Recent reviews by Sepherix

Oh no, its bad. Its extremely novice in terms of balancing and general gameplay. For a fighting game, this is bad!

Some characters do not work. They have little to no tools in their kit to do anything due to slow animations, cooldown, recovery or has too much setup to do not much, meanwhile the next has every of their moves good and lead into another while being a constant threat all the time. This disrepancy is ridiculous. There are already problems that player discovered so get ready to get infinite'd.

You don't get enough currency to unlock characters. Worse, you cannot try them. If you make a mistake, you have to pay real money, play shaggy or free rotation for another week or two (and that's with the starting extras). Which is my case right now. I unlocked what's probably the worst fighter.

Daily. Daily. daily. The whole 'boost playcount & playtime' system is awful, doesn't reward anything meaningful and task you to play for way too much. You aren't rewarded for playing the game normally, so you HAVE to. Do your chores to progress the battlepass! :(
This is awful, never buy into that crap. Those need to be turned into at least weekly or monthly for the sake of not burning out players. Not like the game is going to survive long if it stays this way. Yes, the alternative is players maxing out the pass in a little time, is that a bad thing though ? No. Players have fun while doing that. Players don't have fun doing meaningless chores you might not even be able to complete because you're missing a character for it! It also takes a lot more time trying to accomplish said task than playing normally.

By the way, the long year leap they took did not fix or improve anything.
This is the result of a YEAR of refining. A worse progression system through and through for the sake of selling selling and selling things to you.
They sell you pve lives for higher difficulties that you can only access with enough pve exp that.. can only be increased with slow, daily tasks or BUYING exp straight up.

Don't spend a single cent. Not until there are significant improvements. This is a dumpster fire.

Very good resonance cascade simulator. This is a perfect creative theme to begin with and they pushed it even more with some scp vibes. Its great! It manages to look really good within its stylistic constraints.

The power dynamics are kinda neat. You start being hunted, then you begin bullying the enemies. Until the next ones where they shove your head into the toilet. It doesn't feel unfair. It can get hard in singleplayer but i've been enjoying it nonetheless. A bit more stealth and proper handling of fights. Dayum, some weapons feel really good to use and its only the beginning.

However. Its the unreal engine. I'm having certain issues with it. Like occasionally crashing discord in the background or being a bit voracious on the hardware. Thankfully one of them is a few settings away, those games always have all settings on ultra. As for discord.. I dunno, doesn't happen every sessions. Not like the previous unreal game i've played.

Memory leaked two times in the main area Jumping 17-20gb in under a minute. Its extremely boring. Having to repeat areas you've already done plenty of times is not interesting. at all. New areas are copy paste of previous ones with exceptions for story ones. Optional areas are copy. Pasted.

Waiting puzzle.
Level design is still missing cover.

Its undercooked. Its a horror house attraction rather than actual horror. Stuff just appears, say boo, adds itself onto the checklist and move on. They patiently wait in line, preferably without much repeats. You even have a bell to call them up if they're too slow.
A shame because the ideas are cool. But it wasn't cooked properly. If at all. This is loose ideas. Witchcraft, monster management, cultists and whatever constitute the rest. You can do great things with this. But this doesn't have enough. I expected to go on research expeditions. Would make sense.

You stay cozy at home, hardly anything ever threatens you because you're always home. There's a big monolith that wastes space on the map and is more dlc junk that each dlcs keeps adding in your map so you know you have a dlc installed. Its not a map anymore, its a junkyard.

You don't interact with anomalies to gain their associated research, you unlock the option in the research tree ON SIGHT, and research it with other anomalies instead. ::v Come on. At least give anomalies you capture a purpose. Right now they all are used to only make one unique, generic ressource, and power but that's secondary.
Only ONE of them is useful as a crafting component. one.

For now its a dlc that is not integrated into the game at all. It does its own thing, very poorly. If you don't want to integrate into the game, sure, but at least have meat on the bones.

Has to be one of my all time favs. Everything clicks well. Minus a dlc that's been put on a leash in wotc.

Character pool is an awesome system that let you have reccuring characters and randomly picked over the course of a campaign. That's where it grows to ridiculous proportion once mods are involved. I like that a lot. More games need something like that.

The game does an excellent job at making you feel like you're on a clock despite not truly being at its mercy or not having as little time as it make seem. Doesn't hold your hand after the tutorial but keeps things 'fair'. New threats usually show up by a few before a full squads appear, letting you start scrambling to adjust to them.

It does snowball if you have early losses in missions. non-player initiated mission failures are a bit too punitive as they often lose your region contact, which isn't a instant game loss but a pretty big setback that's a fun challenge to take on once experienced enough, but not if you're starting out.

Each class is good and has their own toys. They don't step on eachother or feel like a weaker version of another. Especially the sniper that gets a gunslinger perk line that rocks.

Maps have plenty of cover and are !randomly! generated. Despite that, they look and work really well. Because its not some shoddy, lazy work with 2 variations at most, there's enough variety and different locations that it shouldn't feel the exact same all the time. And its plenty destructible. Walls and floors with few indestructible supports.

Leads to great fights that are plenty mobile with a strong emphasis on flanking your opponent. opponent that shares a few tools with you which makes for fun fights. Each enemy has its uniqueness, leading to you priorising whoever you want to deal the least with.

If you're going to buy the game, it goes often on sale for ridiculously cheap. 90-95% off.
As a first timer, ingame on new campaign disable 'integrated dlc' for wotc and tick individual ones instead, this make them behave like vanilla, with their introduction missions. Do not 'untick' all of them unless you want everything active by default with no story like vanilla. Its.. very hard if you have alien hunter. If you want to remove a dlc entirely, you must untick them FROM STEAM.

I have to address the horrible 'Alien hunter' dlc. It makes the game worse, turning it into monster hunter. You have bosses that needs your utmost attention, gain an action each time you use one, play during your turn and usually mean that you have to give up missions if they do show up, because they appear like normal enemies do, wotc introduce chosens which are similar but way more balanced, reduce the number of enemy that show up and stop or add more time to timers, make themselves known and either wait or hunt you, giving you time to clear enemies or put yourself in good position. There's tools and rewards to help defeating the rulers but it takes so much importance that shifts the power dynamic too much into your favor even without defeating them, the base new toys are that strong. Unique, but strong.

Shen last gift and tactical legacy pack are dlcs that are plenty worth your time and money. They're not adding huge power balance breakers. Former adds a new troop type that is well balanced and quirky while the later adds banger songs and nostalgia cosmetics, with its own 'arcade' mode that features more storytime inside it. Its good.

Anarchy is overpriced and requires mods to make it usable, cosmetics aren't mix & matchable so you must have a mask but no hat. Or a hat but no mask. A shame because it has a few good cosmetics in there. But not enough work was put in it to make use natively.

resistance warrior is a pre order bonus cash grab. Half of it is a recolor of resistance npc armor. Makes one of the soldier in your barrack at the start REPLACED by a nostalgia bait trashlord. When i say replace, it overwrite after launch of a campaign the soldier; meaning they did appear and will never appear for the remainder of the campaign. And you won't know who.

Of course stuff can be modded in different ways to remove a bunch of issues. Or turn the game into your own personal kind of hell. Your choice.

Its fun. But its not for people who don't want to bother with playing in a server. I didn't expect to have rust/ark kind of ideas for a game like that.

Default settings are for long play, large number of player pvp with long, looong timers to take as much time away as possible. I'm not there to play that, i want a small size, weekend casual squad setting, which isn't too possible to tweak on my own, every time you crank up numbers to lessen the annoyance, the game cranks it up even more on its side every milestone you reach. The material requirements and time taken is a curve and i've only got a flat rate to fix that. It also could use some much needed QoL. You're going to spend a LOT of time opening chests to empty your inventory each time. You can't lazy it out and you have to bring up everything to the station, can't have them be used even if its right next to you, it has to be on you or the station's limited slots.

I wouldn't have that much of a gripe if the progression felt like you progressed. its not much. The first few weapons bring new skills and then some extras. Then you lose out on those extras for a bit.. And the game does not grant anything to return. Armour are lame. Only one piece per milestone, and its upgraded recolour with a minuscule set bonus, its a item level holder, you can't gear up for something specific or improve any aspect.

Combat skills are too samey from one another, leading to choosing whichever debuff you want to apply. There's a few different ones here and there but you have the exact same thing except the delivery is different. I'd like some more identity.

Said skills are also too 'late-ish' progression gated. Not leaving much to play with for a good while. Certain types even do not have a large chunk of its skills untill very late.

You eventually get servants.. That do nothing but be a stat block to be sent on facebook timer tasks, to gain a stockpile of ressources. I'd love for them to do.; anything but be in your way when you're building. They don't even patrol, they aimlessly wander. They need gear of current level to be sent too, so that's more spendings.

It could be a great game. There's some good ideas in the future dev updates, so that's nice. I'll check back later. This is too early.

Its very fun. I love the design of enemies. Its not too difficult either. A fun 'casual' shooter.

Story is forgettable. Its mostly there to give you a reason to go from places to places and its fine. Nobody is there to tell you the obvious stuff you'd be obviously doing the entire time and you want to see each new world. They're cool.

Passive traits you get as many as it takes to fill all of it. So its weird, delayed stats increase that some challenge expects you to have.

Most weapons are good, the worse ones are usually boss weapons. They're not all bad, some are busted material. They each feel nice to use though. Especially single shots. When you're blasting, you ARE blasting.

Enemies are for most part fun. Earth and rhom being in my opinion. Snowdlc could be considered if i didn't forget about it. Bosses are for most part great. Very few are a problem and most of the problems are dlc related.

Plenty of stuff to grab and its usually fun getting there. Not looking at dlcs or extremely rare setpieces that need you to run a world analyzer to get everything.

So lets get to the dlcs. Swamps finishes the swamp so it has more to do, to be somewhat on par with the other worlds. Its meh. having to run it multiple times to see one new thing as its (mostly) adventure only. Grows extremely boring with a single overworld. World analyzer moment.

Then snowland. That one is 'okay', but for different reasons. It has plenty of fun stuff. But its too story focused, the sound mixing was atrocious that i couldn't hear a character talking to me, so i thought they were mute. And they're an important character, not side exposition that's behind a door, no, its all cutscenes for that one. The guy behind the door though has perfect care put into being able to hear them.
That aside it has some tough bossfights that requires some spacial awareness that i do not. Still plenty of fun to get through.

As fun as it is, its unbalanced and flawed. It can be a ton of fun and tense. But a lot is hard to follow as its a constant threeway. You can try to take care of one team and the other is digging from under the objective.

They're willing to use AI to have free voiceovers. Which half of their lines feel soulless and a few of them have audible AI corruption/stroke. Despite using free 'labor' they're not providing much entertainement.

The speed difference makes playing as a team a lot quirky. Chances are someone is getting picked off or dies before the rest can get to them. between long respawns, being usually very distant and ressurecting allies usually getting you killed, you should play it safe but you cant. Ammo is infinite and throwables are too, on a short cooldown.

'Suspended' maps are impossible to win without dedicated tools to get up there or get the objective down as you can break the ziplines with ease. Bounce pads might not reach high enough.

Light class deal way too much damage and have no teamplay at all. None unless you stretch a microsecond of invisibility. Even if they tried to stay grouped, their lack of health make them incappable of handling a firefight beyond who shot first. its bad; Especially on a class with on demand invisibility with no cooldown, with a minor sound cue that's muffled under the average firefights and buildings crumbling down. Are able to melt you under half a second or a bit more depending on the gun they use. And will 'stun' you reducing your mobility and stuck to your primary, as if they needed more crutches! Its bad.

There's a bunch of weapons with horrible balancing, the same kind of weapon on the same class can go from 'alright' to 'broken beyond reason'. Some even nullify too much other tools, including weak ones.
Half the designs feel like its a class based shooter and half the other is generic deathmatch. Eeh.

Might be the best way to play yugioh.

The problem is that you're playing yugioh.

Banlist is a joke. Everything is getting more and more expensive as time goes by as new cards are most often high rarities. And most things you need to play are also high rarity. A new player cannot play master duel. There's too many must have before you can even play a deck and the worse it is on its own, the more expensive it gets too because the bandaids are not cheap.

I wont go over yugioh issues on their own but there's too much. The game should have died out long ago, its this bad.

Mediocre game carried by the art.

Balance is horrendous. Starved for leveling ressources, meaning you can't experiment lest you softlock yourself on horrible characters until you do have a decent team to fall back on. How are you supposed to know as a newbie?

Combat is bad. Either it punishes you for doing too good or punishes you for taking your time. There was potential at the start. But was dumbed down into number big = win. The game's content suffered because of it. No more do we have the people who are consistent but have less of a ceilling. Everyone is consistent. The role of being better at being mid means you're bad once the enemy numbers inevitably goes up to be in line to other 'one hit wonders'.

Everything outside of the gameplay is great. That's awful and by this point is too late to fix. They've used to change their games drastically but i don't think this time they will, or can. So this is doomed to be a bad game that will waste your time playing boring, samey content until it gets anything new and hopefully you've got the experience tickets for it. (you wont.)