Caught between a ruthless crusade, paranormal containment failure, and chaos from a dozen worlds, the planet's greatest minds must band together to craft, survive and – maybe – escape their doomed facility.
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Really great idea! It's a lot of fun and somewhat linear which is refreshing over the randomized everything approach to a lot of survival games
There's some stuff that gets a little repetitive and inconvenient, but hopefully it improves with time over the year. Hopefully they are able to stick to their roadmap for the game and have it done this year rather than being stuck in limbo for years!
There's some stuff that gets a little repetitive and inconvenient, but hopefully it improves with time over the year. Hopefully they are able to stick to their roadmap for the game and have it done this year rather than being stuck in limbo for years!
Medium. No significant story or content spoilers. This review is content-accurate as of 5/17/24, this game is currently in early access. This review focuses more on technical details for those interested in playing. I did not progress past the Manufacturing sector whilst writing this review, but I won't touch on it in this review.
For anyone looking to play the game, I recommend looking at some settings to tinker with. First of all, the game defaults to using TSR at a 25% resolution scaling factor. This doesn't look terrible, but it can increase the frequency of visual artifacts that some players may find distracting. Turning this up should alleviate many issues you could get from scaling, but will reduce performance. I do recommend using TSR since it does look very, very good for an upscaler. I would not recommend FSR over TSR, and I do not believe DLSS is an option in this game as of now.
If you're running an older graphics card, or a graphics card that is a little weaker, I would recommend turning the Global Illumination, Shadows and Reflections settings down, as the "Epic" setting uses UE5's Lumen technology to produce an effect that is not much different from ray-tracing, only in software. I am unsure if this game uses any hardware accelerated ray-tracing, but I think it is a software implementation. Regardless, these settings should affect your performance the most, aside from resolution scaling. Some people have reported a method to help optimize lighting even further by tinkering with engine.ini files, but I did not do this.
On my setup, I can achieve a stable 120-165 frames per second using Epic on all settings at 75% (of 1440p) resolution scaling. I am using an RX 6800 and a Ryzen 9 5900x with 32gb of RAM. Some users have reported stutters occuring between some locations, but I have not experienced any. Overall, this game runs well, but older systems may struggle with some effects.
Review
Abiotic Factor defied my expectations, even knowing I was to expect a survival game within a setting that intentionally calls back to the Black Mesa facilities of Half-Life. Everything from the enemies, to the character design, and the setting which is an underground research facility within a red-colored rocky locale. Saying that Abiotic Factor is taking a lot of inspiration from Half-Life would be a significant understatement. This makes it incredibly fun for someone like me, someone who does quite enjoy the franchise, to play something like this, it has a sort of comfortable vibe despite everything going on. The visual makeup of the game retains a similar (albeit higher) level of detail that the original Half-Life games in terms of textures, but is otherwise using fairly advanced lighting technology that I think looks really good overall.
The game begins with you creating a character. Don't try to get it perfect! You can change your character's appearance any time you want after this tutorial, which sees you being driven to the facility, situated in the middle of nowhere. Once you talk to the security guard, and get your badge, you're then walked through basic mechanics, things you will essentially be doing for much of, if not, the entire game. This tutorial is nice and short, and I think covers enough ground to get you situated into the rest of the game.
Upon completion of the tutorial you're brought to the main menu, and are able to start a new game. There appear to be a lot of elements you can change to make it easier or harder or maybe just different, which is nice. Once making a new save, you are asked to select a "job" and then follow up with traits and points you can allocate for traits, much like Project Zomboid. This seems quite generous, and it is, but a couple of things is that you absolutely must take Wrinkly Brainmeat, which increases your XP gains by 20%, and if you're playing in multiplayer, I think specializing is good. 20% XP gain doesn't sound like much, but some traits that you want to level up as much as possible can take a very long time, and any time saved on that can be a lifesaver. You can have friends specialize in things such as cooking, or combat, so on and so forth, to make the experience more dynamic for everyone playing. It's best to do this with the jobs at your disposal. Dying in this game (at least with default settings)
Starting a game, you may notice a couple of red flags. Your very first task is to talk to a scientist and get your first objective. Why would an open-ended survival game have you getting objectives to complete? Thankfully, these objectives don't necessarily have to be completed within a linear fashion, and, although direct, I feel that this functions in a similar way to The Forest, in which these objectives are simply allowing the player to open the world up to them in segments, and are not the hallmarks of a linear story progression. Regardless, right around the time you craft your first Energy Brick, the game will open up quite substantially, allowing you the freedom to explore the facility, talk to more NPCs, discover new things, and set up your living space for the time being. As in any survival game, you must pay attention to your human needs. Many of these are straightforward, gotta eat, sleep, drink, and in this game you also occasionally need to use the restroom with a little minigame attached to it. Fun! Lastly, you are encouraged to enter the Portal Worlds (one time required, at least), which are worlds that have a complete setting change, and differs in many ways!
I do feel that, at the moment, some of these elements of the game feel more like an afterthought than a mechanic that is engaging. For example, the Strength stat gives you the bonus of being able to properly wield heavy weapons, by carrying over capacity. Grinding this stat was incredibly frustrating, forcing me to run around very encumbered, not being able to collect as many resources as I'd like, in order to use a few weapons. I think that having this upgrade would make more sense for a separate stat or a separate method of upgrading, but some of these bonuses feel somewhat random. Another aspect I feel wears the game down a bit is the awkward combat, a couple of enemies (notably the Peccary) almost have instant attacks that occur, and can be punishing without feeling like a player would have deserved it. This continues to occur with many later enemies, but I think it is at least helped by the fact that you can get much better defensive equipment.
Abiotic Factor is a really fun time. I fully expected this game to be a mostly-joke title, but I found myself a game that I am enjoying and will continue to do so until I have seeped out everything I can out of it. While this game does have a couple issues, I think they could get ironed out by release. Single player is fun, but multiplayer is even more fun. I recommend this game to anyone, or any group, looking for a silly little survival game where you roleplay as HL1 scientists doing... whatever it is they do.
For anyone looking to play the game, I recommend looking at some settings to tinker with. First of all, the game defaults to using TSR at a 25% resolution scaling factor. This doesn't look terrible, but it can increase the frequency of visual artifacts that some players may find distracting. Turning this up should alleviate many issues you could get from scaling, but will reduce performance. I do recommend using TSR since it does look very, very good for an upscaler. I would not recommend FSR over TSR, and I do not believe DLSS is an option in this game as of now.
If you're running an older graphics card, or a graphics card that is a little weaker, I would recommend turning the Global Illumination, Shadows and Reflections settings down, as the "Epic" setting uses UE5's Lumen technology to produce an effect that is not much different from ray-tracing, only in software. I am unsure if this game uses any hardware accelerated ray-tracing, but I think it is a software implementation. Regardless, these settings should affect your performance the most, aside from resolution scaling. Some people have reported a method to help optimize lighting even further by tinkering with engine.ini files, but I did not do this.
On my setup, I can achieve a stable 120-165 frames per second using Epic on all settings at 75% (of 1440p) resolution scaling. I am using an RX 6800 and a Ryzen 9 5900x with 32gb of RAM. Some users have reported stutters occuring between some locations, but I have not experienced any. Overall, this game runs well, but older systems may struggle with some effects.
Review
Abiotic Factor defied my expectations, even knowing I was to expect a survival game within a setting that intentionally calls back to the Black Mesa facilities of Half-Life. Everything from the enemies, to the character design, and the setting which is an underground research facility within a red-colored rocky locale. Saying that Abiotic Factor is taking a lot of inspiration from Half-Life would be a significant understatement. This makes it incredibly fun for someone like me, someone who does quite enjoy the franchise, to play something like this, it has a sort of comfortable vibe despite everything going on. The visual makeup of the game retains a similar (albeit higher) level of detail that the original Half-Life games in terms of textures, but is otherwise using fairly advanced lighting technology that I think looks really good overall.
The game begins with you creating a character. Don't try to get it perfect! You can change your character's appearance any time you want after this tutorial, which sees you being driven to the facility, situated in the middle of nowhere. Once you talk to the security guard, and get your badge, you're then walked through basic mechanics, things you will essentially be doing for much of, if not, the entire game. This tutorial is nice and short, and I think covers enough ground to get you situated into the rest of the game.
Upon completion of the tutorial you're brought to the main menu, and are able to start a new game. There appear to be a lot of elements you can change to make it easier or harder or maybe just different, which is nice. Once making a new save, you are asked to select a "job" and then follow up with traits and points you can allocate for traits, much like Project Zomboid. This seems quite generous, and it is, but a couple of things is that you absolutely must take Wrinkly Brainmeat, which increases your XP gains by 20%, and if you're playing in multiplayer, I think specializing is good. 20% XP gain doesn't sound like much, but some traits that you want to level up as much as possible can take a very long time, and any time saved on that can be a lifesaver. You can have friends specialize in things such as cooking, or combat, so on and so forth, to make the experience more dynamic for everyone playing. It's best to do this with the jobs at your disposal. Dying in this game (at least with default settings)
Starting a game, you may notice a couple of red flags. Your very first task is to talk to a scientist and get your first objective. Why would an open-ended survival game have you getting objectives to complete? Thankfully, these objectives don't necessarily have to be completed within a linear fashion, and, although direct, I feel that this functions in a similar way to The Forest, in which these objectives are simply allowing the player to open the world up to them in segments, and are not the hallmarks of a linear story progression. Regardless, right around the time you craft your first Energy Brick, the game will open up quite substantially, allowing you the freedom to explore the facility, talk to more NPCs, discover new things, and set up your living space for the time being. As in any survival game, you must pay attention to your human needs. Many of these are straightforward, gotta eat, sleep, drink, and in this game you also occasionally need to use the restroom with a little minigame attached to it. Fun! Lastly, you are encouraged to enter the Portal Worlds (one time required, at least), which are worlds that have a complete setting change, and differs in many ways!
I do feel that, at the moment, some of these elements of the game feel more like an afterthought than a mechanic that is engaging. For example, the Strength stat gives you the bonus of being able to properly wield heavy weapons, by carrying over capacity. Grinding this stat was incredibly frustrating, forcing me to run around very encumbered, not being able to collect as many resources as I'd like, in order to use a few weapons. I think that having this upgrade would make more sense for a separate stat or a separate method of upgrading, but some of these bonuses feel somewhat random. Another aspect I feel wears the game down a bit is the awkward combat, a couple of enemies (notably the Peccary) almost have instant attacks that occur, and can be punishing without feeling like a player would have deserved it. This continues to occur with many later enemies, but I think it is at least helped by the fact that you can get much better defensive equipment.
Abiotic Factor is a really fun time. I fully expected this game to be a mostly-joke title, but I found myself a game that I am enjoying and will continue to do so until I have seeped out everything I can out of it. While this game does have a couple issues, I think they could get ironed out by release. Single player is fun, but multiplayer is even more fun. I recommend this game to anyone, or any group, looking for a silly little survival game where you roleplay as HL1 scientists doing... whatever it is they do.
I've had a great time with this up to the current end, should it stick the landing it could very well be one of the top dogs of the survival-crafting genre in my opinion. What is currently there feels very polished, unique, and enjoyable so far.
I like how the game handles general area progression, but I do think it might be nice to make it ever so slightly less linear. Maybe make one point where you branch off into two areas or something along those lines? I also think that even for an early access title, it ends rather abruptly. That said, the atmosphere is really awesome and the level variety is top-tier.
While I like the crafting ideas system and think it gives something unique to the game, I think the recipes could stand to be be spread out a bit more instead of coming in batches like they do currently. Not a huge thing, but I think it would make that side of the progression feel a little more even.
My biggest issue (aside from various technical issues that I have to imagine will be fixed over time) is that it could use a combat update. A complete rework would be great, but what's already there isn't the worst, so even just adding to and polishing the feel of that would probably be okay. That's really the only core element of the game that feels specifically "early", so I'm interested to see what they do with this in the future.
I also feel like while the later chapters have some cool ideas, they are ultimately weaker than the top half of the current content. There are also some strange little things here and there, like a lot of the recipes requiring potatoes, but I guess they took potato farming out because it was causing issues? So you have like, maybe 10 potatoes across the whole game to work with as of writing. Will surely be fixed, but like... maybe make them a higher fridge spawn until then?
If you're on the fence, it's probably worth giving a go! Seems really promising, I had plenty of fun and I can't wait to see how it shapes up over time.
(Last updated as of 5/20/2024)
I like how the game handles general area progression, but I do think it might be nice to make it ever so slightly less linear. Maybe make one point where you branch off into two areas or something along those lines? I also think that even for an early access title, it ends rather abruptly. That said, the atmosphere is really awesome and the level variety is top-tier.
While I like the crafting ideas system and think it gives something unique to the game, I think the recipes could stand to be be spread out a bit more instead of coming in batches like they do currently. Not a huge thing, but I think it would make that side of the progression feel a little more even.
My biggest issue (aside from various technical issues that I have to imagine will be fixed over time) is that it could use a combat update. A complete rework would be great, but what's already there isn't the worst, so even just adding to and polishing the feel of that would probably be okay. That's really the only core element of the game that feels specifically "early", so I'm interested to see what they do with this in the future.
I also feel like while the later chapters have some cool ideas, they are ultimately weaker than the top half of the current content. There are also some strange little things here and there, like a lot of the recipes requiring potatoes, but I guess they took potato farming out because it was causing issues? So you have like, maybe 10 potatoes across the whole game to work with as of writing. Will surely be fixed, but like... maybe make them a higher fridge spawn until then?
If you're on the fence, it's probably worth giving a go! Seems really promising, I had plenty of fun and I can't wait to see how it shapes up over time.
(Last updated as of 5/20/2024)
Stumble upon this game a year back when I played the first play-test, I was already interested but then, the demo appeared a few months later and I was absolutely hooked. Now that it's finally here I'm finally glad to see it was worth the wait.
Not everyday you get a interesting/creative take on the survival-craft genre that's a mix of Half-Life 1, SCP Foundation and tiny bit of cosmic horror into the mix that brings out the nerd out of people (literally) that love this kind of stuff (myself included).
It is a bit on the pseudo-linear side of things that has you constantly progress through each zone as you build bases in order to fight out the "experimental lab-grown" horrors that await you during the day (and mostly night) but you'll be left with many tools/options at your disposal, and you'll need it. You're a nerd with nothing but your brain power to get you out of sticky situations. Right off the bat, the game will point out how laughably weak and feeble you are and only through progression your character will start to adapt to their surroundings, the more you do the same activity (like using a gun, your accuracy will improve the more you shoot it). Do know, if you choose to backtrack at previous locations you'll be happy to known your old bases will still be there. Adhere you go alone or with friends, with MANY tweakable options to shape how (difficult) you want to play, the game is insanely fun and although it's a early access game, you'll find yourself with a hefty amount of content to go through.
Based on the actions, passion and commitment the creator/devs has for Abiotic Factor, it seems like they're in it for the long haul for this game's development given, the fact they're pretty adamant on receiving feedback and bug reports through their community server/in-game reports and issuing hot-fixes shortly after. It's a nice sight to see devs that are close in tune with their community. Personally, I don't mind the price and current state this game is in. I say, give this game a try, it's really fun.
150+ hours in and there's one thing I can safely say about this game that's misleading....
It's missing a horror tag in the game's description. T-T
Not everyday you get a interesting/creative take on the survival-craft genre that's a mix of Half-Life 1, SCP Foundation and tiny bit of cosmic horror into the mix that brings out the nerd out of people (literally) that love this kind of stuff (myself included).
It is a bit on the pseudo-linear side of things that has you constantly progress through each zone as you build bases in order to fight out the "experimental lab-grown" horrors that await you during the day (and mostly night) but you'll be left with many tools/options at your disposal, and you'll need it. You're a nerd with nothing but your brain power to get you out of sticky situations. Right off the bat, the game will point out how laughably weak and feeble you are and only through progression your character will start to adapt to their surroundings, the more you do the same activity (like using a gun, your accuracy will improve the more you shoot it). Do know, if you choose to backtrack at previous locations you'll be happy to known your old bases will still be there. Adhere you go alone or with friends, with MANY tweakable options to shape how (difficult) you want to play, the game is insanely fun and although it's a early access game, you'll find yourself with a hefty amount of content to go through.
Based on the actions, passion and commitment the creator/devs has for Abiotic Factor, it seems like they're in it for the long haul for this game's development given, the fact they're pretty adamant on receiving feedback and bug reports through their community server/in-game reports and issuing hot-fixes shortly after. It's a nice sight to see devs that are close in tune with their community. Personally, I don't mind the price and current state this game is in. I say, give this game a try, it's really fun.
150+ hours in and there's one thing I can safely say about this game that's misleading....
It's missing a horror tag in the game's description. T-T
Definitely one of the more interesting Surival-y craft-y games out there, gives me more Immersive Sim vibes - in a good way. Since this is Early Access we'll see how this pans out, but I can definitely recommend it single player, too.
Extremely cozy game. Obviously Half-Life 1 inspired. What if you played the scientist team and had to survive with your wits instead of your inexplicably amazing way with guns?
I'm generally anti-survival-crafter because they mostly seem to be about stripping the environment of trees and rocks and shit and building an extremely ugly-looking box house. This game recontextualizes that behavior into strip-mining an office complex to build little hovel-apartments to support your work exploring each zone. As a result it feels like the intermediary period between the start of the cascade and when you as Gordon Freeman run into some scientist guy huddled in a corner behind a makeshift barricade going "please help me!!!"
The other thing I super love about it is that so much of your time is about exploring a specific path until that path eventually loops back into the main "unlocked" part of your run. There's five billion shortcuts per area, all bespoke, all uncovered by digging through every nook and cranny. It's extremely rewarding to just wander around and get lost and follow some arbitrary path because it'll give you resources AND open up new parts of the level.
Brilliant stuff. Palworld could never.
I'm generally anti-survival-crafter because they mostly seem to be about stripping the environment of trees and rocks and shit and building an extremely ugly-looking box house. This game recontextualizes that behavior into strip-mining an office complex to build little hovel-apartments to support your work exploring each zone. As a result it feels like the intermediary period between the start of the cascade and when you as Gordon Freeman run into some scientist guy huddled in a corner behind a makeshift barricade going "please help me!!!"
The other thing I super love about it is that so much of your time is about exploring a specific path until that path eventually loops back into the main "unlocked" part of your run. There's five billion shortcuts per area, all bespoke, all uncovered by digging through every nook and cranny. It's extremely rewarding to just wander around and get lost and follow some arbitrary path because it'll give you resources AND open up new parts of the level.
Brilliant stuff. Palworld could never.