Killed 2 gorebeasts. Sliver of life remaining. I start to collect the meat to cook it and heal... Out of nowhere, a beast respawns behind me and kills me off with no warning or chance to dodge. Start over and have to retread the same islands on this slowass canoe... no thanks. I wouldn't play this again even if you paid me to.
The intro was amusing, and the tutorial was useful and engaging enough. But the core gameplay itself is too repetitive and RNG-focused, with little to no sense of accomplishment or progression between runs. Unless I've missed something, your only meta progress is unlocking items in the item pool from which drops are determined, but you still face unbridled RNG in order to obtain them. You're just as likely to loot a pistol as you are an RPG or AK-47 or sword. Every weapon has its own level and rarity, too, so throw that into the RNG mix and most of the time you'll be running around with peashooters. Especially on certain maps where looting the objective takes longer than you are afforded even by the upgraded Coffee item, you end up swarmed with no chance of surviving because RNG didn't see fit to give you any AoE or high rate of fire weapons. It's one thing to lose a run as a result of poor skill or time management, overextending your welcome past midnight in a risk/reward gamble... and it's another thing entirely to get surrounded during the day because your party's damage can't keep up with the zombie spawn rate, because all you've found are common grey items with mediocre DPS. The procedurally generated levels provide absolutely no value or player attachment to the game world. All you ever see is a static base camp and a randomly generated level that no longer exists as soon as you leave it. Combine that with the ever-increasing zombie/mission difficulty, inconsistent drop quality, and the lack of meta progression, it's difficult to care enough about this game's world to suffer through all the RNG-driven handicaps.
Never played the original, so I don't have nostalgia tainting my review. This is an extremely mediocre and bare bones top-down shooter that takes place in a tiny arena. Mobs spawn in, you kill them for xp and random weapon/powerup drops, and that's all there is to it. The arena itself never changes except for the background image, and even then only between boring dirt or colored dirt. As with similar top-down wave-based games, luck plays a slightly larger part in your success than skill; which perks you're presented when you level up or what weapons are dropped when you kill enemies are entirely randomized. You could get a piercing gauss rifle that kills everything between you and the edge of the map...or a blowtorch that requires you to hug the mobs (admittedly a high-damage hug). Comparing the price of this game vs the lack of content and the repetitive simplicity of the gameplay, it's simply not justifiable at full price unless you have a strong nostalgic attachment to the original. If you don't have that attachment, you really won't be missing out on much if you skip this.
Sounds cool in concept, yeah? I played this on Steam ages ago because I thought a hack'n'slash in the sci-fi environment would be fun. All I remember of this game is how utterly boring it was. Let's bask in this wonderful snippet from the *official* game description: >> Grab your energy drinks because this will take some time, **like 50 plus hours** as you hack-and-slash your way through 45 diverse levels to the escape pods, saving as many colonists along the way. Like 50 hours?! Like wow, man. That's like, forever. With a description like that, it seems they got so bored of their own game, they couldn't write anything catchy about it. They resorted to warning you about how prolonged the misery will be, and attempted to spin it as "long game hours equals good game". It can't lean on age as an excuse for its poor design, because it came out *after* other games of higher quality. The weapons feel as though they started out copying the usual fantasy RPG stuff, then suddenly switched over to the sci-fi theme; but they forgot, or didn't bother, to remove the fantasy weapons. Axe, Slingshot, Xbow, Laser Rifle... Maybe they ran out of sci-fi weapon ideas and had to pad it out. Like, who knows? tl;dr : stay away even if discounted
