I've followed the development of this game for years, and this has been well worth it. I remember not loving the demo from awhile ago, but may have been because I played that on normal difficulty, whereas here I played on hard difficulty. [b] I would definitely recommend if you are experienced in shooters to play it on Hard [/b] ; much more satisfying, engaging, and challenging. You really need to manage your resources, especially food to get through. This is a fantastic Bioshock-style game, and if you're into that kind of game or other FPS's or indies, I'd say give this one a shot. It's pretty inexpensive, and more than worth the price.
[b] Pros: [/b]
1) The game looks and sounds great.
2) The level design really flowed well, and the design of the different areas differed well enough to not get stale. 3) The enemies are silly. Most are great to fight; some are bullet sponges and some can easily catch you off guard and burn a huge chunk of your health, but most of those are later in the game.
4) Voice acting is all great.
5) The story conclusion is pretty good.
6) Gameplay feels great: movement, gunplay, managing of food and ammo, etc.
7) Performance is pretty stable. I think once in the entire game I had an area of slight slow-down, but otherwise held up great. I don't exactly have a powerhouse of a computer, but I ran max settings like a breeze.
[i] **Any cons listed may have been addressed by the time these are read, and are me mostly being nitpicky** [/i]
[b] Settings/input-related easy fix Cons: [/b]
1) I cannot stress this enough, and I've seen this with too many shooter games: not everyone plays on 400 dpi. The mouse sensitivity is not scaled to take into account even as low as 800 dpi, which is what I use. With the scale being from 0-100%, my options are 0-3%, and everything else is too fast. Some games have something like a "Mouse Sensitivity Scale" as well as a "Mouse Sensitivity", so something like that would be appreciated.
2) For the zoom weapon(s), a hold button option for ADS would be nice.
3) An option to disable auto-switch to new weapons would also be nice. Also the pop-ups for those (tutorials) could use a toggle to not show them for repeat playthroughs.
4) FOV is shown as a percentage: so like, is it the actual FOV value or... just a percentage in a range or... ?
5) There's a bug where when you launch the game, in the main menu settings your keybinds that you've changed and saved from a previous play session are not shown correctly. But if you then load into your save, they're fine. Then exiting back to the main menu fixes what's shown there.
[b] Slightly more difficult to fix Cons: [/b]
1) Especially during big room battles, it is difficult to know if enemies are behind you. I do not want on-screen warning indicators or something, but making the enemies "bark" more and louder when they're close and behind you could improve this.
2) There are some areas that look like you can get to for secrets, but turn out to be inescapable. E.g. at the start of the next-to-last section, "Light" something I think, there's an arch entryway underneath where you can't get back up from.
3) During certain sections where you have to kill all the enemies to trigger the "open entryway" quick cutscene, specifically with spiders, they attacked me immediately after the cutscene ended. I thought all the enemies were dead; idk how that happened but is a feels bad kind of moment. The last enemy I killed was a spider before the cutscene triggered, so idk if this is an important detail.
4) Sometimes, I'm like why am I not stepping over this little curb? Why must I jump this? I will stare at it and shake my head. Not a big deal, just a nitpick.
[b] Much more difficult to fix Cons: [/b]
1) The 3D audio is inconsistent. Sometimes, like for spike traps the sound just ramps in when you're like ~10 feet away, but at like ~20 ft you can't hear it at all. Also, the directional sound is meh: pretty hard to absolutely pinpoint where things are outside your view, but understandably not an easy fix.
2) Some enemies cannot handle you being in their face. When you are repeatedly hitting them with your mallet, they just can't even. I'm surprised the shotgun duck fellow doesn't have a dodge roll or something when you get in his face. Also, the slide mechanic can be abused to dash through certain enemies to circumvent the challenge they impose. I don't have an issue with that, but stacking the "in their face" part on top of it, they could use some more deterrence or evasion or something.
3) Certain objects/surfaces are able to be phased through by certain enemies, which feels a bit jank and unfair. Not a huge issue, but what is definitely in need of a fix is when they're phasing through and can also shoot at you, and you can't shoot them (for e.g. those furnace looking things in the next to last section of the game). Not cool.
4) During the last [spoiler] boss fight [/spoiler] of the game, [spoiler] falling to your death is pretty easy and very punishing, as you die and reset to the part before the fight. When the boss fight is you mostly aiming upwards or mostly upwards, not knowing if beneath you is "there" anymore is pretty easy. The only difficult part of this boss fight is falling to your death, and is otherwise super easy and anti-climatic. I'm also surprised there weren't any fodder enemies during it, but is often seen as bad boss design; so makes sense. [/spoiler] It's not that big of a deal, but still worth a mention I think.
[b] Conclusion: [/b]
The cons are mostly me being nitpicky, and does not dissuade me from recommending the game. It is great, as well as the developer, and I'm glad I didn't wait to play it. I'm gonna play more to wrap up all the achievements.
