Recent reviews by ToxycBanana

TL;DR: Excellent extraction shooting game that discourages solo play and has far, far too many (FIXABLE) flaws and poor balancing decisions. I'll change this review as we get patches and will probably keep playing. Soft negative review & constructive criticism.

The Good
-Shooting every single gun in this game FEELS great. They have learnable recoil patterns and punchy sound effects, and killing aliens and players is a great pleasure.

-Looting, be it picking up items off of the ground, mining, or killing creatures for their drops is very simple, comes with neat sound effects, and doesn't waste your time with strange inventory mechanics. Hitting ANY rock in this game is my favorite thing to do.

-Getting into a match is real quick. It is so starkly different from the other menu-hobbled games in the genre and it is a breath of fresh air to just be able to play the game instantly.

-Playing in a group has been nerfed significantly since CB2 with the removal of the through-wall outlines and pinging systems. This means that, while you are still at a 300% advantage when facing a solo player, you need to actually communicate your actions with your team or they will lose you in the heat of the moment.

-You cannot craft ANY mods that reduce the recoil of guns. This is nice! It prevents players from "needing" to constantly have attachments pre-crafted for their next kits to be meta and reduces the drag that crafting introduces to the extraction shooter genre.

The Bad:
- Immediately what comes to mind are the graphical presets and unchangable lighting effects. There have been times where I have been completely blinded in game by screen space reflections, HBAO, and other completely unnecessary lighting effects that, sure, make the game look incredibly stylized and pretty, but also detrimentally effect every single system you can interact with. Don't believe me? Next time you spawn on the south side of Bright Sands, try looking at any cliffside to the north at a 45 degree angle and tell me if you would be able to see a person standing up there. There is a reason why cheaters aren't just aimbots and ESPers, and inject graphical changes into the base files - when you can actually see things, the game feels so much better.

- Playing solo is an incredible test of patience. Most of my nearly 200 hours have been played solo, and I only play with friends to help them get their quests done or to do drills and pumps, which generally makes for a good experience. I have completed the entire Korolev drill quest line solo. It was agonizing, and I am now placed into lobbies with players far above my actual skill level because I've learned how to pick things up and get the most stuff out with the least risk. The only way to make marked progress as a solo player in the "high MMR bracket" is to go to where your quest is located, complete whatever it is you were supposed to do or collect, get to your extract, and wait for the storm to even think about calling the ship. Slow, tactical game play is not what the guns in this game are balanced around, but as a solo, you have to think about the direct consequence of every single sound you make. And if a group realizes you are a solo player, you are completely 100% SOL as they rush you and the TTK (minus grenades) only allows you to bring one of them down with you unless you're in the potato bracket.

- Cheaters. It's a null statement at this point in the wipe, but I have stopped running any viable PvE gear minus the bulldog because there is zero reason for me to risk any gun worth 50k+ space roubles in lobbies where cheaters have threatened to kill me if I don't let them escort me around the map because it's funny that you can actually use the heavy mining tool.

- Speaking of tools, every single tool feels like a waste of prep time and money. They all weigh significantly too much to use with even the green bag. In the case of the mineral scanner, it is made completely obsolete by the static spawns of ore around specific points of interest. The heaving mining tool is fun to use, but entirely too loud for the user for virtually zero benefit. Give us more weird, interesting tools, I love stuff like this, but only if it helps cater towards a play style. Give us a monster scanner, or even a prospector scanner, and then sure, you create a loud noise, but now you know where the beasts and rats are actually hiding and can plan your pathing appropriately according to your play style.

The WEIRD: (or, not necessarily bad, but very poorly executed)
- MMR. MMR based on loot extracted. MMR not based on your skill as a shooter in a shooting game, but on the amount of "money" (IN ITEMS) that you have extracted with. Why? Sometimes, vast amounts of the loot that you extract with is going to sit, stagnantly, in your stash until you have all of the requisite items for quest completion. So, now that I've learned routes for making KMarks with mining and looting, without even having to visit the jungle or the second map, I have to contend with sweaty players in every single match who have no goal but to shoot guns at things. I don't have a problem with their playstyle, I have a problem with how the hell I ended up here with a one prospector kill per life K/D. It IS a skill issue, created by MMR. It is a very easy system to game as well. Just load into any map with one trash item in your pockets and nothing else and as soon as you can exit the match, do it, and you'll significantly lower your average loot per raid over time. This is a pretty bad system. My friends don't want to play with me because my lobbies are impossible to extract from without the stealth I'm usually afforded by solo play, and I don't have a chance to learn what guns I actually like or improve my solo pathing because I'm either running into teams that take too long to kill with anything but the KA/C32, or a cheater comes along to collect their paycheck.

Yager, you guys seriously have to shift the MMR system's focus away from loot, and create more than two brackets of MMR for long-time players. Looting is a system that every single player interacts with every time they load into a match. Efficiency with loot and movement is more or less equal to game knowledge, and with around 1/10 the lootable items, guns, armor, enemy types, and points of interest of Tarkov, the skill ceiling for getting good at looting is VERY low. I could probably teach a young child what loot is good to pick up, where to get it from, and, without even killing anybody, in a couple of hours they'll be playing with the big bois. Please give us 6 brackets and tie it to either K/D or damage dealt per drop.

- The C32 and shotguns (minus the Maelstrom) are in a very VERY GOOD place. These guns are reminiscent of the awesome punchy style of combat born out of arena shooters and get their respective jobs done well, even white variants against PvE fare quite nicely. Compared against every other class of weapons in the game, both the snipers and shotguns take only 2-3 shots to kill players at the very most regardless of armor, while SMGs, ARs, and DMRs vary wildly between 3-18 depending on landed headshots and enemy armor. The reason this is in the weird category is because I have no clue how to remotely express how worthless it feels to hit somebody 9 times with an extremely expensive gun that you spent hours to have the privilege of purchasing at a huge markup - and they don't die - but you get instakilled by any competent 2+ group running C32/Bulldog. It feels like I'm shooting myself in the foot any time I don't bring one of these guns with me as a PvP sidearm. The GOOD GUNS are not for killing people, but aliens, and many of them handle worse than their cheap "crap" counterparts. Put simply, it's bad PvP design, but the guns still feel good to use for my play style so I won't categorize the whole thing as bad. Just unbalanced.

I have hit the character limit so I guess this is where it ends.

I've got a few gripes with how this release has been handled. I do not trust this developer.

This game had a beautiful trailer that came out t w o y e a r s a g o and does not in anyway reflect the game in its current state. Taking two years to put out a game in early access that feels this completely unfinished and charge 35USD for it seems like a scam, coming from ex-payday developers.

Let's get into gameplay-relevant facts.

The atmosphere is overwhelmingly dark and dingy, which I love, actually. The setting for this game is perfect, but the experience you get is just so very tedious.

The UI is worse than any of the Halo titles, they could have copied and pasted every asset from the first gen Halo:CE and it would look the same if not better than our current in-game UI. I'm not even going to touch on the main menu because it's just WRONG. Please, just give us the option to make the main menu static. The buttons I want to push move away from my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mouse AND I have to hold them down to do anything. I get that the game is hardcore but why do the menus have to be?

The game does not change difficulty based on number of players in a match. With 3 it is ridiculously hard, and with 4 you can just barely scrape by. Solo and duo is impossible.
There is no reason for this because as of the time of writing this review the only reward you get for completing levels is seeing more of the same old warehouse hallways, dead ends, blinky lights, and admittedly-cool-if-not-completely-f*cking-ridiculously-bullet-spongy aliens. Yes, my group was stealthy. No, it didn't make a meaningful difference. You are roadblocked at A1 until you find your fourth and to me that is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

There is no inherit point to the stealth aspect of the game because there will always be more aliens. Just don't use ammo until you are defending a door because you WILL run out and resupplies are scarce.

Enemies lack meaningful telegraphing, their attacks (aside from melee) do not make any sense at all (especially the ranged ones), difficulty is artificially inflated by ammo deficits and bullet lag, enemies come from cleared rooms and when you backtrack there are still enemies in rooms that they would have had to come from in order to get to the security door that you defended. There should be an inherent level of combat expertise that your character has. Nobody goes into a well-known alien infested facility with 4 magazines and no knowledge of how to control their weapon effectively.

I have to hand it to the developers; they almost tricked me into running out the clock on my refund timer. Maybe if I did I'd find enough reason to continue playing it to find joy somewhere in this black hole. I do not understand the positive reviews this game is getting. Please, someone who rated this title positive, enlighten me in the comments of this review as to why I'm a big dumb idiot for not liking that everything about this game is anti-fun. There aren't even any achievements to show that I've made any progress or learned anything whatsoever, or to even guide a complete newbie even just a little bit.

Overall, the atmosphere was nice, and the terminal system had me enraptured for a few minutes, but there was no sense of real progression or fun about anything I experienced. There seemed to be no point other than to progress through stages. WHY, other than for masochistic torture, would I play a game this hard that has no kind of reward to show for it other than seeing completed missions on the horribly blurry mess of the main menu?

You can play Alien Swarm: Reactive Drop, a top-down version of a coop bug hunting game like this, for free, right now; there is a progression system, actual meaningful story moments, and you can actually use your weapons whenever you feel the need to.

I'm not sticking around to see 10 Chambers Collective go "bankrupt" like their last two companies have. They had two years to make this game into a meaningful experience, I was extremely hyped for this game, it's just not for me and I've learned from this developer that if I don't like their beginning product I won't like how it ends up either. I hope I'm wrong.

There are just so many other options out there for squads of four that are consistently better than this.

This game is truly a masterpiece.

Giving it anything short of a 10/10 is heracy, although I can see why some people may be more inclined to play the game over others. The Metroidvania style progression and map exploration features may not be for everyone, but they are damn well executed in this game.

The atmosphere is beautiful, but underneath the surface, the world is very dark and sinister, and pretty much unforgiving around every corner. But don't let that stop you from trying it out. Come on, it's only 15 dollars, and hell, it took me 47 hours to get to the real ending. And that's without full completion. Plus, Team Cherry keeps adding stuff to the game. Holy heck, how could you not be playing this right now?

I'll end with this: do not fall in love with any one character; instead, fall in love with the idea instilled by them, and let the purpose of your existence in their world be an inspiration for you in yours.

THey MADE IT GOOD AGAIN!@!!!!@