Hollow Signal

The welcoming screen has everything you need to start a run, including a choice between four characters. More characters can be unlocked as you progress, and each one comes with its own weapon and unique perk. You can also select three modifiers that increase the difficulty by making bosses tougher, increasing enemy swarms, or reducing healing effectiveness. In return, these modifiers reward you with more fragments, the game’s main currency. Once you’re happy with your setup, you start a run always takes place in a basic and bland arena. The gameplay follows the standard survivors genre formula: enemies constantly swarm you, and you defeat them while collecting the experience points they drop to become stronger. Shooting is automatic, while auto-aim has to be enabled in the settings. However, I quickly noticed that auto-aim only works when playing with a gamepad. The settings do include several useful accessibility options for better visibility, such as reduced clutter, increased pickup radius, reduced camera movement, and more. As expected, collecting enough experience opens an upgrade window where you choose one option from a random selection of three. These upgrades can be new weapons or stat boosts, such as increased movement speed, higher damage, and other improvements. Weapons come in different rarities, and selecting the same weapon again increases its level and unlocks additional perks, such as more projectiles, shorter cooldowns, or extra effects. These perks also have different rarities. You can only carry a limited number of weapons, and each one can be upgraded up to five times. After reaching the maximum level, weapon upgrades stop appearing and are replaced with regular stat boosts. Besides experience, you also collect items that fill a separate signal bar. Once it is full and you have enough fragments, which also drop from defeated enemies, you activate a slot machine. The reward can vary: you might get nothing, receive a free weapon level upgrade, gain extra fragments, activate fever mode where experience and fragments are temporarily doubled and you kill everyone with a single shot, or evolve one of your weapons with a unique perk. While this mechanic initially feels like a gamble, you usually come out ahead, and the fragment cost quickly becomes irrelevant once you are destroying entire enemy swarms within seconds. If you collect enough loot in a short period, you activate Override, a powerful ability that allows you to mark a large portion of the swarm before wiping them out. This creates a huge power spike and lets you level up much faster compared to the slow opening minutes. The beginning of each run can feel a little dull until you unlock a new weapon and start clearing enemies at a much faster pace. After a few minutes, a boss appears with projectile attacks and area-based abilities clearly marked on the ground, giving you time to dodge. Defeating a boss rewards you with a major weapon that works separately from your regular weapon slots. The more bosses you defeat, the more of these powerful weapons you can collect. They make the run easier, but the enemy waves continue to grow stronger every minute, and eventually the pressure becomes too much. Like most games in the survivors genre, dying is part of the progression loop. The fragments you collect during runs can be spent back at the main menu on permanent upgrades. There are only nine upgrade categories, offering basic improvements like increased damage, experience gain, fragment gain, critical chance, and similar bonuses. Each upgrade has a purchase limit, and every purchase increases the cost of the next one. Overall, there is nothing revolutionary here, but the game does have some enjoyable touches. The stages feature flashy visual effects and glitch-like effects that make the action chaotic, while each run quickly turns you into an unstoppable force. There is some grinding required to unlock everything, but compared to similar titles, the process does not feel overly demanding. Even with all that, I’d still wait for a nice discount.

Um resumo sobre isso: ideia boa, arte ruim. Esse é um jogo de horda e o tema é almas e ecos… O problema é que foi feito, pelo menos, 50% por IA! Mas, para o estilo do jogo, tem coisas boas, como: a máquina de caça-níqueis, com um buff aleatório, o glitch e ruídos no jogo, para identificar um novo inimigo, o ambiente em geral para dar essa coisa de medo, etc. Mas teve muita coisa ruim, como: fundo.jpg, inimigos.png, cutscene.IA, falta de um menu inicial, tela inicial.jpg, etc. Dá para melhorar muito em questão da arte do jogo para atrair mais gente, mas, por enquanto, está ruim.