The top reviews need some refreshing, they're from last year. The game seems to have been very different from what it is now. The current top review claims to have finished the whole game in 40 minutes, and it's taken me roughly 11 hours to unlock every weapon, ability, passive, and difficulty. Still a little short, but nowhere near 40 minutes.
This game could really be something special with a little more love. The difficulty curve I think is perfectly fine, as is the progression system. But what would really bring more out of this game would be more of what's already added.
[b]TL;DR: It's absolutely worth getting.[/b]
[H1]Gun Diversity[/H1]
Currently, there's 9 survivors to choose from. Each character has a passive (i.e. bonus starting health, bonus movement speed, etc.) and a starting ability and weapon. The character selection I think is perfect, each of their starting abilities feels unique and you can make a class fantasy out of any of them.
However, most weapons don't feel particularly unique, except for the 2 melee classes (solely because they are melee) and the Scientist who has 2 of the more unique weapons (a lightning arc gun and an explosive spore shooter with no magazine). I think the guns could use a little more flavor and diversity, such as giving guns various stats like penetration (excluding laser weapons which already penetrate 100% of the time), knockback, damage fall-off, even crit chance would be a fun addition. Right now they only have 3 stats that matter: magazine size, damage, reload speed, and rate of fire (this aspect cannot be augmented, however, and there is no information readily available on the rate of fire of weapons).
Reload speed mostly seems irrelevant and I personally believe is outclassed by magazine size. I've hardly noticed a difference picking up reload speed passive in game, unless it's for a gun with a very slow reload speed, but that isn't many weapons. Scout's snipers, for instance, reload almost quickly as her rate of fire, or at least fast enough that I never felt downtime in which I needed to retreat and reload. I figured a sniper would have high damage, low rate of fire, small magazine, and long reload, but that doesn't seem to be the case. While she does the most damage per shot by far, there's a few guns that feel as though they have the same impact as her snipers.
I love the guns, I love all the gun designs and their aesthetics and shooting lasers, but I believe they need to be more differentiated.
[H1]Ability Diversity[/H1]
The abilities give about the same feeling of "lacking". For example, the laser ability fires a ray down a straight line, and there's another ability that does exactly the same thing but with bullets (I forgot the same, sorry). Their upgrades are also the same: the laser upgrades into a cone, the gun upgrades into a cone. While it's neat to stack them for maximum AOE, and maybe that was the intention, the lack of other abilities makes this just feel like 2 cloned abilities.
There are 12 abilities, not including starting abilities, and being able to pick 4 per run makes you cycle through build variations pretty quickly. Beyond that, I felt playing solo that I NEEDED to pick up the stim ability for healing, and in higher tiers the shield. Not having access to easier forms of healing or damage reduction gimps build diversity. I feel as though health could regenerate out of combat, by not shooting or taking any damage, by multiplying the current health regen stat by 4x (including upgrades) or something similar. Heals would still be viable because healing mid-fight is always good, but they wouldn't be [i]necessary[/i].
On top of this, if you want to upgrade an ability, you NEED to spec into its respective passive. For example, the lightning arcing ability requires a maxed out bonus health buff into order to be upgraded, and it's a substantial upgrade. But this means that you MUST spec into this health buff, even if you feel like you don't need health, and it doesn't have synergy with the lightning ability in any way. It doesn't scale off of health or arc to more units with bonus health, it's just added because...because?
I think this upgrade system needs to be changed completely. I want to experiment with different passives and abilities, but not being able to upgrade abilities seriously gimps you a lot of the time. Like for the stim ability, sure you can ignore its upgrade when you're playing solo--it just turns into an AoE. I can live without the shield deflect damage, too. But the massive bonus damage on the lightning arc? The wide cones of the gunfire and laser abilities? The massive screen-wide frost debuff of the frost nova? The upgrades are impactful, and skipping them feels so, so bad. Tying them to passives, while I understand the intention and simplicity of it, just ruins build diversity.
Upgrades could come from random chance chest pick-ups, encouraging exploration. They could also be rare level up options, not always guaranteed but exciting when you're lucky enough to get one. There could be some alternative form of currency in each level to spend on these upgrades. Something, something that allows me to build more freely. I think this is probably one of the stronger priorities the dev should work on.
[H1]Monsters[/H1]
The monster designs are all right. They have unique enough identities to know what to look out for, such as one being fast and another being ranged and another being tanky, and the silhouettes of the monsters are easy to learn and understand. They also don't dogpile TOO high on you, which leaves room for kiting and quick thinking. What I would like to see is a few more boss designs (there's currently only two), and [i]maybe[/i] unique enemies on different maps as a stretch goal. The latter is far less important, but boss diversity would be very welcome.
I would also like to be able to dodge roll through enemies. Being pressed into a corner with no way out does not feel good, and sometimes there's instances where you think you can squeeze through a tight area, only to be invisiwall'd. This has happened a few times, and it feels cheesy.
[H1]Maps[/H1]
There are currently 4 maps. A passable amount, but I would welcome more. The balance between their environments is a little off to me, though.
The city map has high chest spawns and a straightforward design. You're walking between big squares with a few obstacles along the road, like cars or spore gunk. It's easy to kite through, getting to objectives is simple [i]most[/i] of the time, and the aesthetic of it I think is my favorite.
But I can't tell you much about the other maps, because chest spawns feel so rare on them it doesn't even feel worth visiting them. Like the forest map, chests seem to only spawn in camps, but you don't really have a direction to go off of to reach any camps. If there were some sort of forest path leading you to them, that would circumvent this nicely, but as it stands finding chests here makes me feel lost. The city just has chests simply on any road you go down.
The desert I have went to the least, and probably can't give chest info on it, so that's my fault.
But the suburbs, oh boy, this map is hell. There's SO many nooks and crannies and corners to get stuck on and wiped out by incoming enemies. If you go inside a house, you're likely going to be blocked in by waves of monsters. If you want to leave the house, finding the exit is weirdly difficult with no strong indicator of where the doors are, and if you want to even leave the [i]lot[/i], you have to find a break in the long rows of white picket fences. Apply this to every house, and you'll never want to enter a home. It feels so inconvenient traveling on this map, you think you found a shortcut to the objective and instead you made your trip twice as long trying to maze your way through. While the map is charming and well designed, its environment is unfortunately a hindrance on gameplay.
