Did you enjoy the original System Shock? Good, then you gonna like this one... at least at the beginning. The silly named Hyperviolent (really, they couldn't choose a more interesting name?) takes a page from the RPG inspired shooters of the 90s alongside some Doom 3 elements, like the flashlight, no duct tape on mars remember? And this is where things start to get odd, I mean, I get what they were trying to do with it, and I confess it does work better than in Doom 3, keeping you on your toes and feeling unsafe at every turn, it does work better specially because of the dual wielding weapons, but it gets really annoying towards the end when you can barely see ♥♥♥♥ cause everything is damn dark, you need inventory space and specially because you can't use the flashlight while using a double handed weapon like a shotgun, which you know, you gonna be using a lot so...
But this is not HV's only undoing, oh no, we also have to talk about the inventory management. I don't know why they decided to do it this way but oh man is it a hassle. You can't put shortcut access to your weapons and changing them has to be done in the moment, I mean, in the act, you have to enter your inventory and select and drag to the slot, jesus christ! You do have the mouse scroll to do it faster tho, I would be lying if I didn't mention they did add a faster way, but you run the danger of losing a gun or item while doing so, cause for some damn stupid reason, if you don't have your inventory slots properly sorted, the game doesn't automatically do it for you, which means that you might leave a gun in the way accidentally without you having the slightest idea until it is too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ late. This is the worst weapon alocation system I've seen in a while, and the worst part is it ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up my finale. What happened you say? Well, I lost weapons on the way without knowing it, and without knowing there was a completely unnecesary final stage and final boss in which there are almost zero ammo and NO WEAPONS at all, so I softlocked myself in the ending of the game. Also is worth mentioning that the final boss is terrible, and even with a melee weapon (which I suggest you always carry) you can't do ♥♥♥♥. So thank you for having this game leave Early Access unfinished.
There are other things worth mentioning also that really bothered me, like that lack of upgrades. I know this is not an inmersive sim, but having to run around to the end of the game with the same amount of inventory slots while having more and more ♥♥♥♥ to hoarde through the levels gets really old and tiring. Same goes for the stamina meter alongside anything else, I mean if you can upgrade your weapons then why you can't upgrade yourself? It was possible in System Shock and that was in 1994!
The final nail in the coffin is the bugs. Oh yeah, the game has somewhat of a terrible performance, the final boss has such a low framerate it's absurd, I have also fallen to the ground into space on some ocassions, enemies fuse to the walls and there's some really poor collision detection. In the final stage you are supposed to destroy some pillars but bullets go through them, I didn't realize that was what I was supposed to do until I ram at one with my sword and blew up out of nowhere, you have to shoot at the base of them for the collision to work. That's fine isn't it?
So can I recommend it? I just uninstalled the game after realizing that finishing it was impossible in the current state of my soflocked gameplay (and you can't access previous saves in the final level, cause it autosaves) but I DID ENJOY the first part of it, uncooked or not. IT DOES have something going, it's slow, steady and atmospheric. It's simple, fun and the levels are reminiscent of early Doom and other FPS of the time, it ain't all bad, thing is it's terribly undercooked, specially towards the end, and let me be clear with this: everybody who's leaving a negative review is right. So play at your own risk.
3/5
