Recent reviews by NeedsFoodBadly

It's an iteration on Vampire Survivors (addictive roguelike action RPG with autocast) that mixes in a heavy dose of Diablo I worship.

Aside from touches like an actual equipment system, the game is much more mobility-based than VS... It's harder to set up static killboxes, and you'll have to keep moving around for more than bosses in most scenarios. The bosses are also much more interesting and have actual attacks and AOEs.

This has more bullet hell DNA than VS, but is still fairly forgiving as long as you're making any effort to move around/play to your current character's strengths. You might consider it a problem that you have to be more actively involved in playing than you typically do in VS. It's harder to level and gear.

The look, music, and sound is essentially 100% Diablo I, for good or ill.

My biggest hope at this point is for a game speed slider.

It's Slay the Spire with poker hands. It's very good, although I wish the UI was not retro.

I gave it a go with a PC that should be able to handle anything:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10850K CPU @ 3.60GHz (20 CPUs), ~3.5GHz
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090
32768MB RAM

We are two critical patches in, and it still takes like 30m to build shaders and there are constant, severe display issues. I didn't encounter a crash but I only played for about 30m.

Action feels fluid, engrossing, and rewarding. Melee is chaotic and flesh-pulping--I will never get sick of lopping heads and torsos. Guns sound great. Almost every weapon is satisfying to use.

Controls feel snappy, mostly. I rarely feel like I'm struggling against the game's movement or a lack of responsiveness. Clambering over obstacles, with rare exception, is easy. Melee requires some skill to do right, but is forgiving with hit detection, so I'm rarely frustrated with that.

I think the only things that are a little bit off are the occasional issue with the hacking minigame acting like I made the wrong input (I didn't!), and it being a little unclear at times which knee-high stuff I can climb over, but these are rare issues.

The grimmest, darkest 40K game yet. The translation of the 40K to the setting of this game is perfect. You are thrust into the middle of a never-ending gothic war where it's nearly impossible to tell the good from the evil, with a side helping of black humor. There is no true victory, only continued survival.

The hiveworld the game takes place in brings the old descriptions to life. The characters feel authentic to the setting, and the game proves there's a lot more to 40K than space marines.

Feels like a team game. You'll have to work together constantly, moving and accomplishing objectives as a unit. You have to track on targets and tasks while not getting separated from your squad, which requires communication and mindfulness.

The player base is mostly enthusiastic and cooperative. It's a coop game so you need good players. Most people are fine. You get the occasional toxic person or someone who makes an Olympic sport out of not paying attention, but that's extremely rare in my experience.

Indications are that problems with gameplay and optimization will soon improve. There have already been some performance, crash, and balance patches after week 1.

A lot is clearly in store. Room for expansions of the in-game content--especially the endgame--and accompanying story seem obvious. Not every feature has been implemented yet.

Game is super grindy. It took forever to level one guy to 30, and that's the least of the problems. There's simply not enough levels in the game at this time to make the 1-30 grind not feel really repetitive.

Contracts are almost uniformly horrible to complete and I spend a lot of funbucks getting ones that aren't cartoonishly awful to do. I can at least do that, which is nice, and there's not a lot else to spend the basic in-game currency on. Even when I have "good" contracts, though, they take an exhaustingly long time to do and seem to assume that everyone is grinding at least four hours a day. It's way too much.

The classes feel vulnerable until about levels 10-15 and then take off quickly in power. Starting a new guy at 1 after completing level 30 is startlingly restrictive in what you can do, skilled or not. I got very used to one-shotting mooks and 1v1ing specials, and then went back to Difficulty 2 feeling like Vietnam.

Lack of actual story. The plot is multiple characters reminding you how unappreciated and expendable you are at every turn until you are finally given an Inquisition insignia as a reward for putting up with everyone insulting you for 30 levels. That's it. There's a "We have a traitor on board!" subplot that goes nowhere. Story feels unfinished.

Your character's backstory options are about as detailed as a starting Dragon Age character, but ultimately doesn't matter at all. I think I've heard my zealot make vague reference to it once in 30 levels of play.

It can be a little choppy. I'm running a really high-end 3090 RTX system, and asking this game to play comfortably at max settings is simply not possible, though I'm running most things everything at high at 100 FPS without any ray tracing stuff on, and performance has improved after the first week.

It does scale down well: if you're on an old system, GPU scaling should help.

At this point I have only extremely intermittent problems with crashes and I expect to experience fewer as they continue to patch out crash bugs. Day one was not fun, but that was day one.

The gearing system is pants-on-head. So many bonuses and stats that still aren't explained at all, even after a light display re-work. Getting a weapon with the best mods is 100% luck-based right now. You get very few weapon drops and are buying most everything you need from a revolving store at the hub, which is convenient but not interesting.

High difficulty is not tuned well at this time. Never-ending monster closets are a problem at difficulties 4 and 5.

The cash cosmetic shop uses a currency that isn't 1-to-1, so you always have leftover balance. Enough said.

With all the L4D-alikes starting to pop up more frequently, it's good to see one that's trying to replicate that experience closely while adding its own spin, instead of trying to market on that experience and then delivering you something else entirely. Anacrusis *almost* plays and *almost* looks like L4D2, but on a cruise ship in space.

I would call it a strong but not all the way there beta. Lots of promise, about 75% delivery on the goods. It looks like a Source engine game in animation, play, and overall feel, despite being an Unreal 5 game and captures the basic L4D gameplay closely, without being completely slavish.

Good

• The zombies are basically Starro victims but move and act like L4D zombies.
  
  
• The basic gun balance is there. There’s shotguns, SMGs, and assault rifles, through the lens of a set of laser guns.
  
  
• The major interesting weapons are the grenades, which when used well are very powerful and dramatically cool.
  
  
• The basic enemy balance is there with a few tweaks—boomers and spitters have largely been combined, slime slows you down, there’s a tank, there’s a smoker. There’s now also a guy who disrupts you by trying to blind you with god rays, and a monster who makes adds.
  
  
• After the first episode, the game gets more innovative with the level design and goals, even if a radioactive Gnoam Chompsky isn’t the most clever idea in the world.
  
  
• There’s an interesting upgrade system that uses hidden terminals to create more RNG and replayability.
  
  
• The overall idea of the game is interesting and justifies itself as something besides “L4D, but more!” Picture fighting a zombie invasion on the cruise ship from The Fifth Element.
  
  
• There’s more robust support for custom maps than L4D ever had.
  
  
• The game runs well on just about every system we have between myself and my friends. That's not nothing, I've played some jank Unreal engine games.

Bad

• There’s no gore modeling (yet?), so everyone just kinda gently falls over when sufficiently shot. This is perhaps the biggest letdown in the game right now. The monsters just aren’t gross enough.
  
  
• The guns feel very samey, and given that they don’t produce gore you get absolutely no visceral feedback to what you’re doing.
  
  
• Every level in L4D2 has its own character. They haven’t pulled that off here, you mostly feel like you’re in More Cruise Ship. Everything gets samey fast right now, despite the good level design.
  
  
• The smoker is janky and can pull you from just about any distance and through many obstructions, most of the time. If he pulls you around a pit, there’s no hanging mechanic anymore, you’re just dead before you even know what’s going on. Beware situations where you’re climbing upward, it will instakill you.
  
  
• The game is overall too easy right now, despite the killer smoker. The tank is very easy to dodge. Allies can be resurrected easily and anywhere. It’s impossible to run out of ammunition.
  
  
• The game’s version of the Witch, evil pokeballs, are annoying to deal with, unintuitive to counter, and feel largely unavoidable.
  
  
• The rare special weapons that drop don’t feel important or interesting.
  
  
• The upgrade choices are usually minor and boring.
  
  
• Despite being ethnically diverse and popping with a unique retrofuture aesthetic, the four characters are otherwise very samey, don’t really sell their predicament in the way the L4D characters do, and just blend together with very meh performances. The characters sound like they know they’re in a game and nothing matters. I don’t really care which character I am in Anacrusis, in L4D I do.
  
  
• The narrative touches that are baked into L4D maps, like the graffiti, just aren’t here.

Other Notes

• There’s basically no melee. You have a Force push ability that does little or no damage and can be upgraded to be more efficient/damaging.
  
  
• There’s a lot of cosmetic options and achievement-based unlocks for them.
  
  
• You can aim down your weapon sight and there are upgrades to synergize with this.
  
  
• If you tell the game to leave hints on, it will tell you where items and upgrades are through physical obstructions beyond your LOS, so there’s a pro-tip for you for reading this far I guess.

Extremely janky successor to games like SWAT 4. You'll have to learn to love this one and should only do it with friends on co-op if at all.

Every aspect of the game is some combination of buggy, needlessly tedious, and awkward, whether it be the UI, online functionality, the controls, the AI, the broken English writing, you name it, something's a bit off about it. The only thing that looks good is the lighting.

It's a testament to how badly people are starved for this kind of action that this is reviewed as well as it is. This game is not in good shape and doesn't look like it has the potential to improve to a state that most players would honestly find acceptable.

I have managed to have fun with it with the help of 4-5 friends, because at the end of the day OG Rainbow 6/SWAT style gameplay can be enjoyed in spite of everything wrong about this one. But I can't honestly recommend this to someone looking for a baseline good game.

Is your favorite part of Diablo when enemies just automatically melt before your omnipotent splendor? Then this is your game.

Just not a fan of the isometric twin-stick genre, despite looking high and low for a new ARPG lately. Nothing about this gameplay is that interesting or new.

The game itself is beautiful, the gamePLAY is dull as dishwater. Nothing grabs except the visuals. Also ran into bugginess in the little time I played.

It's an over-the-shoulder coop horde/wave shooter with a mix of Gears of War and L4D. It's mostly good, made by a low-budget developer punching above their weight to make the first good alien game in a while, but it's not perfect.

The good
As a character you feel powerful, but not invincible.

Gameplay is simple but has depth. On Intense, which quickly becomes the first "real" difficulty, you have to watch your spacing, time your abilities well, and coordinate with your team.

Movement feels natural.

The level design is good and you'll have to vary strategy depending on what level you're in.

The classic guns and aliens sound right. You really get most of the best weapons in the game right out of the gate, especially if you play Demolisher.

The difficulty scales well from chill after-work shooter to death march, your choice.

After some early shakiness on release, the game performs well FPS-wise.

The classes are mostly well-balanced. Every player should be running a different class. If you don't have a Demolisher, Technician, Gunner, or Recon you will miss them at key moments, but you only have three player slots, so choose wisely!

The bad
The matchmaking is bad right now and a fix is needed. You'll want to do this with friends or face never being able to find a full group above Standard difficulty. The bots are fine on Standard but increasingly worthless above that difficulty.

There's no in-game text chat or voice chat. This hurts a lot. Discord/Teamspeak or nothing right now.

The story is nothing award-winning and is mostly "Take a tour of the greatest hits of the Alien series." The dialogue isn't intrusive, but your mission control/narrator honestly does too much thinking for you, pointing out where the aliens are attacking from next.

Some of the enemies are extraordinarily bullet spongy, the spitters and some of the synths in particular.

The Doc class needs to be re-worked, it's not good right now.

Flamethrowers are a really obvious trap option above Standard difficulty, and launchers aren't much better.

I'm not thrilled with some of the extra weapons, which can sometimes sound like toys.

There are some bugs involving unlocks and dailies that are being worked on.

The music is divisive, but I personally think it's fine. I constructed a Spotify playlist for when I get bored of it, though: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0MfagyHuKkedsBm6VOi7ph?si=c9b04e0e43d74461

The epitome of cargo cult design for good and ill, combining Doom, Doom '16, Quake, Quake II, and particularly Brutal Doom, with a very light sprinkling of Duke Nukem 3D, in a giant pastiche. If you are unfamiliar with Brutal Doom, you will learn why it is hated by Doom purists (excessive reloads and "realistic" animations on guns) quickly.

It's very heavy on feature sets (choice of pixel or poly models, custom maps) and evoking its influences (for example Doom '16 music and gun design) and a little light on solid mechanics (look-alike enemies, and my lord what are you doing putting reloads in this game, just because that's what Brutal Doom does doesn't mean it's good or helpful here). If there were a mod or setting to remove reloads you would have a much better game on your hands and it's already good, though not great. The custom maps are by the way better than anything Doom '16 mappers came up with already.