Dark Skies: The Nemansk Incident

Atmosphere and level design are top notch. Music is great. Visuals are very fitting. Having played Stalker games, I can see the influence. The design, from maps to missions is excellent. The levels are pretty linear, but with room to explore. I've only played for about 40 minutes so far but I'm really enjoying it. I had a hard time starting the game (it opened on my second monitor, with any menu options being below the bottom of the screen, so I couldn't do anything at first.) When I restarted it worked better and I was able to play. The combat isn't as good as I'd like, but it doesn't discourage me from wanting to soak up the atmosphere. This game is 9 dollars CAD. It's already been worth it and I've only just started the second zone. This game is art.

Has a lot of work, but I think there is a future for this. Remember, it's in very EA..

I really wanted to like this. The artstyle is good, the levels that I saw seem well made in certain respects (but they also have really annoying invisible walls in places you wouldn't expect there to be walls, like right on a road you've been following). It's nicely atmospheric and the ambient sounds are good. But overall it's just bad. I played nearly to the refund limit but realized that it'd be a mistake to keep playing and not return it when I had the chance, even with it being so cheap. Realistically this should be $3, maybe $5 (but that's pushing it)--not $10. CULTIC is $10, for comparison, and blows this out of the water on basically every level. CULTIC is also made by just one guy, by the way, so that can't be the excuse for why this game is the way it is. Dark Skies is buggy. For example, the sprint function randomly stops working and for no apparent reason, and guns that looked normal before become bizarrely far away from the player character's body when they're switched to, along with the player character's arms, with one of the arms becoming detached from the body altogether. The gameplay seems awful. I spent most of the time I was in it running around doing effectively nothing--there was very little combat. When there was combat I was shooting at braindead enemies who mostly stood still shooting at me and hardly reacted to getting shot. There should be animations for when they take damage that just aren't present, with maybe one exception that randomly appears here and there. I realized I had to stop playing when I came to what I think is the first mutant in the game--some shirtless pale low-poly potato man who stood still waving his arms at me from a distance, not reacting to the bullets I was dumping into him in any detectable way, after which I died for no clear reason. Did he kill me by waving air at me super hard? Did I die from some environmental hazard? No idea. The dev seems committed to his project and is responsive to feedback. On the other hand he and other reviewers seem inclined to blame certain problems on the engine and leave it at that. Well, why choose to spend years making a game in such a terrible engine that the dev, having already made a game in it, must've known is ♥♥♥♥? Apparently this engine is so limited and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ that it can't even allow a graphics options menu in the game apart from one set of presets of the "low," "medium," "high" sort. I'm not sure if it also prevents a keybinds or controls menu because that's absent too. There are single-dev projects that resulted in awesome games and that used engines that are actually worth something. Northern Journey is an example. So I doubt that there was no option but this dumpster fire of an engine. Maybe with a ton of work this game could be passable but considering this is the state it's in AFTER early access I'm not optimistic. I'm completely floored by the fact that this has "Mostly Positive" reviews on Steam. I didn't want to write a negative review but I thought someone has to give a realistic impression of the game so more people aren't misled into buying this by the existing reviews.

Um... No. Look, I would love to have a game that plays well and is what they advertised. But in my 14 whole minutes I found iffy controls, damage that is recorded in the little row of HP dots but has no visible or audible reaction. Or source. The guys with guns in this game have AWESOME silencers on their sub-machine-guns. And about 8 million well placed invisible walls. Not the kind you might find legitimately in a magic or sci-fi type game. No.. Poorly placed edge of area stuff that just HAPPENS to be on the safest paths over and over. Enough. I want my money back. And I don't recommend buying this. Even on sale.

Can't say much good about this game, if it came out in the 1990s it would fit in nicely with other games. The graphics are poor, no maps, no AI, enemies are so easy to kill. I would not bother downloading it. 3 out of 10.