Death In Abyss

The premise is that the game is meant to be difficult, so complaining about the difficulty sounds a bit silly. However, I can’t help but feel disappointed. After the challenges I overcame, I expected the game to be longer above all — it only took me 5 hours to reach the end credits. I've no intention of achieving the Prime rank in each level; I’m not interested in that. Moreover, the biggest disappointment was the ending itself. After everything I went through, is this really the reward? At the moment, there’s no endless mode, which in my opinion could have been a very fun addition. The only pros I can think of right now are the movement system, it’s genuinely well-made, responsive, and dynamic, the enemies are designed specifically to keep you constantly moving. On that front, there’s really nothing to criticize. As frustrating as it can be, it ultimately feels satisfying when you finally win. I don’t feel like criticizing the difficulty level itself. You know it'll be a hard game when you buy it, although a few extra levels to create a smoother difficulty curve instead of hitting a wall would have been appreciated... still there’s one thing I can’t ignore: enemies that can kill you in one hit are objectively a bad idea in any game, and there are several instances here (the Predator, the Shark, the Ovule, and even the final boss). All things considered, if I'd known beforehand that the game was like this, I either wouldn’t have bought it or I would have asked for a refund. I didn’t dislike it because it’s absurdly difficult, but because: 1. It’s very short. I don’t like comparing game price ranges, but for €20 you can find longer games that are just as interesting. 2. The ending offers absolutely no real reward — nothing that makes you say, “Yes, well done. You made it.” AH, one last thingh, can be spoiler so watch if you read it: Near mid game you find an upgrade that let you dash to deflect/absord incoming projectiles. I touhght it was cool to have upgrades, and maybe there would have been more in the next levels, but no. Its only that. Quite disappointing...

This is amazing. As an arena shooter it has a lot of variety in enemies and combat options, and even though it's with ships it’s incredibly fast-paced thanks to the dashes and speed, you have to be on alert all the time and learn who to target first. The designs and atmosphere lean toward horror, with all the killing creatures at the bottom of the sea, but it’s really the incredible sound design that makes it unique and even scary. It is pretty hard and challenging. You’ll find yourself replaying levels and hordes over and over because you die so often, but it almost never feels unfair because the game gives you everything you need to handle it. Especially the bosses the attacks are very satisfying to master. It's more like an arcade because of its short length, it’s also very demanding when it comes to scoring. Even though you don’t die from a single hit and can heal by killing enemies, if you want a good score you practically have to go for a no-hit run, but it always feels achievable. Highly recommended. Esp: Esta tremeeendo, como arena shooter es bastante variado por los enemigos y con opciones para pelear, y aunque sea con naves es re frenético por los dashes y la velocidad, tenes que estar a full y aprender a quien enfocarte primero. Por los diseños y la atmósfera tira para el horror con todo lo que es matar bichos en el fondo del mar, pero mas que nada el increíble diseño sonoro que lo hace único. Lo que si es difícil, bastante, te la pasas repitiendo niveles y hordas por morir tanto, y casi nunca se siente injusto porque te da todas las cosas necesarias para lidiar con todo. Especialmente los bosses con sus ataques que son muy satisfactorios de aprender. Tira mas a un arcade por lo cortito, es muy exigente con la puntuación, aunque no mueras de un solo golpe y te puedas curar al matar, si querés buena puntuación prácticamente tenes que hace no-hit, pero siempre se siente posible. Muy recomendado

if your looking for a more horror themed starfox like id pass on this one. you have a constant enemy bombardment that swarms your screen making you have to become a super sweat the second you start the game without any build up to learn the controls on top of enemy design so grossly overtuned against the player this is more of a thing to look at than play. you dont 1v1 bosses they join in slowly and darken your screen making everything attack you in a grim haze with even less visible range. on top of this there is no mini map or boundry marker so you will constantly move into the out of bounds and risk instantly losing. oh and there are enemys that can apparently 1 shot you. this is what happens when you have a richly creative mind misunderstand what difficulty is.

The first boss has an attack where it will eject a limb out into the center of the screen and then start rotating in one of the four cardinal directions. If you happen to already be moving in that direction there is quite literally no time to react because the hitbox is perpetually active and it takes longer to notice the motion and then switch directional movement keys (up/down is on e/q so switching from left/right to up/down requires relocating your fingers) than it does for the tentacle to hit you. Moving diagonally seems to only work around 50% of the time. It is also proximity based, there seems to be less room to react at closer distances and the movement quickly loses the four-direction tracking as it instead tries to track to you. It does this attack seemingly anywhere from 4-6 times throughout the fight, so statistically you are likely to take a guaranteed hit at least once in the fight. Did I mention this is all while aoe explosive enemies are swarming around you that explode regardless of if you kill them or bump them? This sort of sums up the game. It requires full 360 awareness at all times in a 3d space on a 2d screen. Its not feasible for most people. You will dodge in a direction expecting to clear something, only for it to hit you anyways. You will dodge in a direction, and magically there is already an enemy outside of your field of view in that direction that hits you anyways. You need to be fully aware of all 30+ off-screen enemies at all times, or things will just hit you anyways. It's not as simple as manipulating a swarm together because spawns are random across the whole arena. A lot of attacks in the game continually aim at your current position, leading to moments where you dodge and the fully-extended attack seems to pivot to hit you anyways. Enemies will chase you down to grab you, turning on a dime, forcing you to prioritize them and back away, leading to you backing into things and getting hit anyways. Swarms of smaller enemies will end up naturally forming shields around larger targets, leading to you trying to kill a larger target and it takes too long and you get hit anyways. Oh and the ending [spoiler]is you just get killed anyways at the end of it all, so that checks out I guess.[/spoiler] There is skill involved, but there's just so much going on that the only way to actually apply the skill is if you literally have a hyper autistic level of spatial awareness beyond your field of view. The result for me is simply a trial and error game. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel satisfying to finally get through the trial and error just for the game to call your performance "weak" without any indication of how you could have improved. It shows you your time, hits and kills, but no individual rankings so no way to know what to improve. The game gives you exactly zero tips or guidance on seemingly fairly fundamental things like swarm management, leading crowds into bombs, how much you actually need to kill to hit quotas, etc, its just "here is a list of the controls play around until you're ready" then immediately puts you into the hardest possible encounter you could have faced in the combat system. Any questions you may have will never be answered. All levels are simply either fight a boss in a spherical arena, or kill enemies indefinitely in a spherical arena until you hit a quota. It loses appeal fast because even though there is enemy variety, the chaos of it all causes it to just blend together. The only ability upgrade you ever see doesn't change much about the combat loop, the projectiles you're supposed to dodge into are introduced alongside the upgrade so it feels like that was how they were always supposed to be dealt with. The countering mechanic with the dodge is hardly noticeable since again, there's always swarms so getting a big hit off on one doesn't feel very impactful, and it only works on projectiles and lasers which needed to be dodged anyways. Because the difficulty is always at max, it never feels like there's any kind of ramping or building up to something, the stakes are always the same. The music(?) I've heard has been unimpressive, at least compared to that steam trailer. It's either ambient or not present, which does not help that feeling of blending together at all. I managed to kind of just find myself bored after a while.

What a phenomenal game Sure, it looks like Star Fox as if it were a deep-sea sci-fi horror, but it's so esoteric & mysterious that calling it a Star-Fox-like would be doing a disservice to Death in Abyss. I am a HUGE fan of retraux (or faux-retro) games, and even tho I never played a whole lot of PlayStation 1 games, I adore the jagged & gritty design direction in this game. I particularly love the art style & audio design. The artwork meshes jagged models & pixelated textures with an old green-colored computer interface. Probably close to something like Metal Gear Solid's art direction. The sound design is deliciously bit-crunched, which usually employs a cacophony of weird alien sounds (fitting for the setting) but it can also sound mysteriously frightening at times. Death in Abyss is PUNISHINGLY DIFFICULT, which is fitting for a PS1-like game. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't want challenging gameplay. Completing the full campaign is short, but beating each mission is very exhausting since it tests your 3D spatial awareness, movement, and gunplay all at once. If you can't beat a mission the first time, then take a break & try it again another day, that's how I maintained my sanity. Death in Abyss is so cool, creepy, and engaging all throughout. I just wish I had MORE missions to play on this game, which I think would be a testament to how freakin amazing it is. If you're squeamish about the price tag, (which is understandable, it seems a little steep for a 6-7 hour game) then wait for a sale.

SNES Star Fox was one of the first games I ever played, and an all time favorite. Nowadays I tend to enjoy souls-likes mostly, I LOVE THIS GAME. The sound design is choice, and the vibes are immaculate. The difficulty is as intense as the atmosphere, and the final boss payoff is so so so worth it. The way it demands you split your attention in many directions while managing all of your controls tickles the same part of the brain that Armored Core 6 does for me, so do not sleep on this if you liked AC6. Play the demo at least!

Despite the negative review, this game is very fun. I love the enemy visual design and the controls are smooth and lovely and the sound effects are grand. I love being able to bomb the enemies using the tumours and the power ups that give you swarms of rockets and it's all so cool! HOWEVER the game scales WAY too quickly with its difficulty. Enemies do massive damage, so you're expected to dodge, but the amount of stuff they pile onto you gets very overwhelming very quickly. By level 2, you already have massive swarms of enemies combining with enemies that latch onto your ship, draining your health and blocking your vision, an enemy that covers the entire map in darkness and removes the audio cues -- the things I was using to tell when I should dodge enemy attacks -- that is super tanky and difficult to kill on top of an enemy that snipes you from afar. Combine that with levels that take a long time to complete, very little breathing room in between waves and the fact that these levels are apparently all there are to the game and I just don't see myself sticking with this for too long. I am, admittedly, not very good at most games. Part of this may definitely be a skill issue on my part. But I wish I could mitigate that. I wish I could be bad and still play this game. I don't expect this game to get down on its knees and serve me victory on a plate, but I do want to be able to feel like I'm getting somewhere when I die instead of just saying "so they spawned a ton of audio-cue enemies at the same time as the darkness enemy, now I die." I'm trying to save cash at the moment. If this game was half the price it is now, I would probably keep it. I'd bang my head against that wall because, well, it was cheap! But it wasn't cheap. It's frustrating and annoying and I just want to have a fun arcade gaming experience that I can come onto for an hour and have a blast! If they tone the game's difficulty down in the future -- maybe by adding something that lets you reduce enemy damage or health because I could otherwise deal with the large crowds -- then I might buy the game again because, like I said, I did have fun with the game. But, for now, I think I'd rather have my money back.

Нас всех обманули: на дне морском ни хрена не Губка Боб, а хтонический зубастый ужас.

Wasted potential… but still fun. Extremely unique gameplay - needed expanded upon. Very little enemy variation. Core of a great game is in here. But nothing else? If you’re curious try the demo. It is 70% of the full game. Price is too high. I’m sadly disappointed. Was looking forward to this one. Was on wish list since demo. Cool boss designs.

Brilliant answer to a seemingly absurd question--what if Star Fox 64 was a brutal, undersea horror game? Fast-paced, blisteringly difficult but deeply satisfying to master, I had an amazing time steering my frail little ship safely through swarms of what I can only describe as cancerous tumors covered in teeth and tentacles. Special, life-shortening shout-out to the enemies in the second level for making the "look behind you" function as essential as the fire button--if you liked Devil Daggers, you've gotta try this one