This might be the puzzle game equivalent of myhouse.wad. You start out doing simple puzzles, but odd details and weird choices start sticking out, and as you investigate things evolve into seeing shapes in the clouds and frantically scribbling bizarre codes on notes in real life. It's a project made by an artist who wanted to explore ideas like the nature of reality or the differences between the way 1930s physicists see the world and the way Zen Buddhism interprets the world. It's obviously been called pretentious, but I'd argue it's more just pie-in-the-sky and overly poetic. The point of the game isn't to do a couple hundred maze puzzles, it's to absorb this constructed world and start seeing it differently as you take more of it in. The game is about perspective and exploration. So with that in mind, the game will be pretty grating if you're looking for a more straightforward or normal game. Should you play Pathologic 2 or Spec Ops: The Line or The Stanley Parable before this? Yeah absolutely, they're way more fun, and the questions they make you ask yourself don't generally include "am I going crazy?" or "should I just look up the solution?" But is this game worth playing? Yeah! If it clicks with you, it'll leave you feeling like your brain has changed. But uhhhh if you aren't confident that the game will click with you, don't burn $40 on a pretty world map to do maze puzzles in.
This game reminds me of classics like Starcraft: Brood War and Diablo 2 - sprite-based isometric games that deserve decades of play and appreciation. The game is an amazing vibe, a moody depiction of a cyberpunk dystopian banana republic thrown into chaos. Mechanized warfare means that small numbers of rogue mercenaries can tip the balance of power by destroying key infrastructure, assassinating military leadership, or wiping out enemy troops. Lives and livelihoods are chewed up by the figurative and literal machines of war as conflict erupts planetwide overnight. Civilians are an afterthought. And that's JUST the atmosphere of the game. The story is surprisingly deep for a game structured like a suped-up arcade title, and it's a better story than you get out of the average AAA title. The title introduces you to the space between arcade action and immersive sim in terms of gameplay, with sightlines, noise, weapon systems, environmental destruction, and more strategic elements allowing you to develop dozens of strategies and tactics. There are something like forty or fifty different weapons systems to mix and match together (primary fire, secondary fire, special attack) on three different kinds of vehicles which each have dozens of distinct and niche sub-types. You can be a golf cart packing melee-ranged cannons, a mecha tall enough to fire anti-material laser beams over the tops of buildings, the floating head from Zardoz melting anything that gets too close with a wall of disintigration beams, a hover car with gatling guns strapped to the hood, the forklift suit from Aliens with a laser jackhammer for tunneling through buildings, and so much more. It's just a great game, and well-worth buying at full price. If you ever wanted to play a Metal Gear game as a Metal Gear, if you ever wanted a real-time mecha action game, or if you ever fantasized about being a hero unit in an RTS, check this game out. It rules.
The gameplay loop has two conflicting objectives. On one hand: In-level, your primary goal is to win the battle, which is a great strategic challenge like you'd expect from a good Warhammer title. Out of level you manage troops, direct their development, deal with injuries or training periods which remove troops from the squad, and so on. This is the part that resembles X-COM, and I definitey enjoy it. On the other hand: In the spirit of Lethal Company, the premise of the game is that you are harvesting warpstone (everything is Empire-perspective and it gets called wyrdstone for some reason) to ship out to your faction leader. In-level you need to gather resources, looting the ruins, the fallen, and the chunks of warpstone in order to gather the resources necessary to fulfill your quota. These goals don't need to be in conflict (X-COM did a decent job of making resource gathering a major mechanic), but unfortunately the implementation is frustrating. You lose a lot of the initiative and control over combat encounters if you prioritize resources, and you lose access to the vast majority of resources if you don't take the time to scavenge while you play. To be clear, you essentially lose your save file if you fail to meet a quota too many times - you NEED to devote a significant amount of your focus to resource gathering, or it's game over. In spite of this one major caveat, the game really does succeed at creating a fun tabletop-like experience. The resource management and combat mechanics are balanced reasonably, there's a bit of depth to decision making, hedging your play around risks and unknown factors feels reasonable, and different factions have identifiably different playstyles, strengths, and weaknesses. It takes a tabletop amount of time to play a scenario, though (at least on my 2016 gaming laptop).
