Recent reviews by Endrai

Simple, clean arcade fun. A genre icon at this point.

The core gameplay is good. The art style is fine. And the soundtrack and sound design are great. This is a good top down arcade shooter at it's core.

But there are so many issues. It deserves more development time. I wouldn't normally care about any one or two or maybe even five of these things to this degree, but it's too much for me to really enjoy what is otherwise a good game:

The inventory system is unintuitive and clunky, actually navigating through the items and dropping things you don't want to pick up the things you want to equip is a hassle and breaks the flow of gameplay. You can only have so many item types, not items, so if you have a single grenades it takes up an item slot that could fill ten razor wire. So first you have to pause, go into your items to your grenades, then drop the grenades, the pick up something else for that slot.

The very way the game utilizes items is also so incredibly clunky. You have two separate item 'wheels', one that activated on Q and one on F. Each carry multiple different types of use items, but only specific ones. For example, the mines and razor wire were always on the Q 'wheel' while the grenades and the dome shields were always on the F 'wheel'. If you had multiple items on a single wheel, you have to swap between items using V for the F 'wheel' and C for the Q 'wheel'. Good luck remembering which 'wheel' what items are on. Nonsense.

Everything* is a rainbow of bright neon colors, it is difficult to tell what things are friendly or hostile at a glance. Items are color coded the same as guns, but without a visible reason; that blue neon circle is a gun, that other one is a shield, good luck storing through a pile of 20.

A lot of the background and environment is dark and dull compared to the neon effects, which would be a great visual direction if not for the sheer amount of environmental clutter. Objects that look like background things can be solid walls instead; managed to die multiple times getting caught on impossible to notice background things like hydrants, bikes, and a kid's wagon.

And of all the things to add to the confusion, the color of gunfire if different guns are different. Some of which is purple, you know, the enemy color.

There is no way to tell what an perk is without picking it up. Even items and guns aren't immune as they can be visually difficult to see in a pile of loot and then you can't tell what they are without picking them up. And then you can't, because the item system hates you. So you drop a perk to pick up another perk then go into your inventory and look just to find it's garbage so you drop that perk and go pick up the first. Bad design all around.

There is nothing really distinguishing harmful and non-harmful effects. Those pink blobs on the ground, harmless. Those green ones though, dangerous.

And this game definitely puts the friend in friendly fire. Actual fire, explosions, grenades, lightning, rockets; so many ways to add to the pile of possibly hazardous color vomit visuals.

In addition, most enemies are difficult to distinguish at a glance. Whoever thought the all the aliens should be variations of pink neon boxes should learn how important enemy recognition is in a game like this and how difficult it is when they share so many basic similarities.

A lot of the hitboxes are just straight up wrong. As an enemy smashing the air a quarter screen hits you somehow. Which doesn't help with teleporting enemies basically automatically hitting once they begin teleporting no matter how you react to them.

But thankfully the AI is all pretty bad. It gets stuck places all the time, a troubling detail with most of the enemies some variation of 'moves toward players and attacks' with very few ranged enemies.

These together leaves the entire game in a state of sheer visual confusion. You can have a pile of explosions, a bunch of gunfire, a pile of loot, a pile of enemies, numerous difficult to see environment objects, colored players/markers, mission markers, and your tiny white crosshair all on the screen at once. Actually keeping track of the important things, yet alone everything, is impossible.

The all important HP bar, sitting in the top left bit of the screen out of view, is mirrored by another same green colored experience bar. Guess how often you'll mistake which bar is which at a glace.

The currency collection from enemies is the awful system of 'whomever is closest to the kill gets the reward'. Which mean anyone not in melee range of enemies gets to enjoy being poor.

There is no way to really 'try out' the different specialists since you slowly unlock all of their features. You don't even get their signature weapon until a few levels so if you don't like how that sniper rife feels tough luck start back at 0. You can't even keep your weapons and items between specialists without first dropping everything.

Variety is lacking overall; in enemy design, in mission design, in guns. The mission variety is particularly noticeable. A lot of similar feeling an area control missions, beacon destroying missions, and npc escort mission. Complete with dumb AI npc who will die.

It is possible to get stuck all over the place, climb up onto things clearly not intended, managed to even get someone trapped in a place they couldn't get out without dying twice.

On the topic of bugs, lots of them. Can get stuck 'dashing' as you walk around so you can't reload or anything. Triggers can get kind of funky if they're activated by multiple people at/near the same time. And unknown sources of damage happening in definitely safe spaces. Just to name some I can remember.

Every new enemy pauses the game to play an intro cinematic borderlands style. Ruined the pace of gameplay then, still ruins it now.

The game doesn't stop while popping up new screens with new information and can do so at very inopportune times. Something might pop up telling you how to interact with certain very important objectives AS YOU'RE DYING, then require you to hold E for a full second to remove the screen. Not only is the screen distracting you from not dying, but you also really need to read that information sometimes. This is unacceptable from a 'completed game'. Outright unacceptable.

On that note, very few accessibility options. No way to stop the tutorial popups from showing up. No way to change the crosshairs. No way to change UI or font sizes at all. I couldn't imagine trying to play this if I had difficulties seeing.

The save system in the game is archaic. You have save spots that your entire team has to be near to save at. And if you die you go back to the save, not just the spot. And the only place these save spots are at are safe zones that appear every once in a while. So quite often the group has to stop playing the game to backtrack to save every so often just to keep progress.

No public lobby. While not really a problem for me personally since I wouldn't play without friends anyway, is definitely an overall issue worth addressing.

This game has many excellent qualities but is trying too desperately to be a souls game. Before I extrapolate on the qualities I found lacking, there are some great things that deserve praise:

1. The atmosphere of the game feels good, the frozen mechanical dystopia-punk aesthetic is great.
2. The controls feel surprisingly accurate for an isometric game.
3. The story telling is done quite well... mostly.
4. The art is great, the flat shading style works well.


Yet at the end of the day, I would recommend anyone looking for a 2d souls experience to look elsewhere for a handful of incredibly disruptive reasons:

1. The game's combat pace is glacial. All movement is sluggish and enemy attacks are so slow that they can be hard to interact with because their windup animation ends long before any attack come out.
2. The combat is boring. Partially due to the slow speed, partially due to the simple combat system, and somewhat due to the excessively large health pools of some enemies.
3. The RPG system surrounding the mechanics are uninteresting and pointless. The stats do next to nothing and the different weapons are functionally the same.
4. Enemy AI is bad. Fairly easily exploitable into performing loops or controlling their positioning. Combat would often consist of 2 attacks, stepping back as the AI countered blindly, moving forward with another two attacks...
5. Enemy attack balance is all over the place. Some attacks from many enemies barely deal any damage while certain attacks, sometimes from the very same enemies, can deal hefty damage and stun at a range basically guaranteeing a kill in one hit.
6. The game stagnates toward the end. This was clearly an idea formed at the beginning without regard to how it would end. Your character does not grow, the combat remains the same, the enemies do not really scale, and the story does not end in any satisfactory way.


There were also a handful of personal naggles that I would like to note, though they are not quite as disruptive to the game:

1. The mouse cursor being default is out of place; I understand the game recommends playing with a controller but other control methods should not just be disregarded (especially for a thing that would be fairly easy to implement).
2. Randomly spawning enemies in health drop locations is pointlessly tedious and cruel. Just annoying before getting health upgrades as you have to activate the nodes then back away before it opens on the off chance an enemy is there.
3. There is no indication of dashing invulnerability frames. I spent the first section of the game dodging 'too late'.
4. Some of the individual maps are tiny, causing you to pass from loading zone to loading zone in mere moments between one another.
5. Why the weapon trick system? It does almost nothing?


tl;dr: Game takes a while to 'get', even for a souls like game, and is not particularly good even once understood. Does not really get any better or more interesting.