Future Breach 64

everything that Ready Or Not did, Future Breach 64 did better.

good

This game has a lot of potential, but is held back by a couple of confusing design choices. First off the positive - I love the retro visual style and the dystopian sci-fi tone of Future Breach. The gameplay loop is also a unique take on the extraction/looter shooter formula: your mission in each raid is to gather workers, fuel and tech resources - all of these contribute to the construction of a giant mothership being built in your base. The base/hub is really nicely done - it feels like a living community and you can see your progress in the form of new npcs, piles of resources, the growing mothership and defensive structures you can manually build using resource. I enjoyed it a lot for the first few hours, but the big problem soon became clear - build progression on the mothership is WAY too slow. I put in around 8 hours and still hadn't completed the first engine - this means it would take dozens, possibly over 100 hours to finish the story. However, there's not enough variety to keep this game interesting for anywhere near that time. In the dev's latest update, a "reduced grind" mode was added - this was a step in the right direction, but implemented badly. Instead of simply rebalancing the progression, the reduced grind mode was added as an optional "cheat" - you have to find a secret room, do a couple of tasks and then enable the mode from settings. So far, not too bad, but the big problem with this update is that enabling the mode disables achievement unlocks permanently. The dev is treating this mode like a cheat that the game punished players for - but without this mode, the progression of the game is simply bad. As a result, I'm not going to finish this game. I'm giving it a thumbs up because it was ALMOST a hidden gem. If progression had been faster by default so that the whole game could be finished in around 10 hours, it would have been perfect. If the dev wanted to motivate players to put more time than this into Future Breach, he would need to add more mission variety and narrative content in order to stop the loop from becoming boring. Personally, I think it should have kept the vision small as a short-but-sweet, budget gaming experience.