Recent reviews by Black Magix

Looter shooter crawler set in space with some awesome rogulike and rpg mechanics. Worth checking out for sure! Sound design and story design are nice. Graphics are nothing fancy but fit the theme of the game incredibly well.


Disclosure: I received a free review copy of this product from https://www.keymailer.co

Lets get one thing clear right off the bat. THIS IS NOT A REMAKE. If you're looking for enhanced mechanics, new engines, new enemies, etc... you won't find it because this is a REMASTER.

Now that's out of the way, the game is gorgeous. The upscaled textures (with the option to play with the old ones) is a wonderful addition and you can clearly see the changes in the new look. The UI is much easier to read and several areas are easier to find thanks to the higher resolutions.

Audio performs well and sounds great, the music fits the areas well as was true in the original.

The only downside I can comment on is the lack of options for video controls. There's no way, that I can find, to set resolution, graphical options, etc...

Grab it for 6 bucks. It's a great playthrough for the low price and is decent enough looter shooter.

It's not ready yet. Yes it's an early access but balance issues and playability issues are plauging the game. I can see the great game lying under the clutter that needs to be clean and I think in 5-6 months it'll be great but core aspects of the game need to be tweaked such as loot drops and time to kill before the game truly begins to shine. Now these issues are probably going to be fixed but if you're looking for a complete experience, dodge this for now.

Pros:
The game looks amazing and movement and casting feels alive and well
Sound design is phenomenal. You can feel the UMPH behind skills and abilities both incoming and outgoing

Cons:
Dodging is effected by friendly units. Your minions can body block you and cause you to die.
Gear reliance is way to real and punishing since the game doesn't drop a lot for you right now
Given the lack of gear drops, currency items aren't dropping enough to make up for the discrepancy.
Certain typical playstyles (Minions for instance) are completely non functional.

There is so much that this game could be and I can see that, But it needs another 6-12 months in the oven with balancing issues before I recommend it.

I'll continue to check in and see how things go though.

I'm not normally one to enjoy the Vampire Survival esc style of games but this one grabbed my attention and ran with it. Amazing gameplay on the steam deck and the perfect way to kill 20-30 minutes at a time. It has a wonderful Diablo 2 aesthetic, the sound design is awesome, classes feel great when powered up and it just gets better and better. Definitely my dopamine injection game of the year!

TLDR: The game is really fun but the lack of optimization leaves the game unplayable in the late stages.

I hate to do this because the game and it's DLC is incredibly fun. The game starts with simple tasks to carry out and minor jobs to accomplish and then you start unlocking employees who can manage the most tedious tasks for you. This frees you up to manage things instead of directly handling tasks. This also lets the station go into an automated mode letting you earn income and focus on DLC and upgrades.

The technical side of things leaves the game almost completely unplayable as you progress. The optimization is so poor that as you reach end game, the FPS will begin to dip lower and lower and lower as you implement more and more into your station. Currently I'm seeing large dips into the 10 FPS range.
I'm on a 7800x3d, 4090, and 96 gigs of ram on Windows 11. I shouldn't be suffering 10 FPS at 1440p.

It's gotten so bad that the game is basically unplayable if I'm ANYWHERE near my gas station and I've tried changing every setting in the game to no avail. The devs MUST work on optimization and correcting this. Googling the issue turns up hundreds of posts with the same issues and all point back to optimization.

It's frustrating to pour hours into your station only to not be able to play because of silly issues like this.

This would be a great buy if the game was cheaper. As it stands, the value isn't there for 50 dollars. It tries to be a Need for Speed game but doesn't accomplish it much. It has it's moments of fun but the AI is insanely cheat with nearly unlimited traction and the game just doesn't have the content you'd expect it to.

The major complaints around this game revolve around the water mechanic. To explain, your "innards" (base of operations / hideout / fob, take your pick of lingo) consumes a resource called water. This consumption is based on IRL time, not in game time. As you acquire more water, more features of your innards unlock.

However this also means if you stop playing you will actively lose water. The game is very upfront with warning you "Running completely out of water will reset the Innards and remove all of your inventory."

Assuming this only meant your characters inventory I explored a bit more and found -
"Get Water or Die
In order to survive, the water tank needs to be filled. Each day, the level goes down. At 0 all scavengers die.
[Loot will be lost, characters and exp will be kept.]"

So In other words, if you don't play the game for an extended period, you lose your stash and all of your equipment that you worked to acquire and extract with.

There isn't a single game in my library I haven't stepped away from for several months on end. To put literally ALL of my inventory at risk for simply not playing the game is not acceptable regardless of how easy water is to obtain. All this mechanic does is punish you for not playing the game.

I'll be refunding the game.

I'm 2 hours in and really enjoying the gameplay loop. I haven't had the performance issues others are plagued with but I have had some server lag but I'd imagine that will be fixed once the hug of death is resolved.

This game is a mixture of Crysis with the mechanics of Tarkov. You're in this vast jungle and have to accomplish tasks in certain sectors. Call in a chopper and get a ride out to where you need to be.

Awful experience. Let's start with the beginning. If you start the game while the servers are down, you can't even get to the main menu. You are just stuck in a constant loop of "Error getting shards for client" and it loops back to the Early Access thank yous. An MOTD that would say "hey servers are down for maintenance" would not be unappreciated to find out WHY I can't play the game.

Now the actual game itself. Assuming you can start the game when the servers are online, I experienced MASSIVE hitching and slow downs every second the game was active. Smooth 90 FPS then suddenly a slow down. No FPS drops, nothing on my system is pegged, the game just feels like it's barely limping along.

If you ignore that and push through the awful hitching you're greeted with rubber banding trying to do the most basic things. At that point it was clear that this game was NOT ready for early access and needed more time in development to fix basic issues.

Worst part of this is - that's only the first 5 minutes of the game. I couldn't stand to play it longer.