I don't want to say the game is bad. It's average. Most of its pros are balanced out by its cons.
Unfortunately, the game is already "finished" and nothing will be changed in it (and I suspect that at launch, in some aspects, it was better than it is now). I'm leaving a negative review solely because I wanted to finish the game completely (learn the plot, get a better grip on the mechanics), but I've already gotten bored. Got bored way too fast.
Of course, this is all just my subjective opinion.
Pros in short:
-Stunning graphics. Everything (except characters) looks very beautiful.
-Pretty satisfying gunplay. Overall, nice gameplay mechanics, like the movement speed changing depending on whether your character is going uphill or downhill. A functional and useful pair of binoculars (a rarity in games).
-Crafting, progression, builds, a companion robot... Overall, you won't get completely bored.
-Lore. The idea of an 80s robot apocalypse is pretty original.
-Co-op game about teenage rebels with a hint of a tactical shooter? Sign me up!
-Price. You can find a Steam key on key reseller sites for a three dollars.
Maybe I forgot something. Well, doesn't matter. The game seems to have everything necessary to be at least a solid middle-of-the-road title with a dedicated fanbase. So why is nobody talking about it, and why does the peak player count on Steam Charts barely reach 12,000?
Well, I don't know what kind of marketing campaign the game had, or how many people play on consoles, but I can make a guess...
This game wastes its own potential with impressive efficiency.
Gunplay. The selection of weapons is modest, and paid DLCs don't fix this. Moreover, hip-fire bullet spread is a complete joke. At the same time, as soon as you aim down sights, bullets fly straight with almost zero spread. Skills compensate for this a little bit...
Oh my god, skills and progression. How good of an idea is it to hide skills with new gameplay elements somewhere at the very bottom of the skill tree? I don't know the answer to this question. There is some semblance of builds, but some skills are barely useful, while others are just too niche to even remember about them during combat. There are universal ones, like "more stamina, more health, less recoil."
Back to guns. Some of them *drumroll* are useless! Almost useless. The further you play, the more armored enemies you encounter, and it's better to strip their armor off in advance. The game has various rifles, which you can even load with armor-piercing rounds. Cool. But the game also has a .50 caliber rifle. Mmm... Hunting rifle? "I'll call you back!" You can attach a silencer to other rifles. But why? Stealth in this game is broken. Sometimes enemies won't notice a player firing a bazooka point-blank, and other times they spot you from 300 meters away while you're sitting in a bush behind a hill.
The game's balance seems broken. Take enemy ammo drops, for instance. There's a lot. Too much. And for some reason, high-level armor-piercing .50 cal ammo drops, but low-level ammo doesn't. Or a whole bunch of rocket launcher shells drop. I constantly returned to safehouses not to craft ammo, but to unload extra stuff into storage. Gathering certain resources is a joke. You can't chop down trees (the Swedes probably take environmental protection seriously, and a local apocalypse is no reason to chop trees; plus, Swedes are very law-abiding and can't just sail away to safety on a boat, probably don't have a boat license), but you can gather small trees (about 2 meters tall) in the forest. They give 1 unit of wood. Know what gives 2 units of wood? A flare. You can scrap it for resources, and you'll get more wood than from a two-meter tree. Crafting is weird. Guess what a wooden wall is made of (yes, there's base building in the game, but there's nothing interesting about it). I'll give you a minute to think. No, not wood. Metal and phosphorus. Why? I don't know.
Oh, by the way, the UI is awful. Overcrowded and uncomfortable. The radial menu has too few item slots, inventory space is always running out, and some items cannot be used comfortably directly from the inventory, so you constantly have to put them on the radial menu and then remove them.
Returning to the topic of weapons, specifically combat. The game tries with all its might (or is it just me?) to create the vibe of tactical survival against deadly machines. But there is no guerilla warfare here. There are hundreds of machines, and you have to kill them by the hundreds (if you want to get new weapons or level up in this lifetime). The abundance of ammo doesn't push you toward careful gameplay either, and the only traps in the game are "throw a mine on the ground with a playing radio nearby." Even though robots are indeed dangerous and kill the player quickly, 9 out of 10 times everything turns into a "pew-pew-pew Call of Duty style" firefight because it's less tedious than crawling through a town on your belly for 40 minutes just to find a rusty pistol and a spool of thread in a box as your reward.
Speaking of enemies... How do I put it. Um. This whole idea with weak spots and armored areas simply doesn't work. Just because a spot is vulnerable doesn't mean the robot will be destroyed after you destroy that spot, and destroying a specific part (like a weapon, optical sensor, or servo motor) is harder than just blowing up the entire robot. I thought different robots would have weak spots in completely different areas of their bodies (which is partially true), but in most cases, it's enough to just fire a few shots from a AMR into their center of mass, and then shoot a rocket launcher there (I'm not talking about small robots, you don't usually need a rocket launcher for them). Of course, you can try to entertain yourself by shooting off fuel tanks, optics, or the central processing unit (I don't know why a robot doesn't shut down after its CPU is destroyed). But after 40 hours, I still haven't figured out if there's any point to any of this.
The game suffers from Fallout 4 syndrome. All the interesting events happened before the protagonist arrived at the point of interest. All that's left are notes and corpses. Plus the robots you need to kill. The game lacks variety as it is. Clearing out identical towns or bunkers, collecting random junk, killing the same robots, pressing switches... I want to be a rebel, I want to participate in guerilla warfare (in-game, not in reality! please don't start World War III), experience interesting events firsthand, meet interesting characters, complete important tasks! Hey! I want the game to entertain me!
But unfortunately, all I get is clearing locations, gathering trash, and "go ahead hero, everyone died here, but you can read a note describing what happened." There are a few interesting quests and three and a half characters (well, after 40 hours of gameplay, those are the only ones I met).
And finally, atmosphere and design. Maybe I just don't like Sweden? I don't feel the 80s vibe in this game. Are a couple of guitars on a bed in a random house and rock music playing from a radio trap really all it takes for an 80s vibe? Most of the game consists of identical villages, identical bunkers, and forests. Beautiful forest. Snow-covered, green, autumn-colored. Forest. Plus a few castles. In the forest. Sometimes on hills! Sometimes there's a forest on hills. Okay, you get the point. Points of interest seem abundant and varied on the surface, but due to repetitive gameplay, it all feels boring and monotonous.
I hope I didn't forget anything, though I already wrote more than enough. The game has a decent concept, but mediocre (or just weird) execution. Some elements clash with each other or just don't work, and overall the game feels way too repetitive. For a three dollars, it's fine. It might be fun to play for a couple dozen hours. 5/10, neither fish nor fowl.
