They actually make use of the 3D enviroment compared to episode 1!. In the first level, then they forget about it rather fast, and go back to the same flat same level copy&paste enviroments. But they seem to have fallen in love with fixed camera sections, which is the only reason a certain bossfight poses any kind of threat. Except of falling asleep doing the exact same thing trice. Overall an improvement over episode 1, with a way higher bodycount, getting closer to true AB game, but the same "quest" design that starts to get grating.
(I only played and completed the story mode on veteran) Well..if you come from the Amiga games expecting another entry in the franchise...you will be disappointed. This is neither classic Alien Breed nor 3D, but some weird isometric mongrel where you are still only running about on one height level. Considering the classic AB games 3d added NOTHING, compared the FPSs it's a downgrade. This part is also rather a survival horror game than a shooter, with a low enemy count and being starved of ammonition still. "Welcome to Intex 4000" ...no. It's just "Intex" now. All weapons have the same 3 upgrade options, with "more damage" being the only one you actually want, all 3 part share the same basic loadout (peashooter+machinegun start, find shotgun+flamethrower) and two episode exclusive weapons with variing levels of usefulless. All levels boil down to go to A to open B oh no A malfunctioned go to C to reactivate A then back to B". It looks like one of those early 2010 Unity browsergames
Short, linear to a fault , red. The combat tries to be sort of a mix between Hotline Miami and something like DMC or Bayonetta, but the former doesn't really work with with enemies that need several hits to die and actively teleport around, and it lacks the combos or style of the latter. Only get it on sale, or rather: Play Hotline Miami. Or Ghostrunner.
Zigurrath/Tower of Guns like game with absolutely garbage gunplay about 10 enemies and 5 different rooms, a Rogue of legacy like upgrade bonsai, the redneck in Egypt scenario that adds nothing to the game and reminds you that you could play Serious Sam: First Encounter again instead, run-ending negative effects of random pickups, performance issues, did I mention how fucking awful every single weapon feels? And then they reload for hours and ammo pickups are generic and only count for your currently active weapon. I tried to like it...but it's only redeeming factor was that it didn't crash on me.
It's a competent x in a row game, somewhat set in the BOI universe. The latter being pretty much the only reason people look at this game, and it's the ONLY reason to do so. The loading times are awful, the game has no controller support for some reason, there is no quit and continue, there are bugs softlocking your game in between levels, you can run into rooms with enemy set up in a way that you can't avoid taking damage no matter your board, ... Everything about this game just feels like it has been abandoned halfway through development. The foundation and the art is there (the artstyle and the music are good)....but noone seems to ever have playtested the whole thing, it goes out of it's way to get on your nerves. ..and it doesn't look like there will be any improvement, the last patch on steam is from mid march last year. Avoid.
At the current time Im closing in on 100h "vanilla" and Afterlife combined, and well, it's a bit complicated. The game is a metroidevania soulslike, think Salt&Sanctuary, but with a completely different, more vibrant and colorful, atmosphere. The initial release was decent, but lacking in many aspects. Afterlife feels more like a finished game, but knowing the initial release, some of the design decisions feel weird. It's like they removed difficulty from your standard playthrough and put everything in the optional content, every single halfway challenging platforming passage has been removed, but most of the heroic boss challenges are way way, .....way harder. Most areas became smaller, but there are more of them. ..and, at least at the current Gog patch (see date of this post), the game isn't quite there. Some of the talents are broken and do nothing, or just give you the donwsides. The descriptions from pre-afterlife are still there, while the functionality has changed. Abridged, the story is your standard anime plot: Help Death and use the power of friendship to kill a god, or death (and someone really seems to have a thing for zombie girls in combat gear). So why still 4 out of 5? The basic gameplay loop and the world itself are really good. Your char always does what you tell him to do, when you do. Normal bosses never feel unfair (different story for some of the heroics), the pixel art is beautiful, and it actually managed to build the 4th wall into the story. You have fun playing and exploring, entering "toss your controller through your neighbours window" territory when trying some heroic bosses (the difference between old and new heroics really really shows). Absolutely worth the 20 bucks,
It plays like one part of the devs wanted to tell a story, and the others wanted to make an action game. The result is a roguelite where your flow gets interrupted every few minutes by cutscenes(not all of them are skippable). And that is the game's biggest problem: Unlike Bastion, storytelling and actually playing the game are handled as two separate things alltogether. When the narrator starts talking, you stop walking. This could be overlooked if the combat was awsome, but that experience depends mostly on your chosen character. It's great that all of the chars play differently, and that is on of the games strengths, but that also means that some are objectively better than others, with some pretty much useless in hard/NG+. In a game where you get swarmed by enemies or offscreened by archers, standing still is an especially bad idea when you have low attack range and relay on many fast hits. Recommended when you are in for the story and presentation, but there are a lot of better roguelites out there. P.S.: That screeching sound of the corrupted enemies gets grating really really fast.
Whoever compared this to The Chaos Engine has never played it. Both. There are several different characters and it's topdown, that is what they have in common. This is a clunky, buggy mess. It's a SNES-style action-RPG. The gunplay is just awful, there is no flow. None of the weapons feel good, and all of them (except the fall back peashooter) have limited ammo. Online multiplayer is unstable, we never managed to play longer than about half an hour without players being disconnected. Rather fire up the Amiga-Emulator...or try something like Synthetik.
