Recent reviews by SKN The LISPer

It has good foundations, but it's way too buggy in it's current state to be recommended.

Plays kind of like a mix between demon souls and king's field but with FPS, procedural dungeons and Porn.

I really want to like the game, The artstyle, graphic, presentation, it's all really good. But the combat is like the devs sat down and thought; "what is the most hated mechanics of souls likes? I wanna put them all into my game!".


Enemy attacks basically come in 5 types:

Normal Attack (can be blocked most of the time).
Yellow Attack (parry or dodge only).
Red Attack (dodge only, 'generally' dodge towards).
red circle attack (AOE, dodge only)
ranged attack (can be blocked)


So a normal enocunter is 2-4 enemies, that will randomly choose whichever of the above (depending on what they have available, some have 3, or 4 of these) and attack you with.

Basically, every encounter is a boss encounter in term of mechanics, where the block/shield button could've just been removed for a 'parry' button instead, and you'd not notice a difference in gameplay.

Terrible company. Hires unhinged sociopaths and is proud of it.

I really like the game, however it is not ready for release. Not only are there quite a bit of bugs left (i.e; summoning is almost completely unusable), but there's a lot of missing voice-acting, and if you turn off subtitles, you'll lose out on a lot of dialogue (no way to turn it on only for dialogue you partake in, or on only if there's missing, another one of many, many missing 'features').

This is in act1, further acts has far more 'missing' content. I'd wait until a few content patches if they ever come.

Caveat to recommended is; "I want to play a tactical shooter and don't mind bugs, rough edges, or procedural missions".

The biggest issue of the game, AI has been mostly fixed (it's now on par with most other older tactical shooters, such as Rainbow Six Vegas, or GRAW), it's not perfect but commanding them at least feels good instead of like you're figthing them (though you still need to baby sit them for clearing, without the benefit of 'squad camera' of SWAT series).

The reliance of procedural generated missions still feel extremely "temporary placement", but at least the foundations of the game now feels to be in place.

Unless you're really hammering for this kind of game right now, I'd suggest waiting for a couple of updates to see if they add new (scripted/hand-made) missions, as you'll blow through the scripted missions in a couple of hours currently. And the procedural ones are a lot worse than the scripted ones as is usually the case for most games.

Not really much to say. It's pretty much an more dialogue \ RPG heavy isometric S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

If you like S.T.A.L.K.E.R \ Post-apocalyptic scavanging games, you'll most likely like this one.

Pretty much Russian Half Life (Game is unappologetic about it's influence and rip-off of the opening sequence of Half Life 1, going as far as to straight up mentioning it "Have you played Half Pipe?").

Overall, it's a good spiritual successor to Half Life (Valve, take note. This is what we want(ed) from Half Life 3, we didn't expect a ground breaking game!), and it's one of very few SP focused games, where the shotgun actually work like a shotgun (yeah, you can shoot further than 1m ahead of you!)! Flashlight also covers most of the screen, rather than being a little dot where you can barely see what's infront of you (however the range of the flashlight leaves something to be desired on bigger maps).


Gameplay is very much half life, with gameplay loop consisting of making your way through linear areas, shooting enemies or solving simple puzzles to progress (most of the puzzles consist of fetching a specific item, or stacking objects).

One thing that stand out a bit, is the 'rest' sequences, something that used to be common in the late 90's to early 2000's, where you have sections where nothing really happens except a minor break\story dump as you wait and continue on the path. It's a nice breath of fresh air, as most (story) FPSes today tend to give you breaks only in the form of cutscenes, rather than actual interactive levels.


The game does have Ray Tracing options, however light and shadows don't work correctly. Global Illumination 'fights' with the pre-baked light causing visual artifacting (light dots), and certain shadows don't get rendered if too close. Ray traced reflections work without issue (at least with ScreenSpace Reflections turned off).


This also has an extreme amount of graphical options, with not only description of what (most) of the settings do (with photos!), but the effects are toggled in real-time, allowing you to see the difference immediately in the background (menu is also moveable!).


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On the bad side, however. The game utilize Russian VA (only), with English subtitles, but not all dialogue is subtitled, only "important" dialogue is, so TVs, P\A systems, ambient chatter, etc. Is not subtitled, leaving you to wonder what is being said. It would be nice to have these subbed (perhaps with a secondary font \ screen position to emphazise ambient vs main subs).


Some of the bosses (looking at you worm!) cheat or ignore general gameplay mechanics (some of it's adds are immune to fire, which is the primary mechanic given for the fight as well!) and feels 'cheap', while others just constantly have you under pressure giving no actual openings to attack (looking at you chopper!).


Enemy AI is pretty bad in close encounters, which is bad considering most of the enemies are close-encounter enemies (they phase through you, and sometimes hit when they shouldn't, or miss when they shouldn't), etc.


But overall, these are minor things that doesn't really take away from the game as a whole. For $10€ the game is well worth it, if one likes Half Life, and would like a spiritual successor to it.

Giving it a positive \ recommend mostly because of all the brigaged downvotes.

If you liked Dragons Dogma 1, this feels like an improved version of that. Bigger, better, with more stuff etc.

However, I'd recommend holding off for a few months until they fix the optimization. There's also some memory-leak issues which becomes apperant in harder fights (memory doesn't get flushed properly when you reload, which might happen a lot in harder fights).

Pushes the alphabet mafia on you (stealthily planned so you will run out of the refund window).