Recent reviews by Electric Meat

It's difficult to recommend but at the same time feels wrong to give it a 'no'. The first half of the game is incredible; the atmosphere is perfect, the weapons take a bit of getting used to but work fine once you do, the jank is just the right amount of jank to be endearing. The game tells you to save often and you should. The npcs you meet are interesting and the zones, while circuitous and sometimes confusing, never really left me lost and did an excellent job of discreetly signposting where you needed to go.

That being said the latter half of the game is absolutely awful. The later zones are basically straight paths and the primary obstacles become instant death pits littered everywhere and mandatory enemy arenas (littered with instant death pits). That endearing jank from earlier is now a frustrating floaty movement system that requires precision to avoid instant death, your hitbox feels larger than your screen; enemy projectiles that seem like they should miss will go past your vision then still hit you. If you so much as touch any environmental objects (like a rock or stalagmite) you go from full speed to stopped in an instant and numerous times I got stuck on objects or enemies.

The game drags on longer than it needs to as well with several zones that add basically nothing to it; you could easily cut ~2 hours out of the game and it would genuinely be a better game for it. There's a section towards the end that's probably 20-30 minutes long where you're just holding forward through a series of interconnected caverns and.... that's it. The final areas are especially bad for padding and every time you think the game has run its course (tbf it ran its course, at this point, 1-2 hours earlier) it goes on for a bit longer. As well the final couple boss fights don't do the game justice and only serve to highlight how weak the game's combat and movement are.

Despite the awful latter half of the game it's worth picking up just because of how good the early to mid game is but the end of the game is bad enough that it definitely killed any possibility of replay value for me.

Overall an incredible game if you're looking for something to get that Stalker itch and another run of Anomly just isn't going to do it. Really looking forward to see how they expand the late game and what else gets added. It's a shame the demo got taken down because the price point might seem a bit high for an early access game but it's 100% worth it. At 1.5 playthroughs (and no challenge runs or trying hardcore modes out) I'm at 40 hours played which is more than you'd get from most $100 AAA games.

Some minor complaints. I don't like the hunger system but it's largely able to just be ignored; but please just let me turn it off completely. As well some mission text is extremely vague and some aren't signposted at all and easily missed. Finally there are several hidden system that meaningfully contribute to the game but are essentially wiki bait because the game tells you nothing about them. But nothing that makes the game unplayable or too tedious and frustrating. Even now in Early Access you're getting, depending on how fast you play and what you decide to look up, 20-30 hours of solid gameplay. The late game gets a bit stagnant but I believe that's what they are currently working on now.

Even if you bought it now and it never got another update you'd get your money's worth. I'm looking forward to what else they will be adding to the game because if they can flesh out the mid-late game as well as the early game is now it'll be one of the definitive stalker-likes to the point where it surpasses the games that inspired it.