Just some notes from my playthrough: 1)Gameplay Mostly a rogue-like. There are a few permanent upgrades that stay with you throughout the runs, but all other stuff is just unlocks that can spawn on your run. You get 2 weapons and 2 abilities and go through randomly generated rooms and corridors, kill stuff, find upgrade shrines etc. You have to reach the end in one take as death will reset the run. 2)Unlocks Generally, more expensive unlocks are usually not necessarily better than their cheaper counterparts. Hell, I found some of the starter weapons to be best to use. Unfortunately, the game forces you to spend currency on unlocks, which can lead to polluting your random item spawns throughout the runs with bad/weak weapons you want to avoid, actually making the game harder. You can spend currency but don't finish the unlocks fully to avoid it. 3)Difficulty There is a difficulty option in the settings. This was apparently added in one of the later patches but on a fresh install, it defaults to the lowest. Noticed it only after I finished my first playthrough of the first three chapters without dying once and this explains why. The original difficulty was apparently the 3rd out of the 4 available. They probably didn't test fresh installs, so just keep it in mind if the game seems awfully easy. Similarly, don't play on the hardest difficulty. It seems fine at first, but towards the end of the run, the enemies scale to extreme degrees. The 3rd difficulty seemed perfect. Played through on a KB+M without issues. 4)Narration. The only actual voice acting in the game is the main character. Voiced by Ron Perlman, it gives the game a good atmosphere. But also causes a stark contrast with the few grunts and noises all the characters make for their text bubbles. Can get a bit repetitive if you fail often though so you'll start skipping. 5)Bugs. One noticeable bug is that some enemies have bugged movement. They will twitch in place but if you get near, they'll attack.
The gameplay is pretty fun. You can seamlessly transition between a mech and a jet, but you will spend most of your time as the jet. There are some situations where being on the ground is preferable, but they are few and far between. Overall, a pretty fun shoot'em up. The biggest flaw is its length. You can easily be done with the game in a couple of hours. Once you are done with there is not much left to do other than replay the levels, to which there is no point at all. You are also a bit too durable for my taste. Most enemies hit you for 1 health at a time so with 100 health, the stakes are not very high most of the time. You can also just go back to a healing point at any time and heal to full for free. Would have been more fun if the game was a bit more challenging.
A standard dungeon crawler written in a humorous way. The character interactions will keep you entertained, although keep in mind that the game uses swear words in ample quantities. It adds to the humor, but might turn some people off. However, the gameplay itself is highly RNG dependant. If you played XCOM, you know what to expect. Playing on difficulty 3/4, the game's already pretty save/load heavy. For the majority of characters, focusing your level-ups on increasing hit chances is your go to. Some characters have abysmally low accuracy. Add to that the fact that pretty much every single enemy can also dodge/parry your attacks or resist status effects, everything a chance based on the enemy. There is also a 5% chance for any action to be a critical fail, with severe adverse effects. Most enemies hit hard and can take a beating, even low tier ones. Your ranged characters will get 1 shot, 2 shot if you're lucky. Melee characters don't fare much better as they have about 2x the HP. Armor is basically useless as it's just damage - armor = final damage. Reducing 40 to 30 doesn't mean much. It might be balanced on normal, but anything above is just bad. There is also no way to tell what abilities enemies have. So you'll just have to get half of your party randomly one shot/stunned by a massive AoE nuke that one enemy has to find out. Then reload. You can set up opportunity attack zones, but enemies have enough HP that they can just run through like 4 of them from your melee chars and just beeline to and one shot your backline. As such, the gameplay forces you to just chain CC/disable as many enemies as possible to death because fighting them normally is going to cost you. Also, by default, your characters have pretty bad initiative. You have to heavily invest in it to be able to play before most of the enemies. You can also get unlucky with gear. 2 of my characters were still on starter weapons about 1/4th into the game, dealing little to no damage at that point.
Can't believe I've slept on this for so long. Even if you're not a fan of metal as a genre, the game's story, world and especially creature/character design makes diving into this Brütal world very worth it. And I even ended up liking some songs from the 107 that are in the game. Voice acting is definitely one of the highlights with some big names in the cast. If you are a fan of Double Fine/Tim Schafer, you should definitely play this You get a reasonably sized open world that is not too overbearing with collectibles and activities. Whether you are just running/driving around, there is always stuff to collect and do. The main story is surprisingly good and engaging with memorable characters throughout. The background lore of the game is also well thought out and original. If you don't care about the open world and just want to go through the story, I'd say it's still worth the price of admission. One thing that might not be to everyone's liking are the light RTS segments or "stage battles". The controls can take some getting used to and are quite different from regular play. You must capture resource hubs and recruit/manage units all in a 3rd person view of your character and destroy the enemy's stage. You luckily get the ability to fly in these segments, so you can get an overview of the situation. The tutorials don't do a very good job in these segments of properly explaining the controls, so keep that in mind it can take an hour or two to grasp well. Played through the entire game on a KB/M and completely without issues. It's actually a pretty decent port, especially considering the time the game released in when terrible PC ports of, well... everything were to be expected. A tip: you unlock a car upgrade in the shop after completing the campaign that detects collectibles. So don't stress hunting them down too much as you play the game. Also, enable "Hi-Fi Sim" in the settings, it removes the 30 FPS lock. Definitely a hidden gem. Giving this an 9/10.
