My opinions on this game are extremely mixed at the moment. I found out about it quite early on in development, and I was really excited for it all the way up until my purchase. I even splurged and bought the game at essentially full price, which I almost never do. Knowing what I do now, I wish I had waited.

On the one hand, you have the demo. It’s perfectly paced, flows well, is immersive, has awesome music, and feels good to play. If the whole game were like it, it would be an instant recommend. On the other hand, you have the actual game. As of writing this, it’s been out for half a year and only has one mission (Aside from the tutorial), which plays nothing like the demo. Where the demo was about an hour long, the actual mission lasted six, and that’s not a good thing. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I must say that the boss fights are dope as ♥♥♥♥ and I absolutely love the worldbuilding. It very clearly takes inspiration from Star Wars, but does well to twist it into its own thing. Combat can be difficult at first, but an extensive options menu allows you to tweak, tinker, and tailor the experience to your own liking without getting rid of the challenge.

Unfortunately, the game also has a lot of negatives. The visual style can be a little hard to adapt to, even nauseating at first, and I can’t stand the English voice acting if I’m being completely honest. That said, the alien languages are fine. Seems like a strange choice to even have English in the game at all, given that our character is clearly bilingual. The campaign mission has two songs; one you’ll hear for the first five and a half hours, the other you’ll hear right at the end. For these reasons, I honestly considered turning the music and VO off multiple times throughout my playthrough, but then I’d just be left with the in-game audio, which really doesn’t fit the vibe. You’ll have to tediously backtrack the same level the entire time you’re playing, and on more than one occasion, I had to refer to the discussions tab in order to progress as many mechanics go without any sort of explanation. There are essentially no imm-sim elements throughout, aside from the basketball in the very first room (Which was also present in the demo), and you’re forced to talk to the one and only NPC featured on the entire map right after the opening cutscene. Ladders are slow, janky, and a hassle to use with their old school mechanics and a good 40% of the tutorial is unarmed combat, which I never found myself using even once during the campaign mission as I got a knife right away and managed to swap it out for a gun before even leaving the first room. There’s one section of the level where you absolutely NEED ammo in order to progress, so if you’ve spent it all before you even get to that point, tough ♥♥♥♥. Luckily I had one shot left by the time I got there, so this wasn’t an issue for me, but unless I’m missing something there’s literally no way around it without ammo. Picking up or interacting with objects can be extremely finicky, and in some cases mean the difference between life or death. For example, lighting a gas leak. Sometimes the prompt pops up from about three meters away, other times you need to be right under it, which surprise-surprise, kills you. That said, you can stand amongst the things which catch on fire afterwards, just not the source of the fire itself. At this point I’m more nitpicking than anything, but I also liked the old logo and advertisement graphics more than the current ones. They had sort of a grungy-dystopic vibe, but the new ones feel more like generic boomer shooter graphics made in MS Paint, and if I didn’t know anything about the game, they would probably deter me from checking it out. They’re also really inconsistent, using one of the three different official logos with various colour schemes depending on where you look. The same goes for a couple of the in-game graphics, e.g. Mozah’s face sprite, which I think was far superior during pre-release. Bundle all that with a handful of bugs, many of which the devs cite as intentional design features, and you end up with early access Fortune’s Run.

Apparently it’s a two-man dev team, in which case they’ve already done an absolutely phenomenal job, but at this rate we won’t actually get the full game for another seven years. I do see much potential for improvement in the future if the demo is anything to go by, but until then, it’s gonna be a strong pass.

My opinions on this game are [u]extremely[/u] mixed at the moment. I found out about it quite early on in development, and I was really excited for it all the way up until my purchase. I even splurged and bought the game at essentially full price, which I almost never do. Knowing what I do now, I wish I had waited. On the one hand, you have the demo. It’s perfectly paced, flows well, is immersive, has awesome music, and feels good to play. If the whole game were like it, it would be an instant recommend. On the other hand, you have the actual game. As of writing this, it’s been out for half a year and only has one mission (Aside from the tutorial), which plays nothing like the demo. Where the demo was about an hour long, the actual mission lasted six, and that’s not a good thing. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, I must say that the boss fights are dope as fuck and I absolutely love the worldbuilding. It very clearly takes inspiration from Star Wars, but does well to twist it into its own thing. Combat can be difficult at first, but an extensive options menu allows you to tweak, tinker, and tailor the experience to your own liking without getting rid of the challenge. Unfortunately, the game also has a lot of negatives. The visual style can be a little hard to adapt to, even nauseating at first, and I can’t stand the English voice acting if I’m being completely honest. That said, the alien languages are fine. Seems like a strange choice to even have English in the game at all, given that our character is clearly bilingual. The campaign mission has two songs; one you’ll hear for the first five and a half hours, the other you’ll hear right at the end. For these reasons, I honestly considered turning the music and VO off multiple times throughout my playthrough, but then I’d just be left with the in-game audio, which really doesn’t fit the vibe. You’ll have to tediously backtrack the same level the entire time you’re playing, and on more than one occasion, I had to refer to the discussions tab in order to progress as many mechanics go without any sort of explanation. There are essentially no imm-sim elements throughout, aside from the basketball in the very first room (Which was also present in the demo), and you’re forced to talk to the one and only NPC featured on the entire map right after the opening cutscene. Ladders are slow, janky, and a hassle to use with their old school mechanics and a good 40% of the tutorial is unarmed combat, which I never found myself using even once during the campaign mission as I got a knife right away and managed to swap it out for a gun before even leaving the first room. There’s one section of the level where you absolutely NEED ammo in order to progress, so if you’ve spent it all before you even get to that point, tough shit. Luckily I had one shot left by the time I got there, so this wasn’t an issue for me, but unless I’m missing something there’s literally no way around it without ammo. Picking up or interacting with objects can be extremely finicky, and in some cases mean the difference between life or death. For example, lighting a gas leak. Sometimes the prompt pops up from about three meters away, other times you need to be right under it, which surprise-surprise, kills you. That said, you can stand amongst the things which catch on fire afterwards, just not the source of the fire itself. At this point I’m more nitpicking than anything, but I also liked the old logo and advertisement graphics more than the current ones. They had sort of a grungy-dystopic vibe, but the new ones feel more like generic boomer shooter graphics made in MS Paint, and if I didn’t know anything about the game, they would probably deter me from checking it out. They’re also really inconsistent, using one of the three different official logos with various colour schemes depending on where you look. The same goes for a couple of the in-game graphics, e.g. Mozah’s face sprite, which I think was far superior during pre-release. Bundle all that with a handful of bugs, many of which the devs cite as intentional design features, and you end up with early access Fortune’s Run. Apparently it’s a two-man dev team, in which case they’ve already done an absolutely phenomenal job, but at this rate we won’t actually get the full game for another seven years. I do see much potential for improvement in the future if the demo is anything to go by, but until then, it’s gonna be a strong pass.