what happens when half-life 1, scp: containment breach, valheim, and project zomboid have a nasty orgy. that's the love child that this game is.

I just realised I never wrote a review for Abiotic Factor. It's kind of hard. The game is utterly insane. It's brilliant and crazy, just like most of the scientists and science in it. It's half-life, but it's also survival builder. It's a stealth FPS, but it's also tactical melee bash. It's a lore-based storytelling adventure, and it's also complete nonsense.

11/10. More, please.

Might be better in the future, but as of now the back half of this game is just a miserable slog. This game starts SO STRONG and remains strong up until you finish Labs/Security after which it feels like the devs just ran out of steam.

1. IS/Enemies: I was legitimately smiling at all the cute little secrets and emails you could find discussing the ISs (This game's term for what are basically SCPs), as well as the interesting progression of enemies. That lasts until security. From the dam onward, you stop discovering new IS entirely other than the one single IS there and all new enemies are just gun or melee weapon wielding bipeds for the rest of the game. A majority of the gameplay from this point onwards is just gunfights with humans and boy are the devs in love with making every enemy from this point onward bleed you so be prepared to stop every 5 seconds and bandage your arm in every single fight you're ever gonna do for the rest of eternity.

2. Adventure: Any semblence of the puzzle solving/platforming adventure will end here as well. From this point onwards you will just be required to go home, craft something, and come back over, and over, and over, and over to solve any problem. No creative platforming or building (minus one fantastic area as a side path of the finale), very few cheeky secrets besides a vent here or there to skip 1-2 enemies, and basically no portal worlds. On top of this, at this point in the game you get access to some really cool new ways to move around. It was an incredible change of pace. Don't get used to it. You will never be allowed to use the jump pack or jet pack the first time you enter a world -- and worse, these items will literally just become unusable for the entire final 2 areas for no reason. I'm guessing the devs just didn't know how to balance the game for these items so they just took them away at the end. Hope you weren't using them to make up for slow movement on a heavy character because you're gonna be overencumbered poop walking the rest of the game!

3. Equipment: You can definitely tell which builds the devs liked to use for sure. Heavy Weapons literally just stop at this point. There will not be another one from this point onward. Blunt weapons get a couple more upgrades before stopping. Bladed weapons and guns will continue to have new evolutions up until the very end of the game. It sucks. It feels so bad to watch other players in your group keep getting upgrade after upgrade and even ENTIRELY NEW WEAPON MOVESETS while your weapon just stopped getting new content hours or even days of gameplay ago.

4. The ending: I get that the current ending is not the big grand finale -- only the end of this storyline, but it was so abrupt and so vapid of an ending I legitimately thought naming the final quest "The End?" was trying to challenge me to find a way to move forward. Nope. That's the actual end. You work with a bunch of people to get to the final boss, you fight the extremely boring combination of killing an infinitely spawning set of tentacles while randomly getting death lasered in the back (They even have an NPC that heals and revives you here because they're aware of how much this fight sucks), and when you win, everybody shows up and shames you for what you did and that's the end. What you did? Who knows! Apparently you unleashed *something* but not only did you unleash that thing in another world that wasn't earth -- it also has no current effect on what's actually happening on earth so good luck figuring out what was actually supposed to happen.

This game may be out of early access but it still definitely needs more time to cook. I imagine we'll see the review trend down to Positive as people begin to actually finish the game since currently only 3% of players have the achievement for beating the final boss.