The plot is, exactly, isometric Dead Space without weapons. Also, the cat dies. After that, I went and did a little look-ahead online and sure enough, the rest of the game only gets more pointlessly depressing from here. If you like games where everything you've done was for nothing, you might like Stasis. I hate games like that, so I don't care for it much. Give me a scary, disturbing game, but keep your discount nihilism, thanks.
I like the aesthetic and VA, the gameplay was OK, but after 4 or so relaxing hours sort of playing it in the background, I ran into a gamebreaking bug ("sign of the snake" never ended, so every run constantly sapped my max health). Apparently this has been a known bug for a year or so, and hasn't been fixed on any platform. Disappointing, because otherwise I mostly enjoyed the game. The other criticisms about "you die too suddenly" / "too RNG heavy" / "too opaque" are also valid, both on their own merit and compared to other roguelites, but they weren't dealbreakers. Unaddressed gamebreaking bugs are. Too bad because otherwise, I enjoyed it. At least I got it from the giveaway so I didn't lose money, but I probably won't buy from this dev.
I *like* the idea of a fast/stylish shooter/slasher, but this game isn't really it. Considering that I bought the original for $10 and got this version for free, I got my money's worth, but... -The boss fights are horrible -Gameplay is fun otherwise until you get tired of doing the same run-n-gun down a corridor or arena -The short stealth and driving sections are really bad and ruin the momentum -You sometimes respawn after dying in a mob, or right by the edge of a cliff -Sometimes crashes (especially on the plane wing fight) -Grapple hook bugs out sometimes, bad on the plane wing fight -Obvious coding issues, like a cutscene continuing after (?) you die and fade to black -Would've been better without ANY plot. What little there is...is really, really, really bad, to the point that it's distracting. -The dialog sounds like it was written procedurally by someone who didn't read the script -Really short (less than 2 hours) -The DLC is just skimpy clothing (higher cost for less clothing) TL;DR there are good ideas here gameplay wise but they're marred by some really annoying bugs, design choices, writing, and so on, and the game never does anything with them beyond what you see in the first ten minutes.
THE BAD -Crusade Management- If you played the first game you remember how awful the kingdom management was. Crusade management (this game's version) is not as bad as that because there aren't completely arbitrary, hidden deadlines that will softlock your game. (You can still get softlocked if you lose too many units early on, but it's harder.) The army combat is SLOW, grindy, unfun, and just a mess. You can disable it but you get punished for it, for some reason, apparently, by losing items and quests. Just a terrible design choice. Baldur's Gate 2's stronghold management and fast travel were more fun, 20 years ago, by reducing the "management" aspect of it to a few dialog options and class-specific quests. Even if the management minigame in Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous was well-done it would still interrupt and detract from the CRPG aspect, which is why people buy these games. No one bought this to play Civ 0.7. -Other QOL/game issues- "Real time" map travel is still reeeeally slow. Even moving the map is reeeeally slow! There's no reason for it to take 20 seconds for me to scroll across the map. You can still get locked out of or miss really important NPCs, locations, dialog options, and items very easily, which may be "realistic" but feels arbitrary and frustrating. There is such a thing as too much choice in character creation, especially when you have to handle NPCs. They did enable an option to level up NPCs automatically (thank god) and retrain, but even so, you spend soooooo much time in inventory or character creation, in a game already bogged down by crusade management. Main plot feels too fast at first. The map only opens up halfway (?) into the game, at which point the pacing slows down a bit. THE GOOD Everything NOT covered in the above complaints is mostly pretty solid. Not incredible, but pretty good. Bug-free for me. [Insert insect demon joke.]
This game has a couple moderately interesting ideas but they're few and far between. "Dark souls in space" sounds fun, but pass on this one. Whether you are a souls fan or not, I think you'll be disappointed. -Very, very, VERY confusing and repetitive area design with artificially limted fast travel -Clunky, plodding, repetitive combat -Parkour elements in some places, but jumping is clunky and slippy and if you fall you die Really I can't overstate how repetitive everything is. You fight the same five enemies over and over and over again. Every area is like those 3D mazes you have to get a ball bearing through, it's just torturous. You might finally get somewhere only to take a door you had no idea was one-way until you end up on the other side, or use up all your fast travel unlocks and get stuck in some huge empty zone that takes an hour to get out of. The game is alternately frustrating and boring and worst of all, unrewarding. It's not a *hard* game, it's just not fun to play. I got this game for free and honestly wish I hadn't installed it.
THE MULTIPLAYER ELEMENTS ON GOG ARE BROKEN. GET THIS ON STEAM IF YOU WANT ANY PAWN SHARING/HIRING. Climbing giant enemies good! Bullet sponge OR 1-shot-killed enemies bad. Basic world idea good! Character writing bad. Unique and fun classes good! Pawn (NPC) AI bad. Really, really bad. Calling down a screen-covering meteor apocalypse good! 35 second casting time bad. The ability to duplicate ANY item good! Inventory management and crafting bad. Grinding bad. Really bad. This game is like 50% 5 stars and 50% 1 star with almost nothing in between, but I give it a 4/5 because it is so ambitious and original and despite the things it gets terribly, terribly wrong it gets a lot of things right (or close to) that most games don't even try. Don't expect a good story, you won't get one. The gameplay is fantastic when it works and unbelievably tedious when it doesn't. This game is about exploring cool environments, killing cool monsters, and then moving on to the next one half an hour, or an hour, or several hours after you've gotten really really tired of the current one lol. I feel like a little polish and balance and they could've had a real knockout; as it is, it's only "quite good."
Like the Mirrors Edge games, this is fun...when you can zip effortlessly around and keep that sweet momentum going. Basically it's Portal + Mirror's Edge + Furi, with the self-contained areas and puzzle solving of the former (except the puzzle is combat), the momentum/running of the second, and the irritating boss design and wildly unfocused writing of the latter. The writing gets a -37 out of 5 stars. I mean, it would've been way better with no writing. On every level. Just skip the story and give us fun gameplay without the bad exposition. None of the bosses have that momentum you get from running around, you get dumped in an arena and have to figure out their gimmicks while slowly moving around. The boss design is garbage. The game is beautiful and I love the design (except for the last area). Meh soundtrack. The puzzles and collectibles ruin the flow of the game and are pointless. The entire point of the game is to keep going, not to stop and look behind every crate. Some areas are not well designed for combat. Rather than zooming around, you have to wait for platforms or use stealth, which is not this game's strong suit. A lot of the difficulty is fake RNG-based stuff. Beating this game isn't a matter of "git gud," it's a matter of figure out the enemy pattern and throw yourself at it enough times that you don't screw it up. Slight tweaks (lower cooldowns, a one-hit shield, etc.) could've fixed this; the "one-shot-death" design works against the game because you get bogged down repeating some areas. The platforming/grapple system sometimes kills you for no reason. The upgrade system is dumb. When you die, you can respawn instantly (as in, the game is optimized really well for that). For some rooms this means fun "learning the room." For others, it means dying 100x for no reason. TL;DR: buy it on sale, enjoy the running, ignore everything else. You will die a lot. Zoom zoom is fun. Game is only a couple hours long.
(Had to launch it from Steam to play due to controller issues, hence the short playtime GOG has.) I really, really disliked this game. It's not...the worst thing I've ever seen, but at its best it's VERY mediocre and forgettable. The rest grades down from annoying to aggravating to un-fun. Complaints in no particular order: -Level design is extremely repetitive. Every room looks exactly the same within a "biome" and all of them are similarly designed. -Clunky controls. -Boring combat. Very limited number of enemy types/setups. Guns are nominally different but all play the same. -Terrible, terrible hidden secrets you can only find with a guide. -Unlikable, annoying characters with terribly written dialogue. -Almost no bosses or interesting encounters. -The story and pacing are bad, at least through 40% or so of the game, when I got disgusted enough to stop playing. -The jokes in the game are really, really bad. Not offensive, just...anti-funny. And not in a bathos humor way. Just incredibly mediocre and bad. -Waiting for enemies to respawn is tedious and boring. -The skill tree progression is pretty arbitrary, although I guess some of the ideas are OK. Good things: -Representation in the cast, sort of. One of the two support NPCs is a black dude and the protagonist is female. -The ghost/possession mechanic is interesting but it's used to do something fun exactly once. The rest of the time it is a slow and obnoxious chore. TL;DR: not worth. Awful writing, VA, and level/enemy design. The gameplay is slow and mediocre and is still the best thing about the game.
Story: 3/5 The story is pretty uneven. Some parts are really well-written. Some parts are really poorly-written. On their own, most individual story beats are fine, but they're strung together in a repetitive, linear fashion. There are some pretty glaring plot holes. Sometimes there's no connection between what you just did and what you have to do now. Half of the game is a massive series of fetch quests. The best parts are the ones where you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for. It's not BAD - just not consistently great - and the good parts are quite good. The relationships...were not all handled well, in that there was no onscreen development to make them make sense. Gameplay: 4/5 It's a turn-based, tactical JRPG with heavy timed-button-press elements. It's implemented pretty well, but if you don't git gud at timing (or turn on auto mode) you die. Unfortunately some characters are objectively way worse than others so you never use some characters. Exploration is fun and rewarding and, except for three separate libraries, the environments are unique and well-designed. Music: 3/5 Ima's song is stupid. A song about Santa and Martin Luther King, Jr.?? In a fantsy not-Earth where God is a space whale and the gods are ravens, cats, owls, mammoths, etc.? And the place it plays makes no sense. ...most of the rest of the soundtrack is good, or at least OK, and there are a few really good, atmospheric, memorable tracks. But Ima's song...it's been awhile since a game so abruptly destroyed my immersion, lol. It's the one thing I'll remember about this soundtrack in five years. Graphics: 4/5 Solid pixel graphics. Characters and areas are unique and well-designed. They cheat sometimes with vector graphics, which usually look worse than the pixel graphics. Overall: 3.5/5 Fun, and notable for being the LGBTQIA-est game I think I've ever seen, although it stands on its own merits as a fun game, separate from that. Needs polish, but the good outweighs the bad.
May update my review if they ever fix the game. Both the Steam and GoG versions apparently have serious stability issues. Some people have very reproducible crashes during a particular boss fight...I can't get past about the 30 minute mark in the game since it just randomly crashes when interacting with objects, walking through an empty corridor, pausing the game... Not an issue with my hardware. This is a pretty widespread problem and I've not had this problem with other graphically intensive games. None of the suggested fixes have helped, so if they don't eventually patch it I'll just return the game; it's unplayable like this. Can't review the rest of the game because I can't get to it.
