BARIS (or Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space if you're not a cool 90s kid), was a punishing but very engaging space program simulator. It had a clear interface and featured videoclips and audio from the space race period for most of the missions. This game is not a worthy successor. I say this for a several reasons. First, the interface is unintuitive and badly laid out. The missions you want to launch are not listed on their own screen, and are instead buried inside the research menu of all places. That's just weird. Additionally, the game feels like it was designed to maximize clicking. Scheduling the simplest possible mission (Sputnik launch) takes no less than 10 clicks. And you have to repeat this process every time you want to launch the mission. Again, poor game design. The UI is aggressively bland, failing to highlight important information and adopting baffling UI/UX choices. Important numbers are often hidden at the edge of the screen, using text size and colour that blends into the background. On the screen showing who reached various milestones first, there are no national flags or other easily-visually-readable ways of displaying who was the first to reach that milestone. Instead it's a bland logo for the milestone itself (that is the same for both sides), with the date underneath in small text. Why not display the flag of the first nation to reach the milestone as the first in line, with the second nation's flag coming second (and smaller)? It's the obvious way to easily convey this information, but it was not done. I realize this is vey specific, but I'm mentioning it to make the point: in a menu-driven game, very little thought was put into the menus. In terms of the non-menu graphics, the period videos have been replaced with CGI movie clips that are... alright. Not great, but alright. The sound design is reasonably good, but still not as atmospheric as BARIS. This game comes 25 years after BARIS, but is not as oood. I cannot recommend it.
As others have noted, this game is a great little tactical battle game. It uses an innovative order system in which you have a fixed number of "messenger birds" that are used to deliver orders, after which they go on cooldown. So you have to plan orders carefully, since you have limited bandwidth to fix mistakes or engage in overly-elaborate schemes. It also punishes you harshly for wasting orders or trying to spam unit special abilities. This mechanic was definitely a breath of fresh air. The scouting mechanic was also very interesting. When the battle begins you're presented with the zones into which the enemy may have deployed, and then its up to you to use various kinds of scouts to figure out which units were deployed and where. Again, an innovative and interesting mechanic, well-implemented. The graphics are also very well done. They are clean, easy to read, and easy on the eyes. Icons pop well from the background, making the game easy to read, both on the tactical map and in town. Overall, this is a game with a good amount of depth, and yet it is surprisingly easy to pick up and play, since there is not much of a learning curve once you've fought the initial tutorial battle. Highly recommended to anyone who likes strategy games, or even gamers in general, since this is a "light" strategy game that will ease you into the genre. As others have pointed out, there is currently not enough content - one campaign that I finished in less than 2 hours including reloads, and that was on the hard difficulty. I am very much looking forward to more content from the developers, since that is what the game really needs at this point. Still decent value for money, but once the full content is finished this game will really be something special.
This game does not play like a professional product. As mentioned in other reviews, its very buggy (your character gets stuck in terrain, zombies can't navigate even the simplest obstacles, etc). The weapons can be satisfying, but only when dealing with low-level zombies, since the tougher zombies take loads of damage before they die, and there is no real indication that you're hurting them until they suddenly die. The zombie design is cool, and the death animations remind me strongly of Fallout 1+2. But the special zombies are also a big problem. They start out as challenging bosses, which is okay, but quickly become very common, appearing in groups of 3-5 at a time in every room. This makes the game an annoying slog in which you pop out, take a few shots, then duck back into cover to avoid the boss-zombie's bazookas or other ranged weapons. A zombie shooter should not be a cover shooter! Finally, the levels quickly get boring and repetitive, I stopped playing after a half-dozen levels, so I would not recommend this game to anyone.
There's a lot to love about this title - great music, fun puzzles, an innovative core mechanic (gravity reversal). But what made me give up on the game after about half an hour of gameplay was the very frustrating controls. This is a game that demands precision platforming and exact timing. since If you so much as brush a spike or enemy you die. Yet the controls are both sluggish and overly-responsive. There are delays between inputting a command and seeing a response, and there is also an extremely annoying tendency for your character to slide forwards as if under the effect of inertia after you've stopped giving commands. As a result, you will die over and over again trying to execute simple maneuvers because your character will not respond appropriately. I'm talking 30-40 times per room. I always got through the rooms eventually, but the fact that the arbitrary controls were dictating outcomes was a dealbreaker.
