Mycopunk

Great gun play, fun game with a great idea

boarderlands if it was fun

[h1] Less Than the Sum of its Parts [/h1] Yet another case of Steam needing a "conflicted/mixed" option. I played the demo for this game a while back, thought to myself "this game has the sauce", and then a friend and I picked it up. There's a lot of good here, but some really fundimental problems prevent it from all coming together for me. First, the good: - The base guns feel excellent to shoot - The build system is deep and interesting without feeling too complicated or overwhelming - The sense of style and humor is fantastic - 3/4 Characters are fun and diverse - For the first couple of hours the limb/armor system is inspired Now, for the bad: - Weapons feel like nerf blasters at higher difficulties - The grind will devour your soul or not exist at all, depending on if you like the roguelike mode or not - Map/mission/encounter design rarely does anything remotely interesting and just aren't fun - Visual clarity is genuinely horrible, both due to enemies lacking proper outlines and the armor/limb system making it very difficult to parse at a glance how many (if any) enemies are left - Bruiser feels pretty terrible to play - Limb/armor system falls off hard It really feels to me like these individually amazing systems don't have an emulsifier to bring them together. I love these guns and these enemy designs, but I didn't every get a moment when I felt like they could really shine. I also don't think the difficulty scaling works all that well, enemies just kinda turn into bullet sponges at higher difficulties, which can slow the game's pace down dramatically if it's a mission where you have to kill all of them. The system which calls and creates hordes needs to be rethought completely imho. The visual clarity is also a huge problem. Even before you get all the effects filling up the screen, in some envoirnments enemies can blend right in. Worse yet, because parts of the enemies regularly fall off and persist after the enemy dies (which is a cool system by itself), you end up with bits of enemy everywhere making it very difficult to parse at a glance what is and isn't a threat and where enemies are and aren't. Some sort of accessability option for outlines on living enemies would go a long way to make this more playable, but as it stands its just kinda frustrating. Speaking of frustrating, the progression curve here is all out of whack. If you're playing normal missions, you get upgrades and experience extremely slowly and have to wait a very long time before you can do interesting things with the build system. If you like the roguelike mode, however, that skips the grind altogether and gets you directly to the endgame upgrades for whatever weapon you're using. There's further grind to be had beyond that, but it's still incredibly annoying that the game feels like it's punishing me for not wanting to play the non-roguelike modes. Because there's so much to love, there are going to be a lot of people who love this game. I can't be one of those people right now, and I really hope the problems are fixed and this game is allowed to shine like I know it can.