(Now updated post finishing EA day 1 content)
First of all, there's a demo, it starts at the second area where you get to engage with the stealth, melee & shooting, so give it a go to get a feel for the gameplay.
The release itself clearly takes a lot of inspiration from Half-Life & surrounding releases, it mentions it on the storepage. You have a ton of charming scripted moments that bring the world alive in that classic sense instead of just static cutscenes. There's a relatively good pace of story flow & scripted moments, though they do slow down later in the outside areas, someone contacts you on your PDA periodically, you meet allies who don't last for long.
It feels like a classic release from that era that understands the assingment.
The gunplay too is surprisingly chunky, the particle effects from hitting enemies & surfaces, the smoke effects, muzzleflashes, bullet hit sounds on surfaces, are all good in my books, enemies could stand to twitch more from being shot at, but there's some kind of pain threshold system also where enemies do stagger if hit hard enough.
There are no difficulty options, & the game can be a bit hard, if you're not using melee a lot then you're going to run out of bullets fast.
Luckily melee is reliable, it stuns enemies, sometimes you can even rush certain alerted enemies, mostly just the pistol wielding ones because of their low accuracy & rate of fire.
- But difficulty options would be welcome in the future (even just the simple boring stuff of buffing/nerfing player dmg resistance & pickup amounts on lower/higher ones) because there's going to be a lot of people for whom certain spikes in combat will fall back on old school trial&error quickloading/saving all the time when you enter encounters with particular nasty enemy compositions.
Since this is my gameplay section I should mention the slightly strange decision to have 3 weapon slots only, which isn't quite era-appropriate. I haven't encountered all available weapons yet so I don't know how annoying that could potentially get, but worth mentioning if you're still reading this instead of booting up the demo.
Weapon variety felt limited. You pick up rusty pistols which you replace with small caliber SMGs which also get superseded by tweaked upgraded SMGs (all use same ammo), you find an old shotgun (presumably it too will have some upgraded version later), safety revolver which you can replace with a semi auto heavy rifle, you can occasionally find limited-use harpoon launchers which are deadly but sadly don't pin enemy ragdolls into surfaces. Also grenades. That plus occasional turret is your lot in terms of arsenal, so far.
Could stand to use with more variety, better progression of finding weapons along your journey.
Enemies are serviceable, they're a bit like the Strogg (though story seems to be building towards something with them), there's an issue of readability where the player could use some indication to who's a pistol carrier versus an SMG carrier for instance since one is much more deadlier than the other.
Maybe my standards have been lowered to such sewer depths after 20+ years of being assaulted by mostly awful AI in games, that I was pleasantly surprised to see that here AI took cover & had special lean-out-of-cover-to-fire animations even, they could roll, they stumbled & fell, they reposition in combat to surround you-- It's all indie jank & sometimes you won't notice it & it could be more frequent, but it's there, not just brainless b-lining towards you. They could use more cover opportunities in level design though.
- The vehicle is the jankiest part of the gameplay currently as of this version, feels a bit rough to drive, hopefully will be tuned to smooth out the camera, physics, controls, it's no Halo Warthog that's for sure.
The level design is okay, from a gameplay perspective I didn't feel lost or anything, it guides you & you get the classic lit ladders & vents to signpost progress. I enjoyed the layouts, but the detailing feels like it drops a bit post-intro. The intro sequence at the corporation ship is so packed with environmental detailing & the sculpted hallways having that claustrophobic non rectangle submarine like corridor look with a bunch of pipes & wires running their lengths really nails an aesthetic I enjoy. So when we get to the locations we spend most of our time I was mildly disappointed in seeing the levels follow a pretty boxy rectangle design with much more minimal placements of stuff like pipes, railings, wires, vent fans etc environmental detailing to make the place feel like it serves a function or is lived in.
There are flourishes that look more impressive, usually larger areas that evoke a more monolithic brutalist feel.
I do enjoy the overall aesthetics of this, the crusty textures look great, there's good use of lighting & shadowing, some nice touches of color, just wish the quality stayed consistent.
There's also environmental ambient sounds, humming machinery etc, but the mixing could maybe stand to bump up their volume a bit.
- It gets a bit repetitive later & feels like it could have used some more variety, whether it be scripting, puzzles, environmental dangers, or just brute force new enemies & weapons.
I didn't have many tech issues or bugs (one vehicle control bug but it was patched quickly). The menu is limited, your options are fullscreen on/off, vsync, 60fps cap, some gameplay stuff like toggle crouch, sprint, FOV, a handful of others, you can rebind stuff & it accepted thumb mouse buttons as well which isn't always a given when you look at barebones menus in games, I'm assuming controller support for the people who care is also minimal, there is a listing of controller binds in the menu if you keep flipping, but not sure if it was designed for that.
Performance dropped (sub 60) once you reach the garage section with the intro to driving outside in the wide open, so hopefully the bigger areas will see some optimization in the future, combat too started to chug later with larger groups of enemies all firing their SMGs.
Of course this being day 1 early access, a lot is subject to change & improve, hopefully dev garners enough support to be able to get some english voice acting eventually, currently there's french voiceovers, english subtitles seem okay from what I've read, not even many spelling errors, though the constant early access watermark in your top left corner is spelt wrong.
But I've enjoyed this. If you're itching for Half-Likes then this feels like one of the more promising ones out there, might be a solo dev as well which would make all the scripting effort feel all the more impressive in my mind.
