the regular game. You gotta be kidding me. Allow us to adjust the difficulty, fix the random crashes, and my 1/5 star becomes a 4/5.
