This game has a lot of potential. I chose "Recommended" because I think that, with the right improvements, it could be really awesome.
PROS
There are a few things that stand out to me here. The combat (which, keep in mind, is the core of the game) feels good. Weapons have nice, punchy sounds, and the blood effect is done well. Enemies also do a good job of being unpredictable. Some are slow, some are fast, and some go from slow to fast in a heartbeat. You're never quite sure what they're going to do next, which keeps you "on your toes." Visually, the lighting system gives some nice atmosphere to the dark, indoor scenes. And the music (despite how it's used--see below) is pretty good.
CONS
There are quite a few things that I think need improvement. When I ran the game for the first time, it opened in this awful windowed mode that was 30% offscreen, so that I couldn't see the title or even some of the main menu buttons. I had to start a new game and use the options menu to switch to full screen, just so that I could see everything I needed to see. This wasn't a great first impression.
Music seems to mostly ignore gameplay. Regardless of whether you're in camp petting a dog or out shooting a horde of zombies, some tense/epic music is always playing. This takes away some of the music's impact and makes the exciting parts feel less exciting than they otherwise would. At the very least, calmer areas (like the camp) should have calmer music, to keep the combat areas feeling fresh.
A few bugs interfere with gameplay on a regular basis. For example, enemies sometimes get stuck in walls--despite having a clear path to me, they would just stand there next to the wall they were touching, doing nothing, while I shot them to death. And smaller enemies, like spiders, don't seem to have correct hitboxes--if you don't aim perfectly, your bullets pass right through their sprites, without doing damage. In a game where ammo is precious, this waste of ammo is very frustrating.
There are also a few quality-of-life features that I would like to see added. For instance, hotbar items like health packs and antidotes have no tooltips when you hover over them. Some of these items have pretty cryptic sprites, so I had to guess what they were and hope for the best--not fun when you're fighting off a horde. Also, since enemy bodies stay on the ground and pixelated blood is often scattered everywhere, it can be hard to tell which enemies are alive and which are dead. More than once I wasted ammo on a spider body that I thought *might* have been alive. Animations or highlighting could be used to make it a lot clearer which collections of pixels are actually threats to you.
Hopefully the devs see our feedback and find ways to get this game to its full potential. :)
