Sonar Shock

[h1]We all live in nuclear submarine[/h1] Bearing a title indicative of its primary source of inspiration, Sonar Shock invites the player for a tournée across ridiculously oversized soviet submarine. Primary accommodations onboard the vessel include: infestation of eldritch monsters, political tensions, [strike]radiation sickness[/strike] vodka and a peculiar, pipe-puffing detective. Assuming you can stomach its antics, this game can offer a pleasantly refreshing indie experience. [b]System failure[/b] I hardly ever begin a review by addressing the negatives, however this time around it feels justified to immediately address the elephant in the room and politely ask it to vacate the premises. Namely, the game’s controls. While Sonar Shock is without a doubt an FPS, it departs quite drastically from the usual conventions. Most importantly, there is no strafing in the game – side movement buttons rotate the character towards selected direction instead, creating bizarre “first person tank controls”, if you will. Furthermore, the player is able to move the cursor freely within entire frame of sight, meaning there is no need to rely on the centre of the screen for combat – enemy occupying bottom left corner of the screen can be shot all the same. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3528246597[/url] Taking the risk only a small indie game developer possibly could, Sonar Shock expects the player to discard their usual FPS habits and learn something completely new instead. To give credit where it is due, this design choice is fully deliberate, meant to increase tension through clunkiness, while also paying homage to original System Shock’s distinct screen interaction. As such, nearly every action in the game requires cursor use – navigating menu tabs, collecting items, engaging dialogue or manually reloading your gun in the middle of frantic combat. If unwieldy twist on the gameplay mechanics sounds interesting, this title has a lot more to give, however if the description above makes you question the point of playing with a handicap, you may want to keep off this one. [b]The Hunt for Red October[/b] To all comrades who remain, welcome aboard S1-Utopia, a marvel of soviet engineering storing 4 grand floors within its cavernous interior. Powered by the energy of atom, this behemoth not only contains crowning achievements of motherland’s industry, but state-of-the-art recreational facilities as well. For the player that means 4 distinct environments, all but the first level seemingly impossible for a submarine. Then again, this is cutting edge tech and the reality [i]tends to bend funny[/i] once Lovecraftian influences become apparent. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3528249444[/url] Before you move onto exploring the soviet wonder, there is one more thing you need to know about Sonar Shock. While the core mechanics are taken from an FPS, the gameplay loop is what you would normally expect from an RPG. Meaning that there is a full-blown character stats system, plenty of dialogue and quests which need to be completed in order to progress the story. As such, first step in the game is to determine what kind of comrade the player is going to be. In proper RPG fashion, there are several backgrounds to choose from, all translating to certain initial perks (and drawbacks). To be fair, during first playthrough you have no idea how said background affects the game, however thorough explorers will find enough experience to adjust build on the fly as you come to understand more about the mechanics. [b]Riddle me this[/b] Enough about the gameplay, it is high time to move on to Sonar Shock’s story as it is quite a treat. As the player character wakes up from memory-wiping head injury, the S1-Utopia is already in complete chaos. Monsters are roaming the corridors, most of the crew is dead, mad or missing and a few survivors you encounter inform you that the captain has decided to sink the ship as to prevent the otherworldly infestation from reaching the surface. Thus, a quest to reach the bridge and save the few sane souls (including your own) begins. Now, while the main plot may not be the most groundbreaking, it does get frankly insane towards the end. You may feel like you’ve the story all figured out, but take my word for it – there’s more to it than you anticipate. Capacity to surprise the player is a general theme for Sonar Shock’s surprisingly smart writing. In my opinion secondary quests are the highlight of the game as they tend to perfectly read the player’s expectations, only to subvert them further down the line. Perhaps the best example I can give, is that both interface and save/load feature have a genuine in-universe explanation, something precious few games dare to entertain. Better yet, to diversify survival aspect of the game, Sonar Shock has a number of engaging puzzles, making exploration of S1-Utopia exceptionally rewarding. [url]https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3528250978[/url] [b]Pet Shoggoth[/b] Last but not the least topic I would like to cover is the game’s distinct atmosphere. Despite highly stylised, pixelated graphics, occasional jokes and overall absurdity – Sonar Shock is a horror, first and foremost. Majority of the submarine is shrouded in darkness, supernatural occurs on the regular basis and sanity is a literal resource (and the game will punish you for going bankrupt). Furthermore, this title is straight-up difficult. At first, the primary challenge is outlandish mechanics, however as you progress deeper into the S1-Utopia, difficulty notably spikes between each level and new threats tend to follow you to previous locations. Once things truly kick into gear, a silly bar where you may trade vodka for guns and pet a cat named “tv. Meowserov” becomes a much needed safe harbour rather than immersion breaking element. To be fair, underlying absurdity of these calmer moments plays well into madness which has taken over the submarine. All things considered, I view Sonar Shock as a true indie gem which deserves far greater recognition than it currently receives. Being a work of a solo developer, I think this game is a perfect example of a passion project done right. To be fair, I can recognise System Shock’s dedication to oldschool can be off-putting to some, however it is also what makes the playthrough memorable. Should you happen to be looking for a unique gaming experience I cannot recommend this title enough.

Well, it's hard for me to not recommend this game. The atmosphere is amazing, the gameplay is reminiscent of the classic System Shock (hence, the name) and it has the potential to be a fun game through and through. There's just one small problem. The game is riddled with performance issues (specially on older computers, like mine). The minimum settings isn't actually good enough to run the game without some massive frame drops. I can only recommend this game to you if you have the recommended settings, then I think you'll have a great experience. Unfortunately, that's not true for me. So, consider this more of a personal opinion and a warning to those with older computers that think this game might run smoothly because of the retro graphics: it won't. If the game turns up to be better optimised in the future, then I might turn back to Sonar Shock and give it a thumbs up. But you'll have to sit and pray for new patches. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good experience for me because of the performance issues, but people with more modern computers (like the recommended settings and better) that are fans of the imsim genre will definetly enjoy this game.

A game where you traverse a haunted submarine done in the style of System Shock (the first one) where it might look like an FPS but is more of a classic 3D dungeon crawler like Eye of the Beholder in terms of controls. It's a game of two halves, suffice to say I did not complete it because the second half becomes unplayable. The game has 4 floors. On floor one and two I never died, I got close a few times because the game is quite stingy with health pickups so it still didn't feel super easy or anything. But partway through floor 3 the difficulty spiked massively, not a problem in itself, but after beating this area the rest of the game, including the earlier floors which you still travel back to occasionally is repopulated with the late game enemies, this makes the game lag... A LOT! So now you're in a situation where you have to fight high level enemies in areas where there's no more health items or ammo, all while the game lags so much you oftentimes can't reload (the reloading works by you manually dragging ammo into a specific spot on your gun and then pulling back the locking mechanism, doing this during combat is easy to fumble even without lag, but with lag it's pretty much impossible.) The lag problem seems to only affect some players, but that's little consolation when it happens to you nearly 8 hours into a game.

Seriously so fun and intriguing except when any two enemies come on screen and the frames drop from 112fps to 15fps, which sadly makes it quite unplayable ):

An excellent game that, by its title and some references in design, clearly makes known its inspirations, but also manages to stand on its own without feeling too derivative of its forebears. This is truly one of the most engaging video games I've ever played, and it's an absolutely stellar entry in a genre of games which strive for that immersion. There's only one caveat that unfortunately needs to be mentioned: performance. The game really suffers and can slow down to single digit FPS when lots of enemies or physics objects are nearby. And despite the developer's attempts to fix this issue, the problem still remains. I liked everything else about the game enough that I was able to overlook this flaw, but it's a blemish that might be too much for some people. The ways the player is required to engage with controls and mechanics might be confusing and even a little off-putting at first, but I was able to quickly adjust and I learned to love how unique and effective they are. You can only move via tank controls, but this frees up your mouse to do all the various interactions with the UI at any time. You'll need to click to drag ammo onto your guns to reload them, flip through inventory pages, check the map, assign skill points and interact with things in the world. All without pausing, while dealing with enemies and navigating the twisted passages. This results in a fantastic interplay of asymmetrical control and task management that's akin to playing guitar or piano. There are 26 weapons (27 if you count fists), that are interfaced with in different ways. And most of them have secondary attacks, alternate firing modes, a chance of status effects or opportunities for bonus damage. There's a surprising amount of depth to the mechanics that, unfortunately, aren't explained terribly effectively. But these elements lend themselves well to learning and mastering weapon handling and replaying the game to try different loadouts. The psionic powers are all fairly original takes on the concept as well, such as vomiting a chunk of biomass that can be carried around and explodes like a landmine, being able to set a point you can teleport back to at any time (it can even be set in midair), or launching a bell that travels in a straight line and damages nearby enemies when it's hit. The story kept pulling me forward, eager to see the next point of interest to help unravel the mystery of the submarine you're trapped in. And the later game reveals, while maybe a bit predictable in some cases, were still rewarding enough to keep me interested the whole way through. I also loved the enemies and their designs, especially the ones that look to be clay models that were photographed and turned into sprites. The monsters from Slavic folklore, which are some of the most dangerous enemies, fit well into the setting and are something I haven't really seen much in other games. Altogether, this is a game that well surpasses the sum of its parts and is undoubtedly worth the low price of admission.

It really breaks my heart to not recommend this. I was willing to forgive a lot, because ultimately it had good atmosphere, unique and novel ideas and a brutal combat that, despite its downsides, was compelling and didn't roadblock me hard enough to be frustrating. I could always roll with failure and make progress. What made me decide thumbs down is the optimizing. And I never care about that. I grew up with Megaman 3, where the defining aspect of the final boss is it flickers more heavily than a half-gone bulb on dodgy electricity. No, I don't care about optimiziation. But when the combat is brutal and demands responsiveness, and I'm working with a slide show, then I end up dreading the unseen nuts and bolts behind the curtains more than the actual atmosphere. And there I have to draw the line. Like I said, I don't like doing this. It is a cool game with good ideas, and solidarity for solod devs will in most cases take priority over optimization. I even ended up saving lots of ammo by chucking boxes at enemies. It had actual strategic considerations implemented. But if it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

For such a punishing game, this amount of fps drop should be criminal.

i smiled from start to finish this game is hilarious without feeling like a joke. i love the atmosphere and setting.

A free form immersive sim dungeon crawler game that's like the missing link connecting System Shock 1 and System Shock 2. It has the systems and statistically driven elements of SS2 with the primitive graphical style and interface as SS1. It's a unique combination that may not be to everyone's taste. But I personally see it as a combination of some the of the pair's unique elements. It's very old school, the movement is cumbersome and your saves are limited by the amount of save disks you find in the world. The premise of the game is you're a crew member of the S1-Utopia, a Soviet super submarine. Strange creatures and supernatural phenomenon have wreaked havoc in what is essentially an enclosed city and you have to crawl through vents and scavenge up weapons and ammo and save the sub (maybe?), It's certainly a unique game where you build your character based on their personal experience and nationality(?) in relation to the Soviet territories and you can gain experience points by reading old Soviet and Eastern European literature.