Feel free to consider me biased, as I'm the guy that financially backed the project a bit, but I love this game and that's why it's the only game I've ever funded. I found its prototype on itch.io years ago and knew it was something special and contacted the creator to try to get him to finish it. For me, one of the main reasons this game is awesome is that players of any skill level have a chance against each other because only one strike wins the round. When I played other fighting games like Mortal Kombat against more casual or new players, it wouldn't be much fun for them because there was no way they could win a round and they quickly got bored and frustrated. It was also really easy to tell if I was letting them win. But in First Cut, anyone can get some kills on anyone, and the small wins drive them to improve and they keep wanting to play one more game. If versus is not their thing, co-op modes are great, maybe even better. I like survival the most - back-to-back with a friend, holding back the hordes together. It also has single player modes, tons of fun extras and a short, but very challenging campaign. Beware it's quite hard, consider dropping the difficulty if necessary. The tension of knowing that one small mistake means instant death is awesome and adds a lot to the atmosphere, especially against multiple opponents. The art is great, the gore is great, the community is great. The only downside in my opinion is a bit of an unintuitive menu at times, which is really to be expected from small indie games with lots of features and modes, made by a single person nonethless.
With a bit more work from the developer, this could be a cult classic (pun intended), but I can only rate what I got at launch. The good: - Very nice story with unexpected twists. Just when you think you're near the end, the story takes a very unexpected turn and you get a surprisingly large amount of content from that point on, almost a second game. - Branching decisions make the game very replayable so you can see what you missed the first time. - Pretty good combat. - Great atmosphere. The bad (this section is longer because I want to offer feedback to the devs): - On keyboard and mouse (didn't try controller, don't like to aim with sticks), the menu and inventory controls are by far the worst and least intuitive that I've ever seen in a game. - Difficulty is very inconsistent. Around half of the boss fights are a joke, mostly the later ones. With all of the upgrades on normal difficulty, I beat the final boss in under 15 seconds by just standing under him and spamming fire with normal bullets. I still had 8/11 health units left (didn't even try to dodge). It's really not what you want or expect from an action game's final boss, or any boss. - Occasional performance issues on a beefy PC. Worst section is the mountain climb. - The game starts out pretty slow, it only really begins once you reach Allendale. I considered quitting it before then because the pacing was very slow with very little combat. - Some unfinished storylines that go nowhere (merchant, cult boss lady, Adelaide, music band, cemetery grave) - Nothing good to buy with your money until the late part of the game, only consumables that you don't need.
With a bit more work from the developer, this could be a cult classic (pun intended), but I can only rate what I got at launch. The good: - Very nice story with unexpected twists. Just when you think you're near the end, the story takes a very unexpected turn and you get a surprisingly large amount of content from that point on, almost a second game. - Branching decisions make the game very replayable so you can see what you missed the first time. - Pretty good combat. - Great atmosphere. The bad (this section is longer because I want to offer feedback to the devs): - On keyboard and mouse (didn't try controller, don't like to aim with sticks), the menu and inventory controls are by far the worst and least intuitive that I've ever seen in a game. - Difficulty is very inconsistent. Around half of the boss fights are a joke, mostly the later ones. With all of the upgrades on normal difficulty, I beat the final boss in under 15 seconds by just standing under him and spamming fire with normal bullets. I still had 8/11 health units left (didn't even try to dodge). It's really not what you want or expect from an action game's final boss, or any boss. - Occasional performance issues on a beefy PC. Worst section is the mountain climb. - The game starts out pretty slow, it only really begins once you reach Allendale. I considered quitting it before then because the pacing was very slow with very little combat. - Some unfinished storylines that go nowhere (merchant, cult boss lady, Adelaide, music band, cemetery grave) - Nothing good to buy with your money until the late part of the game, only consumables that you don't need.
I loved the first game, it was an unique roguelike that kept me playing even after I finished it to get the true ending. I always wanted to do another run. It was filled with combat and tension. There was the occasional rewarding puzzle here and there. Overall, a very well-paced game. The only downside was some very childish dialogue and the protagonist was a naive, generic goody two-shoes, but the gameplay more than made up for it. In the second game, which is an RPG and not a roguelike, I think the developers tried to provide players with a lot of "content" so players felt they're getting their money's worth. Problem is, most of this content is mind-numbing filler or literally doing nothing on auto-pilot for over a minute to get from one area to the next while staring at the screen. The fun part of the game is fighting and looting, but they force you to do endless puzzles with little or no reward when you could be fighting other ships and get that loot more than 10 times faster. Even if you figure a puzzle out in 10 seconds, it will take you 5 minutes to complete it because you gotta fly dozens of kilometers to put the pieces in their place. There are sections of the game where you do puzzles for 20-30 minutes and fight for 1-2 minutes in-between them and it just feels horrible and all you're thinking is "can I get back to the fun part already?!" I'd much rather have a shorter and more concentrated game than forced puzzles in every story mission to pad out the game time. How many times do you think I'll have fun escaping from a cave, devs?! The good: - Nice ship variety - Fun combat The bad: - The endless puzzles with crap or no rewards - Very long travel times, fast travel between systems unlocks when you're almost at the end. Dafuq? - No gravity on planet surfaces, things just float, breaks immersion - Childish dialogue, boring and inconsistent story - Using small, agile ships is impractical until much later because of the very small inventory space
The game is awesome! It has a slow start, but don't let that fool you. I played until the point of the first vote, then went to sleep. I've found myself going to take a piss in the middle of the night and then couldn't go back to sleep, thinking about how I could have done things better in retrospect, accounting for the new resource management mechanics that were presented. I went to my computer and restarted the game. I played the game until it was night again... Story: I replayed every save point multiple times to optimize everything and got everyone alive to the end. Even so, it made me tear up a few times, which is remarkable and it shows great storytelling, making you feel emotinally invested in the characters, feeling pride or joy sorrow for them without them even dying. I did not expect it to be this good. Gameplay: it starts off easy as you get accustomed to the mechanics and gets exponentially harder as you progress, then it eases up in the very last segment to let you focus on the ending of the story. It feels really well-paced and ever-challenging. The soundtrack was good and appropriate, with a few standout moments. Technical problems: The game had many, many small issues that I repeatedly encountered, mostly a lot of interface bugs and dozens of typos. I didn't encounter anything game-breaking or any crashes. The version I played was the 1.0.0 GOG launch version. Just as I finished the game, they released version 1.2, which I hope improves things. I still gave the game 5 stars because of 2 reasons: 1. Even with those issues, the game was still great. 2. I know that Bellular (the indie devs) did not release it like this out of malice or greed. I've been following them on YouTube for a long time. They are very pro-consumer, pro-employees and against always online DRM. It was quite simply lack of experience on their part. It was their first released game and I think it's amazing it came out this good. This game is truly an achievement on their part.
3 stars is an OK game. For such a low launch price, you really can't ask for more, but I can't give it more than 3 considering games like Far Cry 3 and The Witcher 3 out there. It's a 2 to 3 hours long whodunit mystery game, made by a passionate, but beginner game developer, from what I can tell. It's fun and cute and you can play at a relaxing pace, since there is no combat or timer (well, to be fair, there's an arcade game with some turn-based combat). At the end, if you gathered all of the clues and spoke to the suspects about them, it's pretty easy to deduce what happened, but up until then you have an idea of what happened, but you're still unsure who did what, so it's a decent sweet spot of difficulty. Gotta say, though, some of the clues would suggest that the killer is one of the most retarded murderers on the planet, like the pickaxe and the receipt.
Regarding the guy that said a major bug prevented him from playing because he got stuck in a room: The gadget he was supposed to use has 2 firing modes. He used the wrong one because he didn't pay attention to the tutorial. This game is mad fun! It was great to play as the Batman and interact with his greatest enemies. Batman and Joker are voiced by the original actors from the animated series! The game is a substantial improvement over Arkham Asylum. Some say the story was better in that one, which it may have been, but the difference is barely noticeable for me, as none of the stories were mind-blowing anyway. They were both OK and both serve the same purpose: putting Batman in an environment filled with villains for him to fight. Apart from the story, everything is certainly better in this game, especially the combat, which is now it's a lot more fluid. The things which keep it from getting a 5/5 from me are the following: - There are a few out of character moments for Batman, though, like ripping the heart out of a bad guy just because he is technically not alive. A future game lets you know that he survived, but at that point I was like "Damn, what the fuck am I playing, Batman or Deadpool?" and immediately searched online to see if the guy survives. - The game is a console port and you can tell. It has a few control quirks specific to a less than stellar PC port, like the remote batarang controlling like shit and oversteering long after you stopped moving the mouse, and some unintuitive key bindings. The save system is pretty bad too in my opinion - the game does not auto-save when you quit the game (remember this is an open-world game), there's no option to manual save and if you get some collectibles and die, you gotta do it all over again. The best way to save is to go inside a building. Overall, a great purchase. Could have been legendary with a bit more work, but as it stands, it's the best Batman game ever made until 2022.
Would be mildly entertaining if it wasn't so buggy and missing basic quality of life things. A list of bugs that I noticed: - Characters with the headshot perk sometimes don't do any bonus damage on headshots for an entire mission. - The pyromancer or however the flamethrower guy is called has a starting perk that gives him extra armor, but around mid-game I noticed that he had the lowest armor out of all the characters. I unequipped all of his gear to see what's up and he had negative armor, unlike all the other characters. Looks like a programmer put a minus instead of a plus somewhere in the code... - In level 5.2 my hunger and thirst meters stayed the same throughout the entire level. The mission had nothing special about it, so I doubt it was a design choice. And other ones... Not a bug, but a terrible design choice: after a mission, when you return to base camp, nothing you do before you quit the game gets saved. You gotta do all of the micromanagement before you start the mission next time you start the game.
The game is good, probably a 4-star game after patches, but the initial release has some pretty unacceptable bugs that really, really detract from the experience. The one that pissed me off the most was when I got my first quiver upgrade from 2 to 3 arrows, which is very significant, especially on harder difficulties, since some bosses are very hard to kill with only melee: I either died or reloaded the checkpoint and the upgrade was gone for good, I didn't have it anymore and it was gone from the environment too. This pissed me off severely because I'm quite obsessive and a completionist and having the sense of losing an upgrade permanently for the rest of the game was really off-putting. After that, I always had a sense of panic after collecting an upgrade until the next checkpoint so as not to die and maybe lose it. Well, turns out my fear was not unfounded, BECAUSE IT HAPPENED AGAIN 3 TIMES IN CHAPTERS 4 AND 5, one time for each of the ranged weapons. This is beyond unacceptable. This modern trend of "release now, patch it later IF it sells well" is really ruining gaming and it's one of the reasons I almost never buy games on release nowadays. I broke my own rule and suffered the consequences. Last fucking game I ever buy on release. Some notes: - The combat is OK, but a bit unsatisfying for some reason and really repetitive. Eventhough you have dozens of combos, you will find yoursel spamming the same 3-4 combos that are the strongest. - The story is nice, but not spectacular. - Great visuals, great atmosphere. - About 5 to 8 hours long. - The interface is buggy and not well thought out. - The aforementioned upgrade-losing bugs are horrible when they happen and they should not exist on release. Idea: add an optional setting to make the blood red to make the game more visceral for those that want it. Props to GOG for being the only store allowing us to refund these unfinished games after more than 2 hours of play. I'll buy it again when it's finished.
I only have cons for this game, so here they are: - This game is like Contra with no improvements apart form some Metal Slug-style mechs which you can pilot. The problem is, if you're gonna copy a game from 30 years ago, you better bring some innovation to the table. As examples, 2 games that do this very well well are Huntdown and Fight'N Rage. - I love difficult games and stuff like Metal Slug. however the problem here is the way the difficulty is implemented. There's a HUGE discrepancy in how much skill is required to beat a boss based on how well-equipped you get to it. You can beat some bosses in literally under 10 seconds standing still and pressing the fire button IF you never died during the level and reached the boss with a defensive bot and a grenade launcher, OR you have to dodge and aim perfectly for 3 minutes instead if you died before reaching the boss and lost your gear. Add this to the fact that you usually only find each weapon once or twice per level and it becomes a very unbalanced and frustrating experience. I found myself dying just once and then suiciding on purpose until I lost all of my lives to restart the level because I knew it was just more time-efficient to restart, considering the length of the boss battle and the low chances of beating him with basic gear. This would honestly be more fun if you had a single life. Also, boss battles should never end in under 10 seconds and should never be a joke. Also, why the fuck would you not add a "restart mission" option under these circumstances? - There's a bug or a very bad design choice that absolutely every time you continue a game from where you left off, you start with 2 lives instead of 5. - There are only 3 weapons apart from the default one, and the devs didn't even bother to make different models for them. They all look exactly the same in the player's hands. Even Metal Slug, an ancient game this one takes inspiration from, had different weapon models AND more weapons.
