Recent reviews by Sarvok

There are some serious control bugs. Tutorial works fine but then it becomes impossible to shoot, change weapons, place traps, exit trap mode, I even had the map refusing to stay on the screen.
I have found a thread and a review with the same issue. No fix and no words from the dev.
The game is unplayable at this point.

Other than that the game looks cheap and controls badly even without bugs. Price tag should be 10£ max, not the current 20£.

And considering the "doggo" line and the name of the publisher "Shotgun with Glitters" I won't regret refunding it

TL;DR: Reddit tier game

Basic retro shooter with a great execution.

Pros:
- Level Design: never lost, always rewarded for exploration
- No unfair/hitscan damage: you get hit because you forgot to dodge
- Music/ambient are never invasive
- Stage order up to you
- Progressive difficulty according to the order you chose
- Beautiful environments (despite the pixel graphics)
- Settings include a lot of graphics/gameplay customisation


Cons:
- Early Access (see below)


-------------------------
About Early Access (EA):

I finished the game in a single sitting (5 hours) while being unaware that it was in EA.
So I was naturally surprised to see the end screen stating "Thanks for playing this EA version" as it felt like a finished/polished game (which is rare considering how low the standard is for EA games).

The devs are active, post regular updates and interact with the community. They seem to listen to feedbacks, especially regarding balancing issues.

The only bugs I've encountered:
- A particle getting stuck on a wall. It happened once and had no consequence.
- Gibs getting stuck in walls and endlessly rotating. Again, no consequence.
- Sound stopping completely, had to relaunch the game. This may have happened because the application was running for 15 hours straight.

This is still less than what you can experience playing Cyberpunk2077 for 30 seconds.

Game broken since last update
Takes 5 min to launch the game
Timeout during game, without any chance of reconnecting

fix ur ♥♥♥♥ EA

If you enjoy Stalker for the environment and aesthetic of the Zone then you will most likely enjoy this game.

Story: You investigate your wife's disappearance during the Chernobyl disaster and the implications of a PMC and a new element of strange properties called Chernobylite. All of this to prepare a heist at the power plant (controlled by the PMC) with the help of your crew, to find out what is really going on.

Game loop:
- Morning:
Prepare for the day: craft, base build, get a quest, assign your crew and yourself to one of the fives stages to explore.
- Day:
Each stage has a main objective, either a quest of a supply drop. You will be free to explore, scavenge, trade, do secondary quests, gather intel for your investigation... While the stage is static, all the enemies/loot/objectives will be randomised.
You can also build here. Field crafting stations for basic equipment/tools; Traps to take out enemies; Zone stabilisers which help alleviate the constant deterioration of the Zone (radiations, monster spawns...)
- Evening:
See the mission result for your crew. Share food, base build, craft, train new skills, investigate the main story...


Pros:
- Game is surprisingly beautiful in Ultra
- Beautiful environments with a great Zone/Stalker aesthetic
- Sound effects are good, music is forgettable
- Engaging story and world building
- Characters are all interesting, developed and yet believable
- Many dialogues with a surprisingly good acting
- Choices have consequences but you can change the timeline (for a cost). It also gives the opportunity to find more clues and see more dialogue options
- Moving around is fast and rarely a chore
- Death is part of the game and therefore forgiving/not frustrating
- The crafting, whether base improvements or weapon attachments, is entirely unlocked at the beginning and gives you the liberty to plan for a certain loadout or technology.
- Gaining a new perk is made through a dialogue and a training session with a companion. (rather than ticking a soulless box when levelling up)
- You gain experience by doing anything: looting, building, killing, exploring...
- Inventory tetris (if you like that)
- Enough resources so you can try out different loadouts
- You can mod weapons so much you can turn them into unusable CQB flak cannons
- Stages will evolve after multiple visits/quests, changing some locations
- Finishing the day means teleporting back to base = no backtracking
- Laying traps is rarely a necessity but it's always fun

Cons:
The game is currently in Early Access which means the following may or may not be fixed/changed
- Graphics:
-- Badly optimised
-- Some noticeable aliasing even at max
-- Missing textures/invisible or see-through walls in places you perhaps shouldn't go
-- Because of building you can access places you shouldn't be able to
-- Extreme frame drops when shooting shotguns (particles) or when an enemy dies (and becomes a ragdoll which flies in the sky because of how the physic is fps bound)

-Gameplay:
-- Extremely weak melee, borderline useless (hits for ~10% of the weakest enemy's HP)
-- Weak enemy variety (4 soldiers, 3 monsters, 1 (optional) boss)
-- Stupid AI
-- By the end of the game, the locations become boring
-- Some assets are 100% copy paste in different locations, I get that it's the USSR and everything looks the same but here you will find the exact same building with a staircase broken at the exact same place...
-- No ending yet
-- Dialogues have some issues: wrong subtitles, local voice when to talking to someone on the radio or the opposite...
-- Black Stalker is rarely a threat. I had to voluntarily wait for him to ever show up, fight was easy with end-game gear. And afterwards I built enough Zone stabilising thingy so I'd have 1h+ until he'd show up.



Fun game if you enjoy a bit of crafting, base building, FPS, exploration.

I have great hopes for the future release as the team has been posting weekly blog post or game update for a while now and the current state of the game is well advanced and clearly playable.

>Get into a room with 3 enemies and a checkpoint to unlock
>Start sprinting and avoiding bullets like I'm Goku instant transmitting behind them
>Power slap followed by a point blank Mozambique drill on each one
>Killed them so fast the second wave didn't have time to spawn
>Oblivious to this I go unlock the checkpoint
>10 seconds long animation
>Second wave spawns during animation
>Shotgun to head
>my_ancestors_are_smiling_at_me_imperial.jpeg
>Get domed
>Back to last checkpoint

I've heard people compare this to Psi-Ops because "TelEKiNesIS". Those people are stupid.
Where Psi-Ops demands you to aim at the item you want to pickup and then move or throw it in a direction (which I would call Gameplay), Control just asks you to spam you "TelEKiNesIS" button, grabs random stuff around and auto aims.
There is no challenge here, no fun, it's just an alternate attack while you have no ammo.
One should also not that in Psi-Ops, all powers are dependant on a pool that can only refill with limited items and killing enemies, here you can just wait 3 seconds and spam again.

The shooting is ridiculous. Because it's third person and made by a marketing team, bullet go through walls (thing that was handled in games 20 years ago).
Just stand behind a wall, aim behind a wall with your 「JoJo Camera Stand」, and spam fire.

The Hiss, The Hiss, The Hiss. I don't feel impressed, threatened or remotely intrigued by something with such a pitiful name spoken so casually by protagonists. The name is ridiculous and being repeated 5 times at every dialogue will never make it work.

Collectibles, everywhere, uninteresting, waste of time.

Loadouts and skills are the blandest stuff possible, no style difference, just bland stats.

The base movement is ok.
Environments are ok.
Graphics are ok.

Too bad the game is lacking a game.

This should have been a free update. Charging for this joke is a joke.

So what do you get?

- Useless cosmetics to play with your friends that weren't dumb enough to buy DLC

- Survival Mode:
Pretty fun, I've enjoyed a lot the roguelike aspect
But you cannot save. You cannot save. This is ridiculous.
Touching the crystal and returning to base will not prompt any warning.
You will not die from enemies, but from exhaustion or the mere existence of anything outside of this game mode.

- Corsus adventure
This is so clearly cut features from the base game that I had a Mandela effect situation where I thought for sure that we could adventure in Corsus before.

- Some new bosses/items or something, I didn't really want to play Corsus again right away, arguably the worst world.

I bought this for 6EUR (40% off 10EUR) and asked for a refund

Note that I'm writing this years after I stopped playing, I still feel like this game didn't get the attention it deserved from players as well as devs. The main reason I am writing this is because Asians server will shutdown tomorrow... or today on easternmost zones.

I stopped playing during the Morrowind expansion, 1-2 years ago, which was the second, after Skyrim.

I've been through a lot of TCGs/CCGs (HearthStone, Legends of Runeterra, Magic, Mythguard...) and this is by far the best I have ever played.

-Core Gameplay
While other CCGs rely on cards to bring mechanics, here the cards will revolve around the core mechanics. The main ones being the lanes or the runes. I've rarely seen a CCG that involves as much tactics and skill as this one rather than just dropping high value cards and hoping for good RNG to win the game for you as you would in HearthStone.

Expansions become quickly the bane of CCGs, destroying current metas and bringing new player made metas (instead of metas planned by foolish developers). While it sounds good, most of the time it will just make an absurd amount of old cards obsolete and will also break your economy as you need to buy the new OP sets.

However I didn't feel this way playing TESL. I found the expansions refreshing and balanced. And the economy wasn't as grindy as you would with HS. I never paid for any content and I never felt like I was being dragged down because of this. People crying about it being P2W have merely started playing and haven't understood the mechanics yet as you don't even need a collection to win drafts.

UI/UX is great. Never encountered a single bug except in single player.

-Art
I am disappointed TES will forever be in the style of Skyrim rather than inviting new art directions as they did between older iterations of the universe. That said, the cards, animations, boards... are beautiful and sober.
Music is ok, I usually play without tho.
Sounds and voice lines are great, I usually would mute them but not here.

-Story
While I love TES lore, TESL doesn't need nor has any good story to tell. I still enjoy the diversity in terms of creatures, provinces, eras... brought by the cards.

-Network
This is why I stopped playing this game.
Because it is a very time consuming game I stopped playing it on PC and switched to playing it on mobile during travels/commute.
For some reasons, I was able to do everything on my phone seamlessly. Messaging, web browsing, YouTube, playing any game... any game except TESL. I've found myself locked out the game so much that more than half of my losses were due to those disconnections. It wasn't fixed during the 1-2 years I played and ranking up was becoming a chore so I gave up on it.

Fun old school FPS with various augmentations and powers to spice up the gameplay.

Bought it because I played it on OG Xbox, had fond memories of it and it's dirt cheap.

Designs are very reminiscent of the OG Deus Ex. This and the augmentations are the only common points with Deus Ex because here, gun play is actually fun.

However, I'm afraid this PC version is trash.

- No widescreen support:
Highest resolution is 1600x1200.
Fixes online may not work or leave with glitches or will leave the HUD in the middle of the screen.

- Doesn't handle dual screen / fullscreen / windowed / whatever
Your mouse will click out of the game and kick you back to your desktop.
Adding to this the mismatching resolutions will result in your desktop having a stroke every time this happens.

- Crashes.
I am writing this review after a very few minutes into the game, barely passed the first save point and the game crashed. No error message or nothing.

- Controls
Mouse sensitivity has only 10 possible values. All too high except the lowest that is barely good.
Can't bind extra mouse buttons.

- Aim assist
There is a very slight aim assist that I'll guess was made for console but it is not intrusive on PC and rather fun. Nevertheless you cannot disable it and I'm not certain I'd have enjoyed 10 hours with it.

This is some low grade Slay The Spire which could be good if it weren't for too many bad points.
The story is borderline non existent but it's usually the case for such games.


Cons:
- The artstyle is clearly drawn by a weeb that just got his first "How to draw your favourite Japanese anime" handbook and is lacking any taste whatsoever. I'd rather have name cards rather than a bare chest Sephiroth taking up my whole screen or an orc with 18 abs.
The animations aren't even worth talking about, and the game would actually benefit from removing them.

- The sound design is mediocre at best, SFX and music are only here to fill a void and even when the sound is at 10% in settings and 1% in Windows' Volume Mixer, some sounds will still blast your ears.

- BUGS, so many bugs, leaving your porch light lit up during a whole summer night will yield less bugs than this game.
Those bugs aren't funny, they are game breaking.
Worst of those are cards/effects that do not happen, your mana and the card are simply sent to oblivion.
Saves are ALWAYS corrupted. Your save will be corrupted. Your game will be lost when you log back in. Your hero will go from 100% HP to 0% when you will be back.
I managed to lose gold when defeating a boss, don't ask me, I wouldn't know how.

- The game will require you to use keyboard and mouse. Not because it is as complex to control as an FPS but because the UI is an absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that will leave you more confused than an interviewed Prince Andrew. Some shortcuts shown on screen will not work, buttons you click will not work, managing your team/items is done through dropdown menus rather than intuitive drag and drop...

Pros:
- You actually control a party of 4, can capture enemies and manage your team. Add to this a lot of heroes and units and it offers a nice variety of teams.

- The combo system (playing a certain type of card in a certain order to fill a super ability) is a nice touch and kinda reminiscent of the one in Neoverse.


Conclusion (?):
Go play Slay The Spire, Neoverse, Dicey Dungeon... if you're looking for a roguelike deck building experience.

game freezes, can still hear sounds and interact, video just stopped
hard kill game
verify cache
game takes 2 minutes to validate on a SSD (22GB of assets so I can play in full low with skins igaf about)
says I have to download 1 file (ok wtf)
download file
launch game
steam tries to install DirectX (ok wtf)
game launched
try to join game
get kicked because of some VAC error
says I have to verify cache
repeat ad nauseum