I'm a sucker for "Retro" or "Old School" FPS games. Lately there have been terrible/garbage retro FPS games hitting Steam lately, so when I saw this and how interesting it looked, I figured I'd give it a shot!
Well this game is, sadly, not that good. It's interesting but needs a lot more work. I didn't complete the game because I lost all interest in it real fast and I will explain everything that is wrong/needs improvement in this game.
First problem I had was the movement felt slow, and running for me didn't even work. I had to bunny hop everywhere to move around fast enough. My other problem that there is no vertical mouse look. That doesn't sound too bad right? Well only if there isn't any platform/pits to jump over... And there is. Not being able to see how close you actually are to the edge is annoying and can cause you to just walk off the edge to your death.
The 2 weapons that I got to use were just not fun to use. The pistol you first pick up is basically a water pistol, with TERRIBLE feedback. The "bullet" is like a puff of black smoke and impossible to tell if you even hit anything. The sounds aren't that good either. The second weapon I picked up was the "Assault Rifle" which was also just a water gun, only it was full auto, but seemed like it did less damage than the pistol. Again the feedback was terrible and didn't sound good either.
There wasn't a whole lot of pick ups. There was only ammo and health pickups. Picking up anything don't give you any feedback to say you picked up anything... like a keycard! In the second level there was a locked door which needed a blue keycard (though there is no visial way to know that you needed a blue keycard and there was a green light in front of the door,) and finding the key and walking over it, I wan't even sure I picked it up. No sound was made, and there was no icon on the HUD to show that I had a key.
The 2 enemy types I faced all did the same thing, which were a static 2D sprite that moved slowly towards me to melee me. Hurting them does not give any feedback at all, so you just keep shooting until they disappear. When an enemy hits you, you also don't have any feedback so you just see your health drop and just die. These enemies also deal WAY too much damage. The basic "White Invader" enemy deals 30 points of damage! As they don't make any noise, one or two can be behind you, and kill you in just a few seconds.
Map design (I only managed to make it 2 levels) were pretty linear and not a whole lot of exploration. From what I could tell, there is no secrets. The 2 levels I played each had "elevators" that had switches to active them. As long as you have direct line of sight with these switches, you can use them. Even when you are outside the elevator you can still use it... Doing that though will cause you to clip through the floor and cause you to fall endlessly...
The game doesn't have a save/load option. There is only a "Starting the next level is an auto save" and you only have a "continue" option on the main screen. So if you were to, say clip through the floor and fall endlessly, you would hit the pause menu and hit Quit (cause there is no re-load/restart option)... Which quits the entire game and not take you back to the menu. This was the point at where I lost interest playing anymore and wrote this up.
BUT, here are some positives!
This game is made with Unity, looks good, soundtrack sounds sweet, and runs well (even on my potato of a laptop!) It has a working options menu and re-bindable keys, though sound is limited to 1 slider. No separate audio options. The story seems interesting, though I could not get anywhere to see what happens. Again I only made it 2 levels until the problems made me not want to play it anymore. If the dev can fix/change some things this game could be really awesome to play! Until/If the dev does any of these much needed improvements, I sadly have to say avoid this game. If the dev does in fact change/improve this, I will probably give the game another go and update my review according.
