When I first played Depth of Extinction around 9 months ago, many of the negative reviews were valid; while the game undeniably had potential, it got boring quick. However, that has all changed. The developer has clearly taken the feedback to heart, and made many awesome changes:

• Several new map types, with more planned, which offer not only aesthetic variety, but also diverse tactical challenges, as different maps require different approaches, and will be better for certain classes/builds.
  
• More details about nodes on the overmap. For example, you canplan your route so as to avoid maps that will be more difficult for your team, or go out of your way to target warehouses looking for upgraded weapons/armor.
  
• Many new difficult enemy units (again, with more planned) that will keep you on your toes, and challenge you to come up with new strategies in order to reliably defeat them.
  
• An enemy database, in which you can see enemyies' loadouts and stats, allowing you to plan your strategies with more certainty.
  
• Enemies now can hear you from nearby rooms if you walk or fire weaponry too close to them. This does a great job of breaking up the formula of "open doors -> clear room -> repeat," occasionally throwing a wrench into your plans and facing you with the decision of trying to fight it out with more enemies than you bargained for, or take what loot you can and retreat back to the sub.
  
• Many more changes. It really is impressive to me, as a programmer myself, how much progress the developer (just one guy AFAIK) has made in these 9 months.

Ok, enough of the recent changes, let me talk about the game as a whole.

10/10

I don't give that rating of 10 lightly. I am a veteran of squad-based tactics games, and that's what this is at heart; comparisons to FTL are only skin-deep. A good squad-based tactics game is all about options; different approaches should be possible in all areas of the game, from soldier level progression, to equipment loadouts, to which character classes you choose for your squad, to the literal approach you take when engaging enemies. These allow the player to explore the tactical space, and find the best approach for a variety of different situations. Of course, to be fun, it needs to be consistently challenging as well. Depth of Extinction has both these things in spades. The only other games I've played that nailed the tactical gameplay this well has been the Long War mods for XCOM and XCOM 2.

8/10

With any non-linear tactics game, you need a gameplay presentation for mission selection. In Depth of Extinction, this is really pretty bare-bones. Which is kind of okay, as it's better for the strategic layer to be short and simple than to be a drawn-out and boring interlude to the exciting tactical gameplay. Still, I would like to see a bit more challenge and depth to the resource management side of the game. One thing it does have going for it is objective selection: each objective is a specific mission with a specific reward, though you will inevitably end up fighting several missions moving towards it. That reward can be main story progression, or unlocking a new sub, or retrieving an advanced piece of equipment. Being able to choose what you're fighting towards makes you much more attached to the outcome.

8/10

I haven't progressed a ton in the main story, so take this rating with a grain of salt, but the setting is pretty original, and personally makes my imagination run wild. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, where the sea level is so high that only the tops of mountains remain. Most of civilization seems to reside in underwater bases and floating habitats, and people travel via submarine. Some of the pre-mission blurbs mention things like skyscrapers where only the top floors are above water, which is a really cool idea.

6/10

The real story here is two-fold: The voice acting and the music. The voice acting is bad, unfortunately. The sound quality itself is fine, but the lines are delivered in a way that feels a bit too light-hearted for a game where you're fighting against marauding raiders and killer androids in rickety underwater buildings. However, the music is what saves this sections rating from disaster. There's not a huge variety of tracks, but the ones there are well-composed, good quality, fit the aesthetic of the rest of the game quite well, and are occasionally downright catchy.

9/10

I usually don't like pixel art too much, finding it often too simple and low-resolution for me to figure out what it's trying to represent. However, I love the graphics in this game, mostly for how detail-oriented it is. The shadows of fish swimming that can be seen through windows, the rust stains on the seams of walls, the dynamic blood stains (from humans) and oil stains (from mechanical enemies). These details really sell the atmosphere of the game. Also, bonus points for the fact that all armor and weapons, (and even some small items, like helmets) actually appear on your characters. I love when indie games go the extra mile do that, because it's a lot of work.

In any in-development game, the attitude of the developer is incredibly important. I have seen the reviews talking about sketchy behavior from the dev. I don't know whether these rumors are true, and frankly, I don't much care: All I see from the dev on the forums is a person who is communicative, friendly, patient, and incredibly receptive to constructive feedback; I myself posted a list of suggestions, and the dev responded to each individual one with an explanation of how that particular issue could be addressed or is already being addressed).

Depth of Extinction is easily one of my favorite squad-based tactics games. It has a cool and well-conveyed setting, an indie charm, and most importantly, the gameplay constantly offers fresh challenges. I've put 50 hours in it so far, but could see myself putting in hundreds more once the game has more content and the dev finishes ironing out the few balancing/pacing issues that remain (the next few builds will be focused on this, ostensibly). If you are a fan of the genre, I highly recommend this game, though you might want to play on the new "Casual" difficulty to start, as Depth of Extinction can be quite difficult, and you can always turn it back to classic mid-playthrough if you want more challenge.

You may want to peruse this thread before considering a purchase. But please be clear that my review below was written before any of that nonesense happened. The info in the thread did not influence my review, but it would certainly influence any future purchases I would consider with this team.

Depth of Extinction combines X-Com gameplay with FTL-node based overworld movement, and the whole thing is too standard for it's own good. Everyone gets excited when they hear FTL comparisons, but I just don't think this is a great mix. Overall, the game isn't terrible, but it has a lot of rough edges and needs to breath some fresh life into the genre to merit a near $20 price tag. This title is very indie, and while I do appreciate shoestring budgets and all that - sometimes less is more. The voice acting is amateur (which is fine, no problem with me), but I think if you can't go all out, then maybe you should just have text-only or something. Another thing that smacked me in the face was that the interface feels mobile. Now I understand it is not on mobile (yet), but I can't shake the feeling the UI was designed for it. This is something that is a pet peeve of mine.

The pixel art is competent, but in an age where we are bombarded with new pixel art indie games on the daily - the bar is very high. It feels like every month a game pops up that just defies what we thought was possible and raises the bar. The sound effects are in the same boat. I bought this title on Itch (I think) on day one, and have picked it up casually a few times. Every time my mind started quickly drifting and the whole thing just felt uninspired, when I want it to have a strong 'just one more round' effect. Again, I can tell this is a labor-of-love for the devs, but I just don't find myself getting hooked at all like I did with similiar titles such as Steam Marines or Xenonaughts or the modern XCOM reboot.

Pros:
+It is certainly a labor-of-love
+You can play with just the mouse

Cons:
-The only novel thing here is the mix of X-Com gameplay with FTL-node based overworld movement, and I don't think it works that well
-The gameplay is too standard; it needs to have some original ideas
-This is very indie (which is fine), but has too many rough edges to merit the asking price
-Unfortunately, I don't find it addicting at all
-The enemies say some really wonky and random stuff, like "fe fi fo fum" and odd expletives that I won't say here

Sadly this is a hard pass from me.

The music and graphics for this game are great. It is very similar to XCOM and FTL, and the world is interesting. Unfortunately, the gameplay is mindnumbingly boring. I decided to play longer than 2 hours, hoping the gameplay would open up, but each and every engagement is exactly the same. Save your money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCAI_S8X2Bw

These developers revoked the Steam Key (beta from itch.io) of a user for posting a negative critique of the game. They have issued a new key and apologized, but this still paints the picture of a developer to be VERY wary of.

In regards to the game, if this were 1/2 the $20 asking price, I woul dbe singing it's praises. As it is $20 it comes in at a price point where there are additional levels of expectation that simply are not being met. Coupole that with the now untrustworthy nature of the developers, and I would recommend giving this game a pass at least until the Devs prove themselves or the game is discounted to the $10 mark or below.

Faster Than X-COM, essentially, with all the flaws of both and little of the charm.

You're exploring a procedurally designed grid of missions to get to your objectives, each grid location giving you a chance to visit a merchant, risk some ship integrity/fuel or take on a combat mission to accomplish something, and the last objective of each "zone" generally giving an overall bonus to your campaign.

This is conceptually something I'd love, the problem is in the execution.

Generally each combat mission, and there are more combat missions than any other type of event, are small, slow and extremely similar, which means that they rapidly become a repetitive chore which you start expecting to be over and done with extremely quickly. However, this changes once the difficulty increases, whereupon the game starts pulling things on you like enemies that can see you through doors and run in to blow you up before you have a chance to do anything(real fun), enemies with huge piles of HP that can blow up cover(obviating that entire mechanic) while also damaging whoever's behind it and enemies that attack from inside the fog of war which means you have no real way to actually take cover or otherwise prepare for their attacks.

You're also extremely at the mercy of what room layouts the procedural generation decides to cough up, as it'll happily create a situation where you have literally no cover while your opponent has tons of it.

Interface issues also abound, like the game being extremely happy to let you waste an important shot on cover instead of an enemy, when sprites overlap or being extremely insistent about "suggesting" actions. For instance, character's ammo out? It'll suggest you reload, and you have to pretty much kick and wrestle the interface to let you move first or perhaps use a secondary weapon instead, making the whole thing feel kind of weirdly "sticky." Sometimes, to activate or deactivate certain actions, you also need to "maneuver" your cursor between other active buttons that might give the game different ideas about what you want to do.

From FTL it also inherits the issue of gear drops being insanely random and also insanely important. For instance, one character of mine randomly got dropped a weapon that deals twice as much damage as any other party member's, and once I start hitting the bullet-spongey Hard mission enemies, he's the only one who can do meaningful damage to them, everyone else starts being kind of irrelevant. Unlike FTL, a run also isn't a quick half-hour or one-hour thing, but an entire persistent campaign, so if the dice roll against you it isn't just a quick re-roll to try again.

It's a game that I really wanted to like and, after the early stages, thought I would, but having to redo an entire 20-minute mission just because the AI decided it could suddenly see through walls just isn't something I have the patience for in a game like this, and the random factors really hurt it. It feels like a game that would have been much better with a single, non-random campaign filled with only hand-crafted missions.

I wanted to like this game, I really did. I was hoping for an atmospheric. difficult tactical game. What I got was a surprisingly dry, uninspired game borrowing from others. I got to the end of the first area and just didn't care enough anymore to finish it. On paper this game sounds great, but the execution of it is rather lacking.

I never felt tension, everything looked rather samey, and the pixel graphics are lacking in personality. I guess I wanted something more in line with old Terror From the Deep, this was not that game I guess. It's not an awful game by any means, it just lack drive and a wow factor to keep things going dooming it to being another game to rot away in my library.

Like many, I was drawn by the description of the game as a marriage of FTL and XCom, both highly enjoyable games.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to join the chorus of negative reviews: Depth of Extinction is simply too repetitive. I made it far enough to unlock two new areas (of 5), unlock a new class, complete the first story mission, and hunt down a new weapon. So I feel qualified to state: When you've played the first mission, you've played every mission. Actually, it's even worse than that. When you've opened ONE room, you've opened them all.

That is how small the game's core loop is. You put your soldiers in good cover outside of a door and turn on overwatch. You open the door. You patiently murder enemies. Then you do the next door. A single 'encounter' is made up of 3-6+ rooms/doors. A map node is made up of 2-5+ encounters. A mission is made up of 2-5+ map nodes. So a single mission - of which I can estimate you'll need 30-40 to reasonably beat the game and unlock most stuff - consists of 60 rooms. So to beat the game, you'll need to defeat 2500+ rooms. And very little changes between them.

But it's worth noting, what does change?

The game does scratch that nice RPG itch of unlocking new items and abilities. You'll get new armor (which increases HP & provides defense against the 4-5 status effects in the game); new weapons (which fall into the categories of heavy, launcher, rifle, sniper, SMG, shotgun, and spear); new usable items (like medkits & grenades); and new passive items (like ammo types that add status effects). In addition to that, there's 6-9 classes, whose abilities are rather standard fare when it comes to the genre. I swear some of them are even named the same as the identical abilities found in X-Com.

Furthermore, you'll encounter an admittedly slow escalation of new enemy types, who use different weapons and have different abilities.

That said, none of this really changes your tactics. At best, the occasional open world map provides a slight variance. But for the most part, the core game loop and the best tactic to deal with that loop remains the same: You park behind cover, you turn on overwatch, and you shoot them until dead. Then you reveal the next room.

Even this small core loop has its issues. Overwatch gets janky if multiple people fire on a single movement. The result is, for example, one of my wreckers ended up blowing up all my own guys because he waited to shoot until after the enemy had ran PAST him and into the midst of my soldiers. Or suppose you paralyze an enemy during an overwatch. He'll still get to shoot. Huh? And the UI needs a bit of work - I found myself continually annoyed by the lack of an easy way to look at my soldier's stats outside of the level up screen. Perhaps it's there - but I never found it.

While this simplicity and rough edges are not unexpected from an indie game, the lack of narrative elements is less excusable. There is a wall of text to start the game and one cut-scene. But beside that I have encountered nothing. No lore. No character development. When I completed the first story mission, there was literally no dialogue to note it. A new area unlocked and that was it. Again, I understand it's indie - but really? Writing is cheap and easy to do, compared to engine design or audio-visual content creation.

I made it 15 hours in the game, but I knew it was time to throw in the towel when I started skipping every fight I could. I felt I'd seen all there was to see, mechanically speaking. Anything else would be, I knew, a tired variation on a theme, a theme that is itself, a poor copy of better games.

All my play time was before the game hit Steam, when it was an itch.io only pre-order.

Depths of Extinction is a VERY solid turn-based combat game, with a surprisingly good story. The game is just very solidly built, and is all around a very well made game. It's obvious the developer really cares about user interface, as the controls and game screens are well designed and gameplay and actions are executed smoothly.

There are character development choices, skills, weapons and upgrades aplenty. It's a bit lighter than some of the big hitter TBS and strategy games, but that's not a bad thing at all. Sometimes you just want to have fun and play some quick combat missions, and don't need a super hardcore experience. This game excels in that regard.

The graphics are very old school. They have a nice charm to them, and they are more than sufficient. One bummer that I hope gets improved is that the way the maps and art is designed, it can occasionally result in a mis-click when trying to move to a specific spot. Not a show stopper, but a slight flaw nevertheless.

The game doesn't really do much super new that will make you go "Wow, I've never seen that before", but it's an entertaining game that will easily give you your turn-based combat and FTL-like node exploration fix, and you'll have a great time to boot!

Jake and Elwood give Depths of Extinction two big fat thumbs up! :cupup: :cupup:

If you are an X-Com fan it's good fun for an hour or so but quickly several problems arise that for the moment make me not recommend this game.

Pros:
* Soundtrack is banging
* Follow mode is fantastic (here's hoping we see something like that in the next X-Com)
* Combat feels good at the start
* Nice customization, variety of items, weapons, etc.
* Enjoyed the leveling and growing of the characters in general

Cons:
* There needs to be more maps to play in. You very quickly get tired of the exact same maps with different but not different enough layouts. There is never enough space for your guys which leads to them either never doing anything or standing out in the open.
* More variety of enemy types.
* In general everything takes too long. Walking around takes forever, which is further exaccerbated by how many encounters you need to do to complete a mission. You can beeline for the end but then I wonder why put all these paths in place?
* Everyone is too powerful. I use a ballistic mask on my warden and have him hunker down somewhere. Everyone runs to the enemies and kills them as quickly as possible as they won't attack them until the next round. I have so much health that even if one makes it it's no big deal.
* Difficulty needs tweaked. Breezing through hard missions without so much as a care using the above strat.
* It's clear the game dev loves X-Com and FTL as it shows here. However the abilities are copied almost verbatim and more thought needs to be put on making these abilities balanced in this game. The map where you go from encounter to encounter is interesting but the repeated maps/areas quickly make it so you just want to beeline for the exit, rendering it useless.
* Maybe there is a reason to pick different ships but honestly it didn't really seem to matter which one I took. Perhaps later in the game it starts to impact things but I think a lot could be done to improve this selection from the start.

There is a good game here but needs a few tweaks, content, and balancing there. It's cheap and if you are hungering for X-Com/FTL hybrid it's a lot of fun before the repetiveness of it wears on you. Otherwise in it's current state I'd say wait for the devs to add content/polish/balance before buying.

This game is an exercise is tedium and brings nothing new to the genre. Could be good, but pacing is too slow and combat too repetitive.

Lost whole team of max level character after last "patch update" due to 3 game errors.

1) First, one of my guys leaves follow mode to run into the darkness after an unseen fuel can. Before patch, your guys only grabbed what was visible on screen. Interestingly as well is that the other 2 guys with higher movement and 1 with higher visibilty never went for it, nor even sensed the fuel can deep in the fog of war. 1 man down.

2) I run my shotgunners in the fray. Turns out thier main and ONLY useful skill close combat is broken ( an extra shot each round when point blank, was UNLIMTED shots pre-patch). Since they dont get the extra shot now i have 2 sitting ducks in the midst of 5 enemies.

3) Somehow my shotgunners barely survive the counter attack. One shoots and kills a close enemy and i activate the "hit and run" skill. So i try to run behind cover since i was standing in open expecting to fire twice from game error #1. Now another enemy ( the big boss ) kills me from overwatch! What?!?!? It does not say "overwatch" above his character as the game always used to indicate when an enemy ( or friend) is in that stance. SO 2 down. Well, other the second shotgunner is in same boat, so i hit and run to cover only to be killed by the over watch again!!!!! Apparantly the boss moved,fired, then sat in overwatch for 2 extra shots after that without any indicator either time. Well now down to my sniper who does not last long againstremaining enemies.

Way tooooooo tedious to regrind 4 characters back to level 10 to attempt this fight again. Took like 20 hours the first time to get this far.

Soooooo, i tried again, and..............

While moving around on screen, your guys randomly freeze ( as though stopped by an invisible hand). Once stuck, they will NEVER come unstuck until rest of team encounters an enemy. And then the guy is soooo far behind that he cannot help in fight. Also take 20-30 seconds for stuck characters turn to end, thus making an insanely tediuos game even worse.

I have been paralyzed like this at least a few dozen times. And finally it cost me more than just my time, as i lost whole team again!!!! This game is a sick joke. Fix your bloody game already.

Also what the hell is even the point of levels if enemies scale? Just start me maxxed out and enemies maxxed out! What a poor decision to scale enemies to character level. No RPG in history has had anyone say: "eureka! This works". NO ONE likes scaling levels in ANY game and NEVER has. Why do developers keep failing?