5089: The Action RPG

I had fun with 3089, but this version is a buggy mess (especially in coop) and the gameplay is starting to get really old and boring and the flaws are becoming too glaring to overlook. Bugs: Enemies often skip all over rather than moving smoothly, making fast moving enemies impossible to hit. I'm playing over LAN and even with that my coop partner also appears to jump around unsmoothly. Quests become unfinishable and unfixable (its so bad they added a way to report unreachable objectives, but even THAT doesn't fix the issue sometimes). Enemies appear inside geometry and are unkillable, making it impossible to convert an area or finish certain quests. You can get stuck inside geometry, such as when taking down a stronghold. In co-op, enemies sometimes "clone", where it looks like you are damaging an enemy but when you destroy it, it shows an animation of the enemy being destroyed but the enemy remains standing back at full health. Just check the bug forum, there's endless bugs. Combat is hideously boring. The core issue stems from the shooting - shots have travel time AND random bullet deviation. Why someone thought this was a fun thing to do in an FPS is beyond me. So, it's an FPS, but aiming isn't a thing, the vast majority of weapons you find have abysmal accuracy, if you are lucky enough to find a weapon with high accuracy in a little bit it'll become obsolete and you'll have to hunt for another or accept awful boring "roll the dice" shooting. If you move to avoid enemy shots your accuracy gets even worse, so you may as well just stand still and tank the shots while shooting at the enemy and praying the bullet goes where you want. For some reason I was fine with this in the previous versions of the game but it's just gotten so tedious and boring. What is even the point of giving shots travel time if you are so heavily punished by moving and there's so much random deviation? I finally rage quit after I needed to upgrade my weapon and after 30 minutes didn't find any with decent accuracy. I absolutely hate using the low accuracy weapons. It's an FPS for christsakes, shooting is supposed to be responsive and fun and satisfying, random bullet deviation should NOT be this extreme. Armor / chips are seemingly pointless. You can get an entire piece of gear's worth of stats just from completing one quest. You'll waste more time trying to find better armor than you would just doing a quest. Combat is feast or famine. Either you are OP and enemies go down in a few shots or you are too weak and each individual enemy is a slog to take down via repetitive, totally thought-free combat. Either way combat is just a boring, unpleasant grind. Going through inventory is painful, there's no "compare" feature making it really annoying to try to compare 2 weapons. For a game that's all about upgrading gear it's inexcusable. There is a really obnoxious type of enemy called a "floater" which can oneshot you even when you have so much armor that normal enemies hardly damage you. It suffers from the "jumpy" movement issue making it difficult to hit and it's a small sphere making it already hard to hit. It moves really fast, too, so you have to run away, turn and shoot it, run away further, and repeat until it teleports away and you have to go find it again. Combined with the awful accuracy of most weapons it's THE WORST. VR is abysmal, the game just does NOT work in VR. It's an afterthought. In short, it's a glitchy "FPS" game which fails to get the fundamental FPS gameplay right. EDIT: Found out MANY others have complained about the gunplay being no fun, but the dev INSISTS that they are "satisfied" with the current state of gunplay. So no hope of this ever being fixed.

2077 < 3079 < 3089 < 4089 < 5089

About 300 reviews, 80% positive, and 5 years of updates: I was ready for a janky but interesting indie, but this is so bad it's hard to explain, not only is every single system is conceptually unsound and executed poorly but they all combine into something worse than the sum of its flaws. Let's try to give you an idea by looking at how inventory/weight limits, player stats, death, and saves work together. In this game, you have autosaves only and a single save slot per character, so if you end up in a bad situation you can't roll back to an earlier save. Also, when you die you will lose a single item in your inventory: if that item is a random weapon part you picked up as loot it's not terrible, if instead you lost a component of some equipment (such as a weapon or a piece of armor) that equipment stops working and won't be back online until you slot in another component in the empty slot, the replacement also has to be in a fairly narrow level range compared to the components still there or you'll get a massive penality. Sounds annoying but easy to work around, right? Just carry or stash spare weapons and armor so you'll never be left unable to recover, right? You don't have a stash, your inventory slots are very limited (in no small part due to inane mechanical limitations such as needing a free slot if you want to use a hoverboard, because enabling/disabling the hoverboard without equipping/unequipping it from its slot was clearly beyond the dev's meager coding skills), and even worse your carry weight limit is so absurdly low you'll struggle to carry a full suite of armor and 2 weapons without significant investments into Agility. Ok, let's raise Agility then, that means grinding skill points from super bland proc-gen quests (while avoiding the majority that generate with mandatory stealth objectives, since those require big investments into Stealth to be even theoretically possible), surely once you get a decent amount of Agility you'll be set for the whole game, right? Higher level equipment weights more, and it's such a steep increase you soon won't be able to jump at all unless you keep pumping the majority of your skill points into Agility: and if you think of sticking to lower level equipment, equipment stats get so much better with level you'd be even worse off even if you put all your skill points into the relevant damage stat to compensate. Notice I said "damage stat", increasing your Melee or Guns skill doesn't let you use those weapons better (such as swinging faster or reducing your spread as you keep shooting), it just increases a damage multiplier. The weapons themselves aren't any better, you'd expect procgen to be a great way to get a fun and varied arsenal but there's only 4 actually distinct weapon types that get then multiplied by more inane mechanical limitations such as "Rifle" and "Energy Rifle" needing to be distinct weapon types instead of the ammo type being a modifier of one of the weapon parts (that's how bad the dev is at coding), also part stats are calculated out of a budget that depends on a part's level so all you get to do is roll for the few combinations of basic tradeoffs that don't completely suck. That's the bulk of the gameplay by the way, you safely grind easy and meaningless "content" (generous usage of the word) to pay a truckload of skill/credit taxes so you can make your damage numbers bigger so you can safely and easily grind equally meaningless "content" with an higher level number attached to it, and occasionally enjoy being set back a few hours when you die to some nonsense such as the vehicle you're in grazing a two pixels wide floating triangle of procgen terrain. After slightly more than 2 hours of playing I had barely made it to level 3 equipment and defeated the first "boss" (again, generous usage of the word, just a normal enemy but scaled up to the point its movement code barely works and also given an obscene amount of health + regenerating shield), and to see if there was anything worthwile somewhere behind all that grind I hacked the game to multiply skill/credit gains by 10. There is, in fact, a bit of stuff that's not immediately visible and only noticeable after what should equate to a dozen to a hundred hours of legit grind: there's new movement options such as teleporters and grappling hooks (very cool, but they're still equipments so good luck getting enough Agility to carry them too), there's vehicles (great way to travel quickly, also great at fighting if they happen to spawn with weapons, you need massive investments in Piloting or you'll be simply locked out of using them, yes the Piloting requirements will scale just as badly as the Agility requirements mentioned above), there's building mechanics (you can spend hours setting up teleporter networks so you can revisit those low level areas that no longer have anything to offer you, yay), there's even a whole THREE new enemy types (out of maybe 10) that only appear if you progress the main quest far enough! If you've read other reviews you might have seen complaints about how you can lock yourself out of the main quest by picking the wrong dialog choices, not only I can confirm that but I'm pretty sure that you can also lock yourself out of two of those three new enemy types if you lock yourself out of the main quest at the wrong time. Some misc observations to conclude: [list] [*]The bosses after the first are just the first boss again, but with bigger stats and further away from your position to waste your time. [*]Escort quest are best completed not by attempting to actually escort the bot you're supposed to protect (and blowing a gasket as it fails to pathfind and humps a wall instead of taking the stairs 2 cm to the side because, once again, the dev can't code worth a damn), but by running ahead to the destination, the bot will just teleport to you every couple seconds and thus negate the whole point of the quest. [*]If you manage to go out to areas level 10-15 (don't even attempt without cheats) you can see some variety in the terrain procgen, revealing you're on an island connected to other islands by enormous land bridges: it's the first and only cool terrain gen I've seen, it's also terrible for gameplay because out there objectives will often spawn underwater and that makes things even slower. [*]Once you cut out all the grind for bigger numbers, the main quest boils down to fighting 4 identical bosses, visiting a certain area after each fight, and not picking obviously suicidal dialog options when talking to the NPC in that area: the longest part is then getting to those 4 boss fights, as the late ones tend to be spawned so far out you'll be looking at several minutes of flying towards an objective marker. [*]If you for some reason want to grind for high level equipment the best way is to invest into Piloting, find a good vehicle spawn, and hunt Surveyors high in the sky as they can be bursted down quickly and have absurdly high level drops. [/list]

THIS is a very good game. PLEASE buy it. PLEASE play it. DONT gay it. JUST 5089 it upppppppppppppppppppppppppp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An amazing game with infinite min-maxing, good progression, surreal/trippy environments and pretty smart AI. While I was playing the game I had Synthwave music in the background, and it really helped me to get more into the game. The weapon system is pretty fun to use. It has a slight learning curve, but when you master it, it is really fun to build your own weaponry. Same goes for the armor system. It also has multiplayer support!

I've played this longer than I have on record. Anyways, the game is okay, it has the basics down and it is pretty simple, but it is pretty annoying. The stealth is a joke. The audio is way too loud. "Turn down the volume" Yeah, maybe I want to do something else at the same time, I shouldn't have to do that. Even when music is off and sound volume is low, the rain is so loud and so are other sounds. It's okay, not great, not terrible. I don't recommend nor not recommend the game, but lean towards a pass.

it's lacking in every aspect