I will start this off with this game's most positive aspect - the visuals. It's an incredible looking game, with brilliant art direction, style, and general mood. It's a beautiful game, with tons of detail, and really sells you on a world that is broken beyond repair, where no building remains undamaged, and bodies are so plentiful they're stacked in three storey tall piles and used as ablative armour.

The concept is also quite novel - a game where you are not the main character, or even the focus, and instead simply trying to survive in someone else's war. Where you're so insignificant that the horror of this survival horror comes not from things trying to kill you, but from you being so pointless to kill you will largely be ignored - but when you aren't, you're dead meat.

That, however, does lead me into my criticisms. The idea of an extraction shooter that encourages you not to shoot is a bit paradoxical. It has a surprisingly in-depth weapon customization system, and a large variety of guns, but wants you to not use them unless you have to. All of the enemies are tough to kill, and spawn in very large quantities frequently. There's never one enemy, even in the case of super-dangerous enemies such as giant mechs and tanks, you'll see entire squadrons show up at once. And the weakest enemy, a cyborg torso dragging itself along the floor, can three-or-four-hit kill you if you're just starting out.

It's a brutally tough game, with very little in the way of clear directions on how to progress. The tutorial is unforgiving, teaching you how to shoot your gun but if you do, you get immediately swamped by 6 or 7 enemies - and when your starting gun takes four well-placed shots to kill one of them, and your gun only has a 10-round magazine, it's a pretty rough introduction to the game.

Additionally, there are some odd choices in the game itself - your health bar isn't labeled as such, and took me a couple of games to realise what it was. You're not able to pick up weapons without a better backpack, so you can't pick those up out of the gate either. You can't immediately see how much money you have in the hub area anywhere I could see, so I had no clue if I could afford things from vendors or not. Character movement feels stiff, either being too slow when walking or too fast when running, and with sprinting working on tank controls and allowing no sideways movement, it feels pretty clunky to play.

It's also horrifically badly optimized - I have a very high spec computer, and I needed to run everything on low just to get a consistent 60fps, and even then I got framerate drops when lots of enemies were spawning in nearby. The game is 82 gigabytes, and each patch needs you to redownload the entire thing, and I simply can't see where all of that storage space is needed. This is quite a barebones game.

There is also a bug which was affecting me and two friends I was playing with, which will cause the game to stutter and throw your aim directly upwards, which can kill you in the middle of a fight.

I do love how this game looks, so I am glad I got to try it, but I'm going to wait until this is further in development and more polished, as currently it simply isn't very enjoyable to play for me.

I will start this off with this game's most positive aspect - the visuals. It's an incredible looking game, with brilliant art direction, style, and general mood. It's a beautiful game, with tons of detail, and really sells you on a world that is broken beyond repair, where no building remains undamaged, and bodies are so plentiful they're stacked in three storey tall piles and used as ablative armour. The concept is also quite novel - a game where you are not the main character, or even the focus, and instead simply trying to survive in someone else's war. Where you're so insignificant that the horror of this survival horror comes not from things trying to kill you, but from you being so pointless to kill you will largely be ignored - but when you aren't, you're dead meat. That, however, does lead me into my criticisms. The idea of an extraction shooter that encourages you not to shoot is a bit paradoxical. It has a surprisingly in-depth weapon customization system, and a large variety of guns, but wants you to not use them unless you have to. All of the enemies are tough to kill, and spawn in very large quantities frequently. There's never one enemy, even in the case of super-dangerous enemies such as giant mechs and tanks, you'll see entire squadrons show up at once. And the weakest enemy, a cyborg torso dragging itself along the floor, can three-or-four-hit kill you if you're just starting out. It's a brutally tough game, with very little in the way of clear directions on how to progress. The tutorial is unforgiving, teaching you how to shoot your gun but if you do, you get immediately swamped by 6 or 7 enemies - and when your starting gun takes four well-placed shots to kill one of them, and your gun only has a 10-round magazine, it's a pretty rough introduction to the game. Additionally, there are some odd choices in the game itself - your health bar isn't labeled as such, and took me a couple of games to realise what it was. You're not able to pick up weapons without a better backpack, so you can't pick those up out of the gate either. You can't immediately see how much money you have in the hub area anywhere I could see, so I had no clue if I could afford things from vendors or not. Character movement feels stiff, either being too slow when walking or too fast when running, and with sprinting working on tank controls and allowing no sideways movement, it feels pretty clunky to play. It's also horrifically badly optimized - I have a very high spec computer, and I needed to run everything on low just to get a consistent 60fps, and even then I got framerate drops when lots of enemies were spawning in nearby. The game is 82 gigabytes, and each patch needs you to redownload the entire thing, and I simply can't see where all of that storage space is needed. This is quite a barebones game. There is also a bug which was affecting me and two friends I was playing with, which will cause the game to stutter and throw your aim directly upwards, which can kill you in the middle of a fight. I do love how this game looks, so I am glad I got to try it, but I'm going to wait until this is further in development and more polished, as currently it simply isn't very enjoyable to play for me.