Recent reviews by Cereal Killer

It is 8 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ notes. Just 8 notes. Over and over and over again. The core of the gameplay loop, the objective of the game, is playing 8 ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ notes over and over and over the ♥♥♥♥ again. And it feels no emotion. It does not read the situation. It just coldly keeps playing. A raw, uncaring 8 notes.

A bit seriously: the cashout jingle playing on the box being a customization loadout item is certainly a money-making gimmick they missed out on.

Mechanics stick to board game style roots and generally avoid sliding into built up feedback insanity. Nothing about the presentation deviates much from mediocre. There is a notable lack of character and personality across the board. Everything seems to be bland and forgettable, as if there was never a human soul behind the project at all, simply committees staffed by other committees.

A decent premise that has potential; however, it stayed disappointingly constrained.

A good relaxing experience, great at allowing the zen experience of slipping entirely into the task at hand. However, the game repeatedly rips you out of that joy in order to force annoying, irrelevant, and completely noninteractive story bits. They take the form of being talked at for several minutes without any ability to respond or do anything during the meantime.
What makes it even worse is that by the time they are started you'll have completed enough of the early loops to be able to extrapolate the timeline of the economics that the characters are complaining about. Getting mediocre results when still limited to the early game jobs, the math suggests you would have to perform your job for maybe 3 or 4 years top in order to fully pay off the trip to get off earth and undergo the conversion into immortality. It is, from the very first point and which it is mentioned, absolutely insane that someone would complain about the deal. So not only do they rip away the zen flow that is going on to engage in one sided preaching, but the preaching doesn't even stand up to half a second of critical thought.
I've never seen a game that was so horribly crippled by an absolutely unneeded system than this game is with its story. Rip it out and the game would be amazing. Even just taking the "Stand in your room doing nothing but waiting for those other people to stop ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥" segments and either adding a "hang up/skip" button or moving the chatter to during the actual game would be a massive improvement.

Meh.

So it wants to do PvPvE. A nice ambition, a type of game formatting that is not done often and certainly could have a lot of potential if a solid game were to explore the idea. In terms of PvPvE, it does a decent job providing a wide variety of missions, incomes streams, and assorted resource demands in order to give players a solid variety of things to do. Dropping in with just a small backpack is a perfectly viable way to make a profitable match.

The problem, however, comes in what the game is for the rest of the content. The PvP is unremarkable-- There was a choice made at some point to make it generic FPS gunplay, and to that end there are dozens of games that do better, for whatever definition of better you personally hold, simply because there are thousands upon thousands of games that have done all of this before. The only unique thing that this game brings to the table is that a good 2/3rds or so of fights will be complete no-contest affairs, either because one side simply doesn't want a fight, isn't equipped to fight, and is completely unfulfilling to fight, or because the nature of PvPvE leads to a lot of instances of one side being complete unaware they are in a fight until the first strike destroys them.

The PvE, equally, is unremarkable, this time woefully so. 4 creature types, with about 3 behaviors each, and recolor variants for each that are spongier. They have weakpoints and can occasionally flinch, but otherwise do not have any deep dynamic features to them. Due to their simplicity, all but the weakest have become out of necessity bullet sponges- A mechanic that simply makes them tedious. Their attacks are all reliably avoidable; however, for melee strikes there appears to be inaccuracy client-side in where they actually are during their melee animation, so trying to cut dodging too close can be a mistake, and you can expect them to teleport a few feet when they leave their melee animation if you were running past them as they started the attack.

So overall the game is a failure, not due to the unique thing it tried, but due to the attempt to be standard and generic with everything else. Honestly, I worry this may be the fate of the PvPvE genre in general until such time someone tries developing one around a different core style, such as a Tribes-like.

Doesn't quite ever capture the depth it at first hints towards.

Consume

One of those weird rough gems. Charmingly confusing and filled with impressive map design.

For those who can think.