Recent reviews by WolfWings

So this is a review I REALLY hope to switch over to a thumbs-up at some point. There's a few obnoxious problems right now though:

1. All upgrades/equipment drops/upgrades require the ENTIRE team to gather around the upgrade point you randomly lose multiple minutes each time, even just starting out one person jumping around the spawn room you have to stand around and wait for them to settle down.
   
2. There's a fixed timer on each mission, WHICH KEEPS COUNTING DOWN DURING THESE DELAYS, so basically you have to skip a lot of upgrades and cripple your progression, or you're likely to run out of time. When it expires it's functionally a game-over because it spawns invincible enemies and an infinite wave of normal enemies as well.
   
3. Level completion basically needs more players to complete faster, and even with the 'Cooper' bot there's no failsafes to make solo runs that feasible even at low difficulties especially since you're even more likely to run into the timelimit which is often an instant-death when playing solo.

These things combined mean this game is just... obnoxiously unfun to play except with pre-made full groups. So unlike DRG where you can just jump in and play with randos... randos are basically a poison pill in this game by comparison due entirely to the 'forced gather' mechanic combined with the level-ending timer so any wasted seconds are more dangerous than anything else.

Do you miss the original Overwatch when it was about stories and hope and incredible characters and there wasn't a billion layers of role queue?

Welcome home, this is what you've been looking for.

This game outright punishes you for experimenting and only has a handful of 'meta' builds that are viable to survive for even a literal minute after the 'go make your build' intro-portion of the gameplay.

Sure if RNGesus smiles on you you might get a 'broken' (actually the expected power level) build and be able to play, but 99% of the time you'll just be resetting to try again. Maybe if you enjoy playing like a speedrunner that's a fun gameplay loop, but a few hours into the game you realize how un-fun it is unless you play this game EXACTLY the way and with the characters/setup the dev intended.

It's a "choose your own adventure... as long as you accept that every path but one leads to failure" type game.

I was expecting a first 'mission' being somewhat sedate to introduce all the mechanisms and tools, etc.

Instead the very first surgery made me double-check I wasn't playing Cult of the Lamb by accident; I just alt+F4'ed when the third round of of 'relieve pressure with more cuts' added zalgo-looking 'digital demonic' text in my digital eyeball <5 minutes in and there was what looked like 10+ cuts requested at once.

Sorry, I ain't murdering someone on the first mission of a 'save the patient' game, check please.

That's an atrocious prologue to immediately try to make you do something so brazenly bad and the protagonist going along with it blindly was incredibly off-putting instead of 'Something's wrong... someone else take over...' like they should have.

Might be a good game or story inside, don't know, but it's very much not for me and the preview images didn't indicate it was going for this tone IMHO. The tiny snippet at the end of the trailer seemed to imply that was a late-/end-game complication, especially when none of the preview screenshots even hinted at that content.

For a game that requires you to deal with spaceflight including being on foot inside and around ships, movement traversal feels HORRIBLE with the seemingly no-warning zero-gravity/magplate-gravity transitions compared to games like Gloom, Natural Selection, or most Descent-likes, and the spaceflight in the tutorial made me wish I was piloting even the slowest, worst cargo freighter from Wing Commander: Privateer because at those those can turn and aim.

Maybe it's palatable if you have a HOTAS setup or use a controller, but on mouse-and-keyboard it's indescribably sluggish and I never once got the spaceship to aim where I wanted due to an ENORMOUS 'dead zone' making using a mouse feel like it's rubber-banded to a controller ten feet away instead of actually being a direct input device, and the game not respecting what I told it to do and waiting for me to keep 'nudging' it to try to get on target. What's intuitive on a controller actively fights you when you're on a mouse.

The FPS part before was fine, but for a game advertising the flight being a core game component they either need to admit this is not a mouse-and-keyboard game, or go back to space-flight games that did mouse well as much as 20 years ago like Microsoft's Freelancer. Right now it feels like my mouse was encased in a gelatinous cube.

The combat is enjoyable but the game absolutely RAILROADS you into a fixed progression despite offering a lot of options, the first several hours you have literally no choice at all in what you can do, even forcing (to the point of changing the UI whenever you click) you to upgrade things you aren't even using instead of things you are, so all the resources you gather become worthless as well.

Even getting it for super cheap with a Humble Bundle monthly I feel ripped off.

The IDEA is amazing, but...

The building tools are utterly ATROCIOUS so it's impossible to actually place things where you need to without building dozens and dozens of bricks of scaffolding... that you then immediately have to delete again, because you can't just place objects mid-air and assemble things around them, everything MUST be connected to something else when you place it.

The only 'challenge' in the races is from random 'surprise... now you crash' gotcha tricks behind blind corners or randomly forcing precision aerial jumps that... once again, now you crash, and 'respawning' doesn't actually put you back on the race path but just rebuilds you mid-air wherever you are, which makes it entirely pointless as you just need to restart the whole race again.

Vehicles feel RIDICULOUSLY floaty, like you're racing hovercrafts not cars. Even when I larded one up with dozens (literally) of spoiler bricks to try to add all the downforce I could, still super floaty feeling. Off-road, racing, doesn't matter which suspension I used, still floaty as hell.

Never anything between extreme oversteer/understeer situations for traction so you end up spinning out from the starting line randomly... or other times just sliding straight off a cliff with your wheels turned for the last several hundred feet leaving skid-marks.

I'll revisit this later in a few months, but for now the physics-jank isn't jank enough to be fun, and the tools miss the Besiege-like charm of being able to make monstrosities easily so it's just frustrating to do anything yourself.

This is another game where everything you do in the entire game suddenly doesn't matter for the finale.

You irrevocably lose your entire party, all your equipment and inventory, and there is no combat at all for the entire final finale area, and the literal only path you can take is being slightly mind-controlled and blowing up the entire archipelago the game takes place in so the entire game of leveling, tactical combat, etc, every single game mechanic, gone.

And it's not even done with care to send-up the genre as a pastiche like Undertale did, it just takes everything away and drops you quite literally naked and tries to flip the entire mood to body-horror and existential dread with time-travelling cthulu horrors that actually feels like a worse ending than Mass Effect 3.

At least there you got to pick the fireworks color.

The 'every single click causes things to jiggle like jelly' shaking is under GAME options, not DISPLAY and it's not a toggle, you have to drag the slider for the strength all the way to zero on the left side.

A mod has been released that turns off the background to fix the motion-sickness issue.

Disabling all the visual nonsense so the game is actually playable without taking you on a ride of the Vomit Comet? The game is freaking AMAZING!

But I seriously hope they re-think these visual effects because boy howdy I've never in my 30 years of gaming encountered a game that induced motion-sickness like this one, I think some grad students could literally use this as a tool to induce nausea.

With the developer standing with the community AGAINST their own publisher, risking their jobs, and getting the publisher to back down sincerely, even if this game is NOT my jam, it's worthy of a thumbs-up, because these developers CARE, and are standing by their players.

MAY EDIT: Well I'm not gonna be checking back in on this NOW, holy wow. My only regret now is I can't assist with the Orbital Dislike[imgur.com] Sony has well and truly earned DESPITE (and in fact TO SPITE) the Devs, since my review was already negative.

Original Review Follows

This is the most confusing, unexplained game to try to play. The tutorial doesn't teach anything about what to actually do in-game, ammo limit feels like I'm playing Resident Evil not an FPS game, and matchmaking is entirely broken so you can't do anything but play single-player when all missions are designed to have 4-player squads.

The gunplay feels good... for the 20 or so rounds you get before you have to manually reload every single time. Maybe it's the vibe they're going for? But it's just not my vibe when it's THIS manual including having to enter street-fighter-esque button combos to call for support drops, it feels shockingly hostile to mouse-and-keyboard play for an FPS.

If you're looking for a new fun themed PvE horde shooter you can drop in and play... unless you were a fan of the first one AND have a group of friends to play with that you organize outside of the game itself... avoid.

I'll check back in next month, or maybe April, but for now this is significantly less fun to even attempt to play than a 3-year-old game like Aliens: Fireteam Elite. XD