Barotrauma is an interesting game with an identity crisis.
The game reads as an underwater horror game where you and your other crew members try to survive travelling through the Europan seas, fighting off monsters and struggling to survive. It broadcasts itself as scary situations, terrible odds, and coming together as a team to overcome the dangers deep beneath the ice. The gameplay, however, is anything but that. Your character wobbles around drunkenly because everything appears to be connected to your head by a string and your body is just a series of PNGs loosely strapped together. There is a lighthearted, almost joking sense to everything and reading between the lines encourages players to go rogue and cause trouble. "Clowns" and "Cultists" are the main troublemakers, encouraging you to troll other players and sabotage the sub respectively.
On one hand, the game acts like it's a serious endeavor and on the other hand, it plays like a joke. People screeching into their mics, blowing each other up, poisoning each other (citing 'experiments') and just generally trashing the submarine. Some claim that they're 'roleplaying' though most of the time it's just trolling and trying to skate by a ban. The only way you can avoid this is by hosting your own servers, even 'serious' servers often have to deal with trolling idiots so you're stuck playing with a handful of people and (stupid) bots.
Without a solid identity (is it supposed to be Space Station 13 trolling or a horror survival game?) the game struggles to do much more than just be a bit of a mess. It seems to be trying to straddle the line between silly stupidity and serious horror and horribly misses the mark on both.
For the game itself, it's relatively poorly optimized and tends to choke and die during intense moments which makes it pretty frustrating. Overall, I can't really recommend this game until it sorts out its identity, picks a lane and fixes itself.
