Its a rare example of good classic sci-fi story implemented in a form of a game. Very beautiful game with interesting story. It is basically a walking simulator, but it was not boring all that 7 hours, because something happends all the time and there are always something interesting or beautiful to watch. Game is very carefull about sound and visual details. Voice acting is marvelous. Character movement animation is complex and realistic. Very good work, masterpiece of its kind. The only bad thing about it is unreal engine common technical issues. Microstutters, low LOD distance on epic settings (objects/textures just popping up frequently). Rover bugs: you can stuck in it or it can just dissappear.
Interesting gameplay, its like slay the spire in 3d :-) Nice music that creates atmosphere of real tough fight. Minimalistic and, at the same time, stylish graphics. First few levels are easy, but in the end of the game big difficulty spike awaits you in order to ruin all positive impressions game made before and make you rage quit it. At least it happends with me. I selected the easiest level of difficulty but that does not help at all. Fights in tight spaces has the same issue that Othercide has with its difficulty curve. Its just so dissapointing that for me it was impossible to complete the very last level of the last mission. And I do not wish to start over a new game just to try build proper deck for the last level of the game or try replay the last level for the 20th time
This game has a lot of problems with its engine and gamedesign. - It generates microfreezes even on modern hardware, when videocard is at 30% of load capacity on max settings. - Campfires do not work properly on DX10. - Enemy A.I. is bad designed. Thea always throw grenades with 100% precition, see you through the wall or in total darkness, but most of the time behaves stupidly. - Flashlight is so bad that you can not see anything in the darkness. Fixed it by editing game items configs files. - Bleeding mechanics is broken. You got bleeding all the time and bandages are never enough. Basic medkit do not stop bleeding (wtf?). Fixed it too by editing actor config file. - Gun jamming mechanics also broken. New weapon in full condition starts to jam after few mags, and it jams often EVERY 1-5 ROUNDS. Just rediculous. Fixed it too in configs. - Final missions have difficulty curve problem. Enemies almost do not have medkits on them and bandages, alfo there are no traders who has supplies, so if you run out of meds and do not have save file before that missions, you probably need to start the game from the beginnign, or, again, fix your health draining via config files editing. - Ending is just dissapointing So, game can be sometimes fun, but you need to fix a lot of gameplay issues by yourself or to use mods in order to be able to feel pleasure playing it.
Game has charming style, good story and voice acting, interesting deck building system, but the combat controls and difficulty spikes on Kraken and final boss can just make you rage quit this game and ruin all positive impressions. I chose easy level of difficulty to travel throug the small card stories and have fun, not to repeat final level endlessly in frustration and despair. Finally I was able to defeat Kraken in my third try, but the final boss fight just too hard and inbalanced even on easy level for me, so I beat it only with cheats. I call it a bad game design.
- repetitive game mechanics: find key card/console/valve to open the next door then repeat this process indefinitely - camera controls is really awful. Sometimes you can not even control it at all and all you really fight with is that controls. - aliens are boring, mostly because they are secondary copy-paste of the Aliens from movies. They spawn on you predictibly, often stuck in environment, just like you are. - this game do not need much resourses, so you can play it on old PC or laptop without dedicated graphics card. During all 3 parts of game i noticed only 2 crashes in one of the final levels, so game is mostly well tested for bugs and totally playable. - graphics is not bad for 13 years old game - comics style story art is nice, I liked it - cinematic sequences with bosses are nice too. Obviously, developers tried to copy-paste Dead Space style cinematic gameplay elements.
I completed the game just now, and I can say that it could be really great, but... - A LOT OF BUGS. It was like playing some kind of beta. Wrong animations, not working interface buttons, cloning of the same hunter at base. Really frustrating sometimes. - Unbalanced gameplay system. Too easy to farm a lot of resouses. Too many days for research new tech and mostly all the reasearch is pointless. Most of the weapons pointless too and you will never use them, just like expendable items (only thing that you need is medkit). Too complicated resistance/weakness system, which can be just overrided via instant monster kill ability or big concentration reserve. Almost every core gameplay aspect of the game need some tuning and improvement. - It is almost impossible to go in stealth mode because of total randomness of creatures movement and big quantity of them (before they notice you and attack all together). So for me the only way to finish missions was to kill almost every creature in my way. - No choices in the story at all. Some RPG elements would be great, but you will not meet them in this game, unfortunately... - Same soundtrack in every battle is annoying. This game need more background music. - Ending is just miserable. No final story words at all. On the other side: - Great stylish visual art. It is really amazing - Interesting core gameplay idea with noise area, smell, concentration points, that can be used either on movement or attacks.
Wide as an ocean deep as a puddle is the best way to describe this game. It can show you some beautiful landscapes and views, but more you play and try to make sense of it - more disapointment you achieve. Pointless grinding everywhere. It just forces you to waste time doing boring repetitive actions like searching planets with needed resources and excavating them. Exploration? You just go from one to another result of advanced random number generator and sometimes it can catch you eye for a moment, but later you will understand that it is all the same after all. SPORE with similar aproach is much more interesting than this game. Only 3 races, identical bases, unbalanced economy with ridiculuos prices on ship cargo hull upgrades (to open i cell you must scrap several other ships to get needed units amount). NPCs dont even try to seem alive. Just few boring encounters when you give some resources to them in order to help repair their ships. To learn alien language in order to read poor dialogs you must grind word stones on planets or grind aliens on starbases (every new one gives you 1 word and to read full dialogs you need to do tens and hundreds of encounters). Unscippable boring landing sequence animation you need to watch each time you visit new starbase completing this masterpiece of time wasting. I got this game on sale and I knew it has problems in past but I thought after so many years it became at least worth to check and complete. But this was a mistake.
This game is interesting, with good storyline and deep slavic folklore background. Card fight mechanics is similar with other card games like Slay the Spyre, but has its unique features. There are two types and two classes of cards - black (mostly used for attack) and white (mostly used for defence), words (main action cards) and keys (additional action cards). You can build your deck and develop your own fight strategy, also you can have 3 different saved presets of deck and switch between them. Also game allows you to skip the fight if you loose more than 2 times, so it prevent you from really frustraiting dead end situations. Game has different endings which rely on your choices. Also your choices can change fate of other characters in the end. Graphics is stylish low-poligon animation. I liked it, but for somebody it will not be pleasant, I guess. The only thing I dislike in this game is its duration. It is too long for such game type, in my opinion. Game creates artificial walls to prevent you from progressing fast. To achieve goal X, you must first do A, B, C, and every A, B, C mission has a lot of sidequest fights. So with high speed of fight animation I finished the game only after almost 35 hours. Controls of character movement also not ideal, but they are not so bad either.
Simple and beautiful design, challenging but nevertheless fun gameplay, which requires balanced set of your agents party from the beginning and careful management through all the game. You must think about every turn and use the maximum of your resources in the best way possible to defeat this game. I got the best ending only in the third walkthrough, so it requires some luck too. This game is like Fermi Paradox, but much more developed and interesting.
It was fun and interesting to play stealth at the beginning, but game became more and more challenging and frustrating after each level. At some point, I stuck on one level and rage quited. You do not have much of a choise and must try and die too many times. You can not make any mistake, you can not shoot your way in and have fun - only infinite tries and caution at every level. Very timing - sensitive game. In order just to see the whole story - i edited hp and ammo clip parameters in saves and then game became a real fun for a bit - cyberpunk top down shooter/slasher at it best) But even then it is hard to find the way on big levels with very similar rooms, it is boring to search every one of them. On the other side - pixel graphics is stylish and beautiful, there is some story, simple and linear, but nevertheless... I guess this game will be fun for gamers who like retro pixel style, stealth gameplay and who is very patient and has good reaction. For me it was mediocre.
