Kvark

I liked it, I guess. The AI is very stupid, though.

if you love Half-life, you will love Kvark!

годнота

If you come in expecting Half-Life you might be a little disappointed. Bits of Kvark are certainly inspired by it, from the visuals to the setting to the weapons, gunplay and method of selecting weapons, but it's somewhere inbetween Half-Life and a boomer shooter. You play through separate levels, find secrets and stay on the move so hitscanning enemies don't get the jump on you, with the very occasional puzzle (and only one of them is physics-based). Not a bad thing though. I enjoyed my time with it! Enemies explode in satisfying ways, the sound design is pretty good and the setting with its dark humour and brutalist architecture is pretty solid. It also runs enormously well considering it's on Unreal Engine 5. Weapons are fairly basic and somewhat unbalanced, with the assault rifle clearing the minigun any day of the week, and for some people the game might be too short but I found it to end at the perfect time. The bosses also suck but that's a given in this genre as much as you expect a platformer to have a jump button. Regardless, a very solid little shooter!

i REALLY (!!) enjoyed: - the aesthetics, the mix of pixel art and modern effects works wonders, it's super creative and stylish! - the fast pace, it's very dynamic - the general atmosphere, it's really coherent and well done, the level design was really good and it got better and better along the game - the variety of environments, despite all this time spent between concrete walls, it didn't feel repetitive - all the little interactions (turning on the radio, breaking monitors, opening taps, flushing things down the toilets, ...) brought a lot of life to the game - the vibe of the game, there's a lot of funny posters and notes and random silly stuff, it doesn't try to be realistic, it's not very serious and the tone of it all was great - and who doesn't like to make fun of how communist (well, dictatorship) countries make no sense with their propaganda! - it runs on mac (thank you for that!!) i found VERY frustrating: - the enemies shoot through the walls and metal doors, it gives a sense of randomness to our playing, like, you can play perfectly, protect yourself from the enemies, but still get hit, and those enemies hit hard... very frustrating to die because of an enemy we can't even see (and that shouldn't be able to see us either)! - the keyboard mapping isn't great. with an AZERTY keyboard, i couldn't map the keys as one usually would and had to find other keys on the keyboard, which felt very unnatural since all other FPS i played would have a correct mapping, that was super annoying - too many weapons at the end of the game, and because anytime we open a door there's a different type of enemies, we never know which weapon to choose before opening a door and are wrong half of the time, also giving a sense of randomness, like, you can't play the game without getting hit at some point even if you're playing amazingly... because we need to kill the enemies very quick (as they are quite aggressive and... can shoot through the walls!!), it means we need to get ready for action any time we open a new door or climb up a stairway, meaning going through a dozen of weapons every time to reload them all... things to improve: - the enemies should shoot with less precision when they're far away, it would give those fights a better balance - there's a lot of little bugs that i'm sure wouldn't take that long to fix. from the enemies floating in the air when killed in a stairway, to the level "Labs" that has buggy light baking, the light reflections at the very top/bottom of the transparent capsule of the player, ... - the balance of the weapons... sometimes it feels like using the simple pistol is a better choice than one that's supposed to hit a lot harder etc, and as mentioned before, there's so many weapons and it's not easy to rapidly switch when fighting the enemies... all of that felt a bit off - after an auto-save near the saving points, it would be great being able to interact with the machine to save again manually. i often wanted to loot everything in the room, reload all my weapons and then save again just in case i die soon after, but couldn't i probably forget a few things, but in short, this is a a very great game, i really enjoyed it despite the very frustrating things i mentioned... really hope the devs will give this game more love and improve those things that a lot of players have noticed too, because it's really a shame that with just a few weeks more of work it could go from "great" to "memorably amazing". it's sooooo close to it, and i would love to play it again without the frustrating part, and recommend it to my friends with full enthusiasm, instead of saying "yeah play it, it's really really cool, but be ready to be frustrated because it's not polished". wishing all the team the best for your next games!!

love the atmosphere and gameplay loop

Drones still fly out of bounds and shoot you throughout the whole level. It's a known issue but the devs took the money and ran