ADACA

One of my favorite single player games in years. Fun combat paired with a compelling story in a world that surprised me and looked beautiful in it's own beautiful way. The guns are fun and you quickly get used to discarding them along the way and change your play style to what you have in your arsenal. There are some puzzle elements but all easy and help constrain you to an area to you finish them. Highly recommended if you want to just jump in and have fun.

I remember a long time ago getting the Orange Box and playing Half Life 2 for the first time, and I ever since finishing HL2 Ep2 I was certain no FPS would feel the same as that experience. ADACA came close with its campaign. And then exceeded it with the Zone Patrol game mode. Despite the hours spent combing the regions and picking apart the mysteries, finding clues and searching for answers, even having a notebook open to write down codes and points of interest... there's never enough, and I crave even more, and can only hope their next game gives more of this experience. If you can get this game, I implore you to do so, and I cannot endorse it enough

An engaging and fun action game combining mostly the DNA of Half-Life and, strangely enough, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. The game comes bundled with two game modes: a linear campaign, and an open world mission-based exploration campaign. Surprisingly enough to me, the more familiar Half-Lifelike linear campaign was actually not my favorite of the two campaigns. The linear campaign leans more into action set pieces broken up with exploratory downtime, while the open world campaign has more exploratory downtime investigating what you should do broken up by occasional action set pieces and moments of cosmic weirdness. While the narrative side of both campaigns are nothing to write home about, they are sufficient for their purposes. If you are familiar with Half-Life, the gameplay of this game will be more or less what you'd expect. Adaca will play like a more modern-grade Half-Life 2 fused with a bit of Halo. However, unlike Half-Life 2 or the episodes, the set pieces of Adaca will never take you too far away from the base gameplay which may make it feel more flat than the original games by Valve. Adaca is worth checking out if you are a fan of sci-fi shooters like Half-Life or Halo, or a fan of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-likes.

Very well made flashback to better times.

no update for 2 years

A solid Half-Life Halo-like with solid gunplay and satisfying physics. Episode 1 is solid, but 2 is fantastic (That ending fight was incredible). 3 dipped down a bit but was still a good conclusion.

Half-Life is one of my favorite games so I had to play this. Pros: -It looks pretty good in the boomer shooter space -The OST was really good. Much better than most indie games. -Solid gunplay. Tons of variety with the weapons. -Great physics and gravity arm implementation. Cons: -Some of the later areas need optimization. Even with a 9800X3D/5090 and only playing at 1440p, I would drop into 60-70fps and even 50fps. -Growing up in the 90's, I'm no stranger to janky ladder climbing but WOW this one might take the cake. -A little too much feels outright stolen from Half-Life. The enemy soldiers look and move like the Combine and they even make the same "flatline" sound when you kill them. -The AI is really bad. They'll just stand there looking at you at times. -Very awkward level transitions at times. You'll just be walking along and teleport to a new area or press "E" on a door that doesn't look like you can interact with it. I'd recommend playing it if you're a fan of the genre. Solid B-tier game.

ADACA is a very impressive game for a more or less solo developer. The campaign takes a lot of cues from Half-Life and it's quite well put together, and it also has another mode called Zone Patrol which is much more open, freeform, and Stalker inspired. In terms of things that apply to both modes, the gunplay is very tight, enemy and weapon variety is good, and the simple non-textured art style is put together surprisingly well. The sort of gravity gun arm you have is a fun addition as well. In terms of technical stuff, I did run into glitches a few times which caused some issues but usually just meant restarting the level. However, I have different things to say about each mode, so I'll split them up from here. Starting with the campaign, I'll say that I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't feel particularly remarkable. It takes you through many levels with lots of great variety of locations, enemies, weapons, and so on, and the gameplay feels really tight and fun. It's a bit of a thrill ride with some weird stuff going on, but good mixes of action and more tense thriller/horror stuff. The story, however, I found a bit hard to follow and not all that interesting. I enjoyed the story in Zone Patrol more, so it might be a case of not having enough lore understanding for the story, or that it's kind of delivered to me rather than piecing it together like in that mode. There were also a few encounters that felt poorly balanced, but they were rare and not that bad. On the whole it was a well-paced, fun, linear shooter experience with a somewhat unintriguing story. Zone Patrol is a much different beast opening up into a mode with lots of interconnected zones and hidden areas to explore, as well as quests to find and undertake, artifacts/secrets to find, and so on. You play as a different character (who's a supporting character in the campaign), and make a loadout before going into the titular zone. By collecting artifacts you can buy more gear to kit yourself out with, and there are a few vendors hidden in the zone that you can find and buy different stuff from as well. Quests will appear as you explore the zone, often when you find something interesting, and occasionally a quest will lead to a special briefing you can do for a bespoke quest from your hub area. It's a good design that unfolds naturally as you explore, and you really feel like you're making discoveries and are responsible for your own progress. So, the design is all rather cryptic, intentionally so. Unlike most modern games, which hold your hand a lot, Zone Patrol really wants you to explore and think about what you're doing and how you can puzzle things together and progress. Quests usually only hint at what to do or where to go, and you have to do the rest. Points of interest are rarely given to you on the map, and there's no "you are here" marker aside from knowing which area you're in. There's even a notetaking function for you to make your own notes about what's important. It's a refreshing design decision, and it made exploring more rewarding. That said, I think it goes a little too far since it applies to almost all quests and discoveries, and it's sometimes too obtuse. It was fun, but at times I found myself looking stuff up online that I couldn't figure out at all or was too much of a pain in the butt. I'm also rather frustrated after finishing this game, because I actually couldn't quite finish Zone Patrol, not really. I might have been able to get there, but I hit a point where I just gave up and watched the ending on YouTube. See, the final quest is very involved and requires you to do a lot of separate things before you can complete it. Using partly my own brain and partly looking stuff up online, I did everything I was supposed to, or at least I thought so. One thing I thought I did seemed to have been left undone, but I couldn't figure out how to get it done. The game wasn't going to tell me clearly, and unfortunately it's not a very well-known game so I couldn't find clear info online. It also could have just been a bug. So yes, sorry for all my complaining, but I feel a bit cheated that I had to watch the ending online. To sum up, I think ADACA is an impressive game for a solo dev, and well worth checking out if you like either Half-Life or Stalker. I enjoyed my time with it a lot, although I obviously still have my gripes. I intend to play the dev's next game, Project Silverfish, so I'm excited to see how their game design has evolved. And I really do like the hands off game design that respects the player's intelligence, I just wish there was a bit more guidance sometimes or a hint system when necessary.

A simple and fun game, an obvious homage to a certain Valve series. Not very long, but worth the play. (Bonus - It can actually count to 3.)

Buy one game, get two, and both are peak What an incredible experience, really glad we decided to give this another try!