Recent reviews by Kaibear

Democracy against SNOY was restored once more

I love it. And the EA Release is pretty much bug free.

However, I am missing higher resolution support, as I am having an ultra wide screen and play in window mode.
As of right now, it really is very small.

The setting the game is placed in, is super fun. I love that the game actually has crafts, that do the mass-hunting for yourself.
Really looking forward to what's to come

It is quite literally unplayable right now.

Your rocket becomes wobbly, no auto struts.
The performance is abyssmal when you already want to build a rocket for the mun
Your orbit changes randomly when you fast forward in time.
Docking ports autodock after separation (what?!)

Then there is lots of info missing: Distance to target for example. Making docking in orbit horribly difficult.

Resource management is shallow: No heat management, no electricity used.

The only good thing in this game right now is the soundtrack and effects.

This game is nowhere near a Beta right now. This is a horrific Early Access start for a game being in development for 5 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ years. I am even baffled they released it in this horrible state.
After 5 years of development, this is what we get?! Jesus Christ.

EDIT: Requested a refund. Unplayability and recent layoffs give me a bad feeling, that my money would be wasted when this project could be abandoned. I might come back to buy this in a year or two.

First, I played this game first time during the free weekend and I just purchased it because I had such a good fun.

Embr is a fun coop-game with a very quirky humor. You play a firefighter, that tries to rescue people out of their houses. These people are not aware of an ongoing fire. They just go to the toilet or playing on their smartphones. As a firefighter, you do a tutorial showing you the gameplay elements, such as: Fires, Ladders, Gas, how to get to water, using a special tablet to find people in the burning house etc.

The game is mainly a coop game. You play with friends together to solve the rescue missions. Sometimes, there are also escape missions. At the moment, there is also a gas campaign where you have to empty houses of poisonous gas, while rescuing people and trying not to burn. This three level campaign is very difficult. I played it just in a group of two. But we managed it with some tactics. Tactics are crucial, even though the game does not appeal like it in the first place.

It is also possible to play it alone with some experience.

With each rescue mission, you gain money. Because firefighters are freelancers in this game. You can also gain additional money by looting the victim's houses. Put a bike or computer on the back of your car and get that extra money. Rescue and looting, YES!

The money can be invested into new gear. There are costumes, that give you resistance to fire, fall damage or gas. Or you put it into a bigger car to put in more loot in your missions. Not enough? Get equipment! Like a grappling hook or a parachute. And those can be upgraded, too.

Great ideas that make it worthwhile to play it some time to get a good equipment.

To sum up the great stuff:

• Fun and unique game mechanics
  
• A lot of content already
  
• Bonus missions after first run through (like Food delivery or looting stuff)
  
• 4 Player Coop
  
• Great set of tools
  
• Upgrade mechanics for your items
  
• Fun humor
  
• Progress tree for items and for levels

Besides these good things, the game at its current state feels a bit clunky in some ways:

• Graphics glitches: Doors are not visible from time to time, floors also disappear when you are in another room
  
• Carrying stuff like boxes is sometimes difficult as collisions make it either impossible to get something through are door or window frame.
  
• It is sometimes frustrating how fast a fire spreads - but that is just like reality.

But it is early access. So I have no problems with it.

If you are new into gaming, if you are long into gaming and like some fun Coop: Get embr. It's hot!

I can crash a moon on Mars.

10/10

Just played through it.

It was a very unpleasant experience. I bought it for 17€ during sale. Whoever thinks about buying it: If you pay the full price, you have to be insane.

Lets start with the only good aspect of the game:

GRAPHICS:

The game's graphics are bonkers! The engine is extremely capable. Every scene looks extremely beautiful. Especially, the urban areas look vast and the damage of the nuclear war make them gorgeous to look at. The game's graphics are also as impactful as they are, due to the great use of the particle system. Snow, rain, electricity... everything looks great.

Now about the negative aspects:

SOUNDS:

The game's sound design is straight out AWFUL! It is difficult to say how many hours of work went into the overall sound design. But the mixing looks like just a few hours of time. Scenes differ between the mix of music, SFX and dialog. Sometimes, the music is louder then anything else. Yet, in other scenes it is the dialog pushing everything into the background. But the single most annoying thing in sounds of this game are the SFX of enemies. Sometimes, enemies sound like they stay right next to you - but they are hundreds of meters away. It happens so often, that you just keep your eyes rolling.

INTERACTION:

The game puts you into the body of the well known character of Artyom. And by doing this, you are just a puppet controlled by the game's cutscenes. Which are around every corner. After half of the game I just got extremely annoyed by it. You keep falling, you get attacked (with messy quick-time events annoying the living excrement out of you), you cannot use the mouse because scenes require you to watch the other characters... ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥! I just want to move as I like. I don't want a rail-shooter experience which one quarter of the game is like. Other games like Half-Life do this perfectly. Do what you like, while the main characters tell their story. But in Metro Exodus, you get constantly blocked by characters, that need to open a door.

The game is also incredibly inconsistent with the use of its environment. Sometimes, you can climb things up. Sometimes, you cannot. In the desert level, there is one level you can only reach by help of another character. Though, the exact same height of this level can be done yourself on other occasions.

COMBAT:

The weapons mechanics look cool in theory. You have to reload ammunition and also either pump air into the weapon to make it work or electricity. But as there are only low bullet magazines on these, weapons like these become useless in fights other then stealthing.

The variety of the weapons is also just superficial. There are just two types: Ammo weapons and BB weapons. The first are alerting enemies, the latter do not.

Stealthing is also really difficult because if you want to execute either stealth kills or knock outs, the game sometimes decide you get none of the options while standing behind an enemy. The result: You get noticed. You get shot at.

Hitboxes of enemies other then humans are also somewhat randomized. A headshot on stealth is a kill. But on alert, the head tanks 3 or 4 shots.

KHARMA:

The game actually has some sort of Kharma system. The screen dims if you shoot at characters the game decide to be friendly. But the outcome is laughable. The other characters just notice it shortly after that but nothing else happens. You can shot on everything moving. Slaughter them down like there is no tomorrow. It doesn't matter. Nothing in this game does.
The efforts of knocking NPCs out instead of killing them on sight are not worth it. The game does not pay you off for it. In no means it does.

STORY:

In the first half, the overall exodus theme is cool. It allows new scenes while following a strict path in the story. But in the second half this just wears off. In the end, the story becomes repetitive and the overall last level and ending of the story is a slap into the face of a player.

"OPEN WORLD":

The idea of having different worlds in the game is great. You take the train into a new chapter and you get a refreshing new area. Areas allow you to walk around freely. But actually, the game does fake an open world style. The truth is, it is no open world. The story parts of a level are locked behind progress. But one world consists of somewhat 75% story parts. So, you have to progress instead of walking around and discover. This makes the game a very linear experience.

"WORLD DISCOVERY":

The whole idea of an open world game is to allow players to discover stuff. This works in the very first area as you get new and good gear. But right at the second level there are NO INCENTIVES in doing research of the map. You are either locked out by the story to discover something or you only find metal and this organic stuff for crafting. But to get to that, you already spent ammunition. This makes it senseless to do any discoveries. I rushed through the last level, simply because I got annoyed by looking around in the level but not getting anything out of it.

MISC:
- Bugs that keep the game crashing
- Polygon-stretching bugged in some parts
- Corrupted save games

Anything that looks great on paper for this game is just a facade. If you play through it, you somewhat get behind it. If I would sum up this game in one or two sentences, it would go like this: Metro Exodus fakes everything. Time spent outside of the story is wasted.

The game was dare enough to recommend me its DLCs. I will not buy these. I got to annoyed by this game. I even got angry by all the cutscene stuff. The very first Metro game was a great experience. This thing here is a mess I never dare to play again.

Blizzard, this is how you do a remaster.

It is damn honorable from EA to give Petroglyph, a game developer studio filled with RTS and Westwood Veterans, the chance to do the remaster on their "baby".

And Petroglyph took this chance with much love. The graphics, the soundtrack... damn the soundtrack! Frank Klepacki is a real surplus to this. He has remastered his classic titles like Hell March, Act on Instinct and Mechanical Man. The soundtrack's quality is so incredibly high that you instantly fall in love with it.

As for graphics, Petro (Westwood) enables you to switch between the old pixel-style and the new reimagined HD renders by a button click (backspace). The transformation from old to new looks lovely and makes it obvious, that this got some serious artworks done.
In terms of graphics you also have to mention the video sequences. You notice they are the original ones but upscaled. The images went through an AI process to have a nearly HD quality. That works surprisingly good except for 3D rendered sequences.

And there is the nostalgic factor: You see the Westwood logo, you even see the old EA logo in the main menu. I would have not expected that from EA to allow this. As they are a big business and they probably want to save their brand image. A very cool move from EA. You got some real good progress on being less greedy and negative by contributing the publishing of this excellent remaster and give Petroglyph the freedom to realize it.

Lastly, there is another big reason to buy this game: We all want a Tiberian Sun and Red Alert Remaster. We need it. We want it. And damn I am sure Petroglyph want it, too! Make it happen!

A con at the moment is online skirmishes, as they seem to lag hard in the lobby. I also encountered a timeout issue already several times. I do not know if it runs via official servers or via P2P. If it is P2P, then this point is invalid.

10/10 Greg Burdettes somewhere in the Mediterranean.

I was already having my eyes on this game when it was exclusively on Epic Game Store.

The premise to modify your own space station and floating through space in search of a new home while also scavenging for supplies is great. Genesis Alpha One has beautiful graphics. But that's it. Only premise, graphics and the builder are fun.

The combat is very superficial and frustrating as you get hit out of nowhere. Sometimes, enemies on the ship are invisble. Not intentionally. You see the marker but nothing on the ground. You go on the sublevel: nothing. You go up again and there is an enemy. Frustrating.

The difficulty also changes from system to system and planet to planet. But there seems to be just "Low", "High" and "Critical". The latter two are insanely difficult and enemies stomp your crew. The crew itself is dumb and ineffective. Even a sentry turret is better for defending you when harvesting on a planet.

It is also quite annoying to run to the rooms of the ship to actually assign workers and tasks. Even though you have your PDA to check status and stuff, you are unable to actually control things.

The game also lacks of details. All NPCs are just hallow figurines. No characters, no dialogs, no depth. They are just a superficial tool.

Harvesting itself also is annoying and only worthwhile to do for site excavation to get upgrades.

The sound design of the game has no specialties.

I thank the devs for the free weekend as it finalized my decision making to not buy the game. If there will be any sequel, I hope you will do better. I really want to revise my decision for higher quality.

My current setup:

• CPU: AMD RYZEN 7 2700X (8x 3.7 GHz)
  
• GPU: NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2070 SUPER
  
• RAM: 32 GB DDR4
  
• Installed on an SSD

Yet, the game cannot even run smoothly on 1440p.
On normal settings.

This game is incredibly unoptimized so that playing it is just not fun with a framerate below 20.

I played it 15 minutes and it was unbearable.

Another big issue:


They just suck.
They just show you, that this is a stupid console port.
The timing does not work (when the big rock falls down in the beginning, I smashed F when it was in the smaller circle - yet, nothing happened).

I am tired of this stuff. 15 Minutes of gameplay were filled with 5-10 minutes of quick time events. If this start of the game shows how the rest will be, then I am pleased to say: I won't play any further.

Get your ♥♥♥♥ together, Eidos.

You managed to do some superior world building within an engine, that is incredibly powerful.
The game's sound design is great but that's it.

The game is extremely unstable and unoptimized.
I am playing on a state of the art gaming pc: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X; 32GB RAM and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070. Yet, the game cannot run on highest or even high settings with 20fps. Yes. 20. There is this joke of saying "But will it run Crysis?". Change this to Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

The game often crashes out of nowhere. Even when starting up initially, the game freezes in the loading screen. This happened like 15 times already in my play time.

The controls are horrible. You feel the Console port here. The active augmentations are horrible to use with a keyboard during combat. Your hand has only five fingers and WASD use at least 2-3 fingers of them. One finger for Shift and one for Backspace (thumb). Which finger shall I use for augmentations? There is no cool combat action where you switch between augmentations. Because the keyboard and anatomy do not allow you to. An extreme bummer. Combat in total is really difficult, as chances to die are very high.

I played through it, but I did not really enjoy due to this messed up optimization and controls. If you want to buy this, wait for a sale on Humble bundle or whatever. I spent 10 bucks on this. Spending more on this game is just not worth it.