Test Subject

This game is like Halo without the guns which might sound lame but it is actually sick. I like the parts where you punch aliens and [spoiler]drive your car[/spoiler]. Officially adding “loves long drives in the desert” to my bio.

While I really enjoy the concept of the game I sadly think it's not thought through enough to be fun. At first, I played on Normal difficulty which is the second highest difficulty level out of four. After dying a bunch of times to the second fight I switched to Easy. But even on the lowest difficulty I would die again and again in the first level. Which wouldn't be a big issue if the level had checkpoints or if there was a save feature. But the game has neither which means you need to beat each level in one go. But in order to do that you need to defeat a few dozen enemies who shoot at you with laser rifles and the only weapons you have are your fists. Since there are games where first-person melee combat is really fun – Fallen Aces is a great example! – I thought I would be able to enjoy this game as well but the problem is that enemies deal a lot of damage, even on Easy and there are not a lot of opportunities to heal. Combined with the weird CPU behavior and the fact that you are almost always outnumbered at least three to one makes this not very fun to play. I always tried to lure the enemies into the room I came from to fight them one by one which would work sometimes but often enough the enemies would just not move towards me so I had to attack a group of four to five enemies at once which often resulted in certain death. I specifically wanna mention the pathfinding of the enemies as a separate issue because I noticed a few weird things. In the second fight of level 1, one of the enemies would repeatedly stand on the stairs facing the railing and not react to me when I entered the room. (Which was nice to get an easy kill but surely not the intended behavior I would assume.) In rooms with four or more enemies I saw them grouped up in one spot several times which didn't look like it was supposed to be this way and made it almost impossible to kill them. After I had finally beaten the first level I realised the health from the previous level carries over to the next one. Neither at the end of level 1 nor at the beginning of level 2 are there any ways to heal which means I went into the first fight against five or so enemies with less than half of my health which – even on Easy – is almost a certain death sentence. I also realised you can softlock yourself in the first level since you can easily clip items through the floor which are needed to progress. Then there's also the fact that the menu is unnecessarily annoying. After using an upgrade point in the skill tree you can't go back to the game with the Escape key, you need to press "Return" which closes the skill tree and shows you the pause menu. The "Return" button is now unclickable (and Escape still doesn't work to close it) so you need to click the "Return to Game" button which is not on the left side of the screen like all the other buttons (like "Return", "Settings", "Quit", etc.) but in the bottom middle of the screen. Another issue are the door puzzles which require you to interact with specific symbols that are scrolling on the display. The symbols are white on a white background. They do have a black/grey outline but it's so thin and the symbols are moving so fast that it's really hard to see them properly. All in all, I am kinda bummed out to give this game a negative review because it seems like the developer(s) really had a good idea and I would've loved to see more of the environmental storytelling but sadly this game is just too frustrating to continue playing or recommend it.