My Full Review And Crit of DDS (Word count exceeded lmao)

[mab]

A Wonderfully Unique Experience, With Some Kinks To Iron Out

DDS is an extremely creative entry in the imsim genre, with deceptively simple but delightful visuals and mechanics that give way to staggering depth in the way you can tackle any issue. Every ability tree, perk, weapon and enemy, combined with open ended level design with simple goals allow the player total freedom in their tackling of missions. This core gameplay combined with an intriguing plot with clever writing, and an absolute banger of a soundtrack make this game a must play

This is now the point of the review where ill be sharing the (suprisingly few) bugs i encountered, and some gripes and critiques i had with the experience. For anyone reading beyond this, i will say that none of these are deal breakers, but if youre the sort of person (like me) who enjoys the challenge of playing games pacifist, while possible, comes with a filterable amount of frustration before learning of the "correct" build to do so.
VERY MILD SPOILERS AHEAD (itll be fine)

THE BUGS
-Attempting to teleport to a backdoor during the first dog encounter resulted in me being unable to move
-Furthermore, teleporting directly onto the helipad means that the conversation never properly starts, and so the encounter is always there every time you go up until you do it "properly". Subsequent attempts also start with the dog being aggro
-Attempting to release the prisoners while in the handlers mansion while on vacation completely filled my command line with white text, and essentially softlocked me until i went back to my apartment
-Clearing your debt and then doing the confessed duvet missions still ends up with you having you bank screen saying that its been tampered, even though that mission didnt go through
-One time a gun disappeared from my arsenal and i have no idea how

That concludes the bugs! a very short list

THE OVERSIGHTS
- While the game does have alternative dialogue for some niche scenarios (the previously mentioned dog encounter for one), this unfortunately does not carry over if you managed to clear your debt. The duvet missions in particular have constant references to both yours and her debt, but since you no longer have yours, you start disconnecting from the plot
- The mirror geometry still renders even when youre out of bounds, which is cool in a meta sort of way, but maybe a good idea to iron that out with a dot product check to see if youre approaching the mirror from the correct side

GRIPES AND SUGGESTIONS , in no particular order, and mostly my opinions, but hopefully you find them valid nodays

CHIPLET AVAILABILITY
Over the course of the campaign, the player earns a pitiful amount of chiplets to unlock skills with.
Having the player only having having 3 abilities they can use at once is already a great balancing move, so i dont see the value in restricting the sandbox that the average player would be allowed to access.
Changes i would suggest include:
- Remove the price doubling of chiplets from the vendor, as this only makes the game way more grindy
- Cap the chiplet cost of a new skilltree to 8
- Add chiplets and pacifist rewards to the randomised missions

PERKS
I dont really see a benefit to having a chiplet cost to installing passive perks. If anything, this ,imo, just causes playstyle stagnation, as if you wanna play around with some new perks, you gotta grind through 2 max pay missions just to get enough money for the chiplets to allow you to replace the perks, and then if you dont like those and wanna go back to the old ones, thats another 2 missions. If youre set on having some chiplet cost to this system, perhaps up the total number of perk slots, but start at 1 and require payment to unlock a new slot

Furthermore, a lot of the negatives of using a perk often are way too high for the benefit or clash with the playstyle that the perk is supposed to promote.
A good example is the perk that lets you hack through walls, which deepens the hacker playstyle, but also causes your laptop to make a noise when it opens, meaning that enemies will be drawn to your location, which you have a hard time reacting to, because youre hacking something and your pov is on the other side of the map, and youre playing a hacker so you die in one shot.
These harsh drawbacks combines with the cost of adding perks combined with me not having access to the full sandbox meant that i played through the game not even using all three slots.

Ideally, when attempting to create a sidegrade, you want to boost a players effectiveness in one area, but also weaken their effectiveness in another, but a lot of these perks aim to both weaken and strengthen effectiveness in the same area, leading to either perks that come off as unappealing or perks that are blatantly op depending on how harsh the penalty was

ENEMY DETECTION
before managing to equip shocking reveal, i really disliked how enemy detection was handled. In short, a system in which the enemy instantly detects the player at the same time that they see them, is a system that only benefits players that are wanting a combat experience, as it completely negates any and all ability from the player to be able to gather an informational advantage over your enemies.
My suggestions would be as follows:
without the shocking reveal perk, have a default reaction time of the guards be one second, until the first non silent shot is fired from either you or an enemy, or a guard sends a transmission, in which case it goes back to instant/near instant
shocking reveal perk unchanged except have guards in LOS be instantly alerted if you shoot at them. (the shocking reveal perk is a very well designed perk btw, makes sneaking easier at the cost of making combat harder, great stuff)

THE TRAIN LEVEL
This is the level i was referring to when i mentioned that it was a filtering level of frustration for anyone who was attempting pacifist/stealth. Due to the completely linear nature of the level, and the complete lack of easy access to hackables near the objective, the only possible way i was able to find a pacifist solution was extreme trial and error until eventually finding a build where i just spammed portable backdoors in a line until i reached the server.
Looking back however, the main cause of frustration for that mission was how low my options were at the start of the game, and the cost of changing perks and the inability to see what kind of abilities each skill tree had prevented me from experimenting (who knows, maybe theres some really good perks in the empath and chrono skill trees for pacifist, guess ill never know until playthough 3!), that and the instadeath triggers being way too close to the rails. Overall, a sore point in an otherwise great campaign

OVERLORD
The chaos that comes from the randomness of the overlords punishments can be fun, but can quickly turn into feeling like complete bull when you roll wrong, especially when it happens so early into a level.
So, i propose that each time you increase the anger of the overlord, the punishments that he can use increase in severity, with the most ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ones (discharging your gun, revealing your location) being put further down the line, providing an urgency to dispose of the overlord, but giving you a consistent window to do that the player can plan for

GUNS
While on paper, having randomly generated guns having an infinite amount of variation with all their variables sounds great for variety, it could use a bit more refinement into how those random elements are controlled. Because any gun could be any shape and could have any stat, it meant that there were no identifying characteristics or any attempt to categorise the guns into typical archetypes. Therefore, it meant that when my gun ran out of ammo, i was always hesitant to pick up an enemies gun that they dropped, as i could never be confident in what exactly i would end up picking up, stagnating my playstyle. Some visual consistency between variants (stubby being smg, long being sniper, long and stout being shotgun, C shape being orb, V shape being bolter, etc) and identifying them as such instead of just bullet, would be a massive quality of life improvement for at least me

GETTING ATTACKED AND KILLED WHILE HACKING
while hacking, its very easy to have no idea what is happening around your character. So having some type of death message and death screencap would go a long way to answering the age old question "WHAT THE F KILLED ME?? I WAS SITTING ALONE IN A CORNER IN A DARK ROOM MAKING ZERO NOISE"
Also, it would be greatly appreciated if there was a warning when someone came across your body while youre hacking somewhere else, and a quick way to completely cancel what youre doing to go back in your body (even when piloting another body) by hitting the backspace key or something while not hacking, otherwise the options you have is to either be a veteran at mavis beacon teaches typing or return to apartment

AWARENESS OF THE THREAT OF THE LEVEL
Clunky name, but giving the player a list of major entities in the level would go a long way in helping the player make informed decisions about their playstyle for this mission. Orbital cannon in the area? maybe i should find that first before i go guns blazing. Chiplet in the area? oo guess i really gotta do some exploration round these parts
etcetc

QUICKFIRE SUGGESTIONS
- Sometimes i hit an enemy multiple times with either a gun or a sword, they dont die and then kill me in one hit. The feedback of this interaction made it feel like i was doing literally nothing, so having some small blood particles on contact will show the player they at least did something (there are hit particles already, but just colour them red so they dont disappear into the background)
- Letting the player unequip their gun would allow for increased hacking depth as they can no longer be affected by having their weapon discharged, as well as a small speed boost for the melee lovers
- Interacting with an ammo station should just refill their spare mags, dont make it unload your gun for some reason
- Entering the apartment always says you have new messages even when you dont
- The "[Mission Type]" and "Tab for details" Banners cover way too much of the screen for way too long. combine them, and make them disappear once the first door is opened
- The lack of any buffer on the top and bottom of the screen means you cant move as confidently up and down as you can moving left and right. Zooming out the camera (or giving an option to the player to do so) would be a good quality of life improvement
- Having every level start with you spawning in a room with a door above you makes every encounter feel samey, have some levels where you start by moving left, or even right! or possibly DOWN 0.0
- The compass takes too long to lerp to the actual direction the objective is
- Having some more notes to go along with the pacifist rewards would be nice, and also could be used to guilt the player and provide more context and worldbuilding, maybe they shouldnt have let those guys live


THE END
Thank you for reading this god awfully long review. Again, none of these are dealbreakers, game is still good, i just wanna help it reach a higher height than it already achieved

[Yung Venuz]

I was wondering why you didn't post this in the review section of the store page, but then I ended up reading the whole thing so mission accomplished I guess. I think you have a few really good points; I'd rather take nothing than 90% of the perks. Tried doing a different playthrough than my demo one so I'm going run and gun and literally all I'm taking is Ol' Reliable for Perks. When it comes to abilities, I feel similarly but with an asterisk. A few career paths have -really- good skills, and then others seem pointless.

Out of the ones I've tried, Empath, Hacker, and Necromancer have absolute banger abilities but Knight, Gunslinger, and Acrobat are never getting used (for the most part.) I like that Gunslinger can compensate for rotation or accuracy though.

The combination of this makes it, more often than not, very deflating when you finally scrounge the chiplets together to get a new career (that you can't preview) and then don't end up using anything you just bought.

Though I really like the game, it feels deeply wrong that the reward system is the worst part for me.

[mab]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Yung Venuz:

I was wondering why you didn't post this in the review section of the store page, but then I ended up reading the whole thing so mission accomplished I guess. I think you have a few really good points; I'd rather take nothing than 90% of the perks. Tried doing a different playthrough than my demo one so I'm going run and gun and literally all I'm taking is Ol' Reliable for Perks. When it comes to abilities, I feel similarly but with an asterisk. A few career paths have -really- good skills, and then others seem pointless.

Out of the ones I've tried, Empath, Hacker, and Necromancer have absolute banger abilities but Knight, Gunslinger, and Acrobat are never getting used (for the most part.) I like that Gunslinger can compensate for rotation or accuracy though.

The combination of this makes it, more often than not, very deflating when you finally scrounge the chiplets together to get a new career (that you can't preview) and then don't end up using anything you just bought.

Though I really like the game, it feels deeply wrong that the reward system is the worst part for me.

Yeah i prolly should have changed the title of the thread to make it clear this was more of a crit than a review, my bad, not exactly used to how discussion boards work tbh lol

And yeah i agree, there does seem to be an imbalance in terms of the usefulness of what each package unlocks you. I fear the workload that comes with figuring out balancing changes, and i pray that nodays has some backend built into the game that can give him some analytics as to what perks/skills are actually getting used

At the very least, giving more transparency as to what youre gonna unlock and removing some of the grind would be a relatively easier chance and go a long way in reducing that deflating feeling

[luckz]

- Interacting with an ammo station should just refill their spare mags, dont make it unload your gun for some reason

I guess it's so you don't just sit on the ammo station and shoot (infinitely) at oncoming enemies?

Otherwise I agree with everything you wrote.

Also, it would be greatly appreciated if there was a warning when someone came across your body while youre hacking somewhere else, and a quick way to completely cancel what youre doing to go back in your body (even when piloting another body) by hitting the backspace key or something while not hacking, otherwise the options you have is to either be a veteran at mavis beacon teaches typing or return to apartment

Maybe Esc pressed twice within a second could save you having to macro something like "return, s, b, return, esc" to a button.
And yeah, a Metal Gear Solid "!" style noise would be cute, if you're offscreen and someone comes into contact with you. Might even have a perk that automagically puts camera back on you, exits hacking, and activates slomo.

[mab]

Początkowo opublikowane przez luckz:

I guess it's so you don't just sit on the ammo station and shoot (infinitely) at oncoming enemies?

ahhh that makes sense. ,maybe at the very least automatically start the reload then, iirc it just ejects your mag without doing that

Maybe Esc pressed twice within a second could save you having to macro something like "return, s, b, return, esc" to a button.

ye, more than that, when piloting something, that macro would have to be "tab, 'pilot', enter, 'sb', enter, tab", so having a dedicated button to just slam while not in hacking mode would be great so you end up not being caught with your pants down

[Super-Nintendo Chalmers]

You can actually type "esc" while hacking and it does that. If you're piloting someone else and you notice someone near your real body, it just stops piloting the unit and returns control and the camera back to you instantly.

Also, you can hack mid-combat if you're fast with the commands and auto completion. If someone spots me, I can open console, type "hop [first one or two letter of enemy name]", autocomplete the command, then move into cover while the crack finishes. From there, you can just input the pilot command while they're moving in. Good for hackers that don't have much in the way of aggressive abilities.

[mab]

Początkowo opublikowane przez Super-Nintendo Chalmers:

You can actually type "esc" while hacking and it does that. If you're piloting someone else and you notice someone near your real body, it just stops piloting the unit and returns control and the camera back to you instantly.

wait whaa. wow, i dont recall that ever been told to the player, that doesnt even come up as an autocomplete option.

Also, you can hack mid-combat if you're fast with the commands and auto completion. If someone spots me, I can open console, type "hop [first one or two letter of enemy name]", autocomplete the command, then move into cover while the crack finishes. From there, you can just input the pilot command while they're moving in. Good for hackers that don't have much in the way of aggressive abilities.

unfortunately a lot of the characters i was running were high ego low armor, so if i attempted the same id imagine id get oneshot at least 80% of the time standing in line of sight of an enemy while not moving. (maybe a perk that slows time while tabbed at the cost of only being able to hack things at a cost of 4 and below in the hacker upgrade tree could help promote that kind of aggressive hacker playstyle)