Cepheus Protocol

Not a huge fan of the changes they keep making, so I can't recommend. The game was at it's best when it was "You are the Military in a Left For Dead 2 or World War Z esque setting, go fight the infection". Like by definition this should be a game that encourages you to hunker down in one area and holdback the infected by blowing bridges, establishing checkpoints to test civilians for infection, sending out teams into infected areas to recover civilians, the works. It should be a game of resource management and making choices to sacrifice neighborhoods as you slowly pull back to wherever your forward base is. Instead you just get building sized kaiju infected or bird swarms that basically make it impossible to just play the game as you want. Like this is a game about killing zombies and the Devs have reworked it towards that, but it kind of sucks. Take State of Decay as an example, as anyone who has ever played that game can tell you: killing zombies is just the busywork you do as you make supply runs or go recruit survivors. You have fun dealing with zombie sieges not because it's thrilling work to fight them, but because you planned ahead and have a level 3 workshop where you manufacture ammo, or plague cure to keep your survivors from dying from wounds. The endgame is never you getting matched, it's having fun once you've overmatched the zombie horde. I wish the focus of this game was on evacuating XX% of the city's population before the city gets napalmed or nuked or whatever, rate success on your level of people saved, not on fighting the super zombie or whatever. (Also Performance is terrible but most people have already commented on that)

The game used to be an interesting blend of RTS, investigation, and resource management where u would send a small team into a bustling city in search of a budding zombie outbreak. You would have to pay attention to news snippets, and monitor ground traffic for any anomalies as you build up your forces. Carefully narrowing your search until you could trace it back to a source. The better and faster you where at investigating, the faster you could set up a perimeter and hopefully prevent the infection from spreading, before sending in your soldiers to clear out the infected area, block by block, and building by building. It really was a completely unique game unlike any other ive played, but now? Its indistinguishable from any other base building RTS on the market. you put down ur production buildings while racing the bot as it places its own buildings. There's no slow and steady trickle of infected that you have to trace back to a source, but instead a massive wave of zombies that spreads out of a random spot on the map and sweeps over whatever few people u managed to land in the short seconds it took for the zombie wave to spawn. I get that this is still EA, but the game worked perfectly fine until the devs decided to overhaul the entire thing from the roots up. Thats the kind of work that should really be saved for a Cepheus Protocol 2, after you've proven you can make a playable first game, ala Hell divers 1

dev cant decide what they want. one patch might have something, next patch it will be gone. rinse and repeat till they run out of money or players.

This game was so much fun and I understand why the devs felt the need to start from scratch. However this game is just unplayable now without nerfing the infected in the settings. Infected swarm any camps before you can even get defenses set up and you can't just set up far away from their initial point because then they will spread to other zones and that snowballs into a loss. The original map was so good, you always had an easy containment to set up and hold while you build your forces and eventually start making incursions into the infected zone. Now you just have to hope the infected spawn point is not right in the middle of the city where it will spread in less than 10 minutes. If the devs make the initial start more like it was before where you can easily set up zones for containment then I will happily recommend this game, but right now it's just too much of a hassle to even play the game.

While Cepheus Protocol has been decently fun for the time I've played it for. I find that I only now boot it thinking about the missed potential. To note, this is a small dev team. They aren't superhuman, but I don't think that means the product shouldn't be criticised. It doesn't mean dev behaviour shouldn't be criticised earlier, despite the stresses of game dev. Take this review with that knowledge. There have been a lot of situations where response to criticism has been quite negative. Look through the steam reviews at the dev responses, you'll see some. I want to address that first because its one of the classic early access trappings. I completely understand that seeing people bash on your hard work sucks. I write, I get it, I've had it happen myself. What I cannot get behind is some of the odd attitudes to this criticism, particularly the way its handled publicly. Its not a particularly encouraging sight for potential buyers when a member of the dev team is arguing in the review comments. It shows that they are passionate, you can tell that the devs do love the game they're making. But its just not a good look. It'd be better to just not respond. People are jerks, but responding to that stuff with also being a jerk again, doesn't paint a good picture. Onto the actual game though. --------------------------------- Conceptually this game is awesome. Hold down key chokepoints and beat back areas of high infection, save the local population. It fails in actually providing this experience, with both inconsistent enemy and player unit behaviour, buggy mechanics and a general lack of polish around the core mechanics of the game. The game is a victim of Feature bloat. Rather than going back and focusing the majority of development on getting the key systems working, we're adding features such as 'player controlled third person operators' and 'a second screen tactical map' which you access from a browser or an app on your phone. While its good to see that the dev team is passionate about adding these things. It isn't the right time for them. Evac is a cool idea in concept, however there's little incentive to do it. The rewards aren't great and you maintain a comfortable economy by just taking over resource nodes on one safe side of the map. (I assume this system is getting a rework, I hope it actually becomes useful outside of small money rewards). In theory, its supposed to stop Patient zero from being able to get more zombies. Its really too inconvenient to ever do in the zones she's going to go to. That's if the infection mechanics actually end up working when she spreads there of course. What reason do I have to go through that headache if I can just respond to not doing it with some more turrets? Assets seem to be tonally inconsistent. The Juggernaut enemy is just some weird creature, it doesn't follow the visual consistency of the zombie buildings which are actually cool and are made of infected individuals. Why not have these big tank units be constructed in the same way as those buildings, like the Rotten in dark souls 2? Sell me on these things! You have a good concept and you're not using it! Go wild! You mention wanting to be like prototype in some review responses! Get gnarly! The Goliath in prototype 2 looked nasty, I can only assume the Juggernaut is meant to feel like the same kind of monster! At the same time, I have zero interest in any of what the player faction has. In pursuit of realistic gear, your units lack any real identity. I don't swap out my unit weapons aside from the Engineers LAW, because none of them really matter. They don't behave that much differently and Infantry is so much more underpowered than any flying vehicle, I don't see why you'd use them outside of early defence or for the roleplay experience. I mean I only really use engineers, maybe a heavy if I'm trying to build somewhere dangerous, the rest is vehicles. The AI super boss, patient zero is quite possibly the worst mechanic in the game, she isn't very well implemented. Sometimes she bugs out, and never ever moves to other zones until you interact with her. Apparently reloading fixes this? Shouldn't have to do that though. Other games (these are very rare, she never usually actually works) she will beeline towards your structures immediately. This has no counterplay early on, you can't hurt her with your units. You will lose that base if she does it. The only thing you can do is have more than a singular compound built. [strike] I've also had issues with enemy population in general. I can't actually tell what determines the creation of zombies. They have these infection pods they all spawn from. However they eventually run out of population to transform. The zombies are meant resolve this by building these pods in new sectors. This however also hardly seems to work. They eventually will just hit a wall and not convert any new infected, leading to an awkward quiet portion of the game where just nothing happens. You'll go into the enemy zones and there will be no enemies. You just pot shot at buildings until you find patient zero. I never do anything to stop them from converting people, it just doesn't work. [/strike] When you then find her, you spend ten minutes stun locking her with flashbangs from 6 spec ops units until her gigantic health pool ticks down. Its like I'm just shooting at a number, I want her to feel intimidating, she looks exactly the same as a normal zombie. Give her horrible prototype arms or something. Make shooting her actually do something. There's no feedback to me hurting her at all! Her design doesn't at all convey that she's a horrible tanky monster! The only reason she actually does have all that health is because the enemy AI can't at all react to you attacking her. It can't actually protect her! I'd much prefer it if you could kill patient zero. If she brought herself back somewhere on the map until you could create a unit which could capture her and stop her returning. It'd make defence feel more interesting as you don't just lose to her if she shows up, it would also give some incentive to go and hunt her down early. Make it so she can't make new buildings during the time she's dead! I can imagine weighing my options between killing her so she isn't around for a bit, or letting her get away so I know where she might come from again. I obviously understand this is a nightmare to balance though. In terms of actual good things. I like how the design of the city is important in your base designs. I have to think about where the zombies are going to come from. I can't build around sharp corners as I wont have line of sight on the horde. I like that holding a bridge is more effective than anything else. I remember in the old version actually blowing up a bridge was an awesome choice. You make a completely safe area at the consequence of having to use helicopters to ferry your units across. Good stuff! Put more bridge focused maps in the game please! I like the idea of using roofs to your advantage (if it worked properly). Being able to deposit a sniper on a roof and then safely hold and area is great! When bird swarms lag get fixed (So I don't have to disable them), it'd make them actually a quite interesting enemy unit. Having to give your rooftop squads some form of defence from them. Gas towers are cool, I like that it gives you limited operating time in a sector. It makes it important to do hit and run tactics and makes me actually use mortars. I do wish that it wouldn't once again nerf the effectiveness of infantry. Which is already weak. They are a good mechanic though. Overall, I wouldn't recommend it right now. I find myself coming back to it over and over though, because I so want it to be a good game. I'd buy it on sale if you're still interested, its got potential. Lets just hope things get better so I can change my review positive. I want you guys to earn eight billion dollars from this game!

This is a tough one - I was so divided between giving it a yes or a no and even refunding the game. Do I recommend it? Yes -- but not now unless there's a HEAVY sale. The asking price is too high for how much of a WIP it is and it's a shame, because it's a *really* cool game. It has one core issue: Communication vs new player experience. What do I mean? The game doesn't tell you a single thing, but it's absolutely relentless. No tutorial and little to no information. It's totally RNG where the infected will originate, but they will consistently overrun your base before you can set it up. Git gud? Sure. But it's hard to do that when I don't have time to get to grips with the mechanics. Built you base too close to ground zero or built your walls on the wrong side? Basically game over. You're encouraged to lock down zones on the map to halt the infected, but I can barely manage ONE base. Either a tutorial or a more forgiving day system (like 7DTD) that gives you a grace period to set up one base would go a long way. I'm experienced with RTS games and that's the only thing that gave me any clue how to play. I *really* want to recommend this, but I just can't. It's a rough new player experience that feels like being dropkicked into the deep end. Optimization is also poor and there's no shortage of jank. The biggest being the camera getting stuck on the many tall buildings in the city - not ideal when every second counts at the start of a run. I get that it's Early Access, so I can excuse the jank, but this just feels like it's hellbent on being frustrating to new players. I feel like it's made with love though, so I hope it sees further development and some of that love goes towards welcoming newbies.

Bought one game, ended up with a totally different game because the devs changed direction. Used to be a really cool and unique outbreak containment rts where you build checkpoints, quarantine zones and pay attention to news headlines to track and contain a zombie outbreak but that entire gameplay idea was abandoned but has since been re added as a shadow of itself. Supreme disappointment.

Really bad optimization still. It feels like each update it gets worse. Good concept though.

I've owned this game since around launch, and there's been all theses big sweeping changes and in my personal opinion, they haven't made the game all that better. This game around the launch period was great, all it needed was some tweaks to the friction of playing it, such as a rework of the HUD to look a bit more polished, some performance upgrades, and polishing of the existing systems. Instead, this game has decided to add a bunch of features and repetitively change the scope of the game. With custom operators that still feel awful to control, special enemy types that become more an annoyance than actual fun, constant reworking and changing of maps when I still think the best map you had was the first one. I think the dev's hearts are in the right place, but we don't need co-op, map changes, a companion app, more enemy types etc to make the game more enjoyable. If you spent that time and effort on small things like HUD reworks with actual good designs that don't look cheap, and worked on the general jank and smoothness of the game, this game would be 100x better than it is now. It seems every year you add a map, add a bunch of enemies, then delete the map from existence, work on a new map, repeat...yet the same core problems are there. I've been watching this game for years now, trying the experimental builds, trying the updates and changes, and honestly it's just lost its magic and it's vision it had at launch. A polished and enjoyable experience could've been well achieved by now, but instead it's just working on updates that backtrack and repeat.