After like 20 hrs of this game, I initially thought it was pretty good, the game is decently well made and thought out for the time it was "finished", the use of organs to "level up" your character has to be the most unique mechanic I have ever seen, the bosses while somewhat flawed were decent enough along with some of the content in the game including unique weapons, the story and world building are fairly decent, overall I would say its a decent indie game. However, after trying to get all the achievements along with replaying the game twice now, I've changed my mind, its not really that good unfortunately as much as I did love its flesh-punk atmosphere.
The balancing for some enemies is awful even for normal difficulty, notably with the Bomber Bettles, who spam their projectiles at you, some of which is inconsistent with its pathing and doesn't go away until you either shoot it or get behind cover where it can't reach you, the worse is they are armoured, basically invulnerable to damage until they fire at you, by opening their wings, meaning the only weak point is behind them and 9/10 times u have to face on this enemy even if you are vulnerable, not even explosives help, you have to use the sabre gun with acid or fire to damage them assuming you don't get blasted first. The Terraworm is somehow the hardest boss out of all three, as it can pretty much one shot you if you do not move quick enough, sometimes it feels like it somehow directly aimbots your exact position to kill you, while I do recongise that you can use the crashed spacecraft to avoid it and even damage it. Some of the area makes it very difficult to slide away quickly, much of the terrain is uneven (Thats assuming you do everything right, sometimes the game's frames drop even outside this fight, it sometimes drops fps for no reason)that it makes avoiding the boss sometimes really difficult, don't even get me started on its eruptions out of the sand, you hardly have enough time to figure out where to go and what terrain is slidable. Most people would be playing it on Easy difficulty to start off with to see how the game is, something I didn't realise until later that was the reason I had a somewhat difficult but managable boss fight (By sticking to the left area and taking potshots at it for a while, using some of the craft nearby to damage it)when I first fighted them, Normal difficulty made it much more harder to fight the boss, with much of the damage the spacecraft along with your guns deals (Smg and Sabre gun are the closest to only being able to damage its mouth... so to shotgun and explosive users, you are out of luck) to it massively reduced on Normal difficulty (I can't imagine what it would be like to play on Hard... I'll come back to that point), the only way other than brute forcing it and luck is to reducing the difficulty temporarily to make it managable. The Nautilus, while an easy enemy to deal with, is the worse one, in my opinion, because it doesn't do much but scream and run up you, the concept of the enemy is interesting to say the least, as I did watch Mixxxis' last devlog video on adding them but in practice its just really annoying enemy to deal with, especially when all your organs end up decayed up until the final bossfight.
Some areas just lack enough content, for a $20 game (Which I thankfully got on discount) it seems to lack enough to justify the price, from what I've seen with other people's reviews, you can beat the game in an hour if you don't take your time to talk to npcs or exploring the limited areas u can, admitively tho there is some replay value for exploring some choices like with sleeping with the trader in exchange for their weapons instead of giving up your resistute crystal or ignoring the guy who acts like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to you (even tho you may as well be a genetic abomination that can use any organs to enhance yourself and obliterate all the locals), though it isn't that much sadly, there is the Arena mode you can play which I found to be really fun and challenging, though near the end point at Round 20 it was really too hard with the Bomber Bettles, combined with the poor terrarain of the Arena, you end up stuck behind cover waiting for them to either kill themselves by their own projectiles or hoping you get another opportunity to move somewhere else and try to kill them, I only barely got to 10 and almost 20 on round 19 before I discovered that you can just negate all the challenge by going into "Invuneriability" difficulty, which does what it says (Apart from preserving your organs, they still are used including lungs and hearts oddly enough), I have no idea how the few who got the achievement managed to get it, either it was luck or patience through the enemies accidentally killing themselves or they found out you could just change the difficulty on the whim.
Yes I am serious, you can change the difficulty on a whim to invulnerability (Or even aim assist which I haven't and didn't bother to use)which makes most of the problems no-existent, I would argue its just a bandaid solution meant to hide much of the games flaws for people trying to 100% the game. This game appears to have a very serious issue with difficulty balance, while I haven't played hard myself, I don't have the heart to do so, the game still is somewhat unbalanced and poorly polished if u do not play on Easy difficulty, it even has this problem in Arena which throws alot of the enemies that can one shot kill you, even if you got decent or better hp, it most likely would make you a one shot kill away from death. I would hardly call this a "fast paced shooter", when u are forced to take your time and rapidly fire distant enemies in order to not take too much damage, ironically easy difficulty makes the game more like what I think the dev was intending since it slows down organ usage compared to Normal difficulty.
The game still has bugs, much of the game seems to very janky, in a bad way where there are some gamebreaking bugs such as the Quest to help the drugdealers, where the fridge gets locked even when you help them despite them rewarding you, the game crashes whenever you interact with certain containers like the one at a crashed military ship, I ended up loosing progress getting the unique launcher from there or when I was with the weapons trader and I was sorting through my two main guns, as soon as I exited the crate it crashed, heck even running the game too long outside of the towns makes the game crash, meaning you can lose progress with killing enemies or even lose organs you dropped or were carrying through a body, I got locked out of a achievement; Iron Lung because I was trying to transport it back after I realised I needed to bring the organ with me to complete it and out of nowhere it crashes. As I look further and further for more information on how to get some achievements like the shipment one (Which confused me, apparently u need to trade in your restitute crystal not sleep with the trader to get the shipments along with all the quests), as it turns out this game is ABANDONWARE, meaning the game has ceased all development and bugfixes, the game hasn't been updated in 4-5 years, from my understanding, after the last devlog or somewhere in the middle Mixxix got tired of developing.
I get that developing games can be hard, but come on, you need to reduce the price and acknowledge that the game is still buggy and NOT complete, with its unfinished balancing, some poorly developed bosses/enemies and glaring bugs that make some of the game's mechanic more flawed than what they are (H and Seduce achievement are obtainable and broken). I did enjoy Endoparastic and some of your other games but this one might be the least best game you've developed, its surprising that this was your first big project to get into the Indie game scene
Tldr; ITS ABANDONWARE DO NOT BUY, most of the bugs and flawed aspects of the game haven't been fixed for 4-5 years.
