Playtime: 4.5 Hours
Score: 7/10
A fun but short shooter. I always wanted to play this game with its very Bioshock inspired feel but always read how short it was so I could never justify buying it. But it was recently free on the Epic Games store so I finally dove in.
Gameplay wise, while there aren't any powers like in Bioshock, it's got some solid shooting mechanics. You get a pickaxe, pistol, shotgun, SMG and sniper rifle and they all work well enough. Enemies can kill you pretty quickly so you need to be on your toes and you can't carry that much reload, so you have to be strategic with when you fight. It's functional but I feel like a sequel would need to flesh this all out more. Also some of the enemy types are annoying like the suicide bomber droids, which I just hate seeing in an FPS.
The story I found to be quite interesting with some good dialogue and voice acting. The only issue is the story doesn't really resolve properly by the end, and it's pretty much sequel bait for the already announced, Industria 2. Because of that this game can feel like a tech demo and the second game will probably be what the devs wanted to make in the first place. Still an enjoyable game. I would recommend grabbing it while it's still free or get it when it's on sale.
All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/
Score: 7/10
A fun but short shooter. I always wanted to play this game with its very Bioshock inspired feel but always read how short it was so I could never justify buying it. But it was recently free on the Epic Games store so I finally dove in.
Gameplay wise, while there aren't any powers like in Bioshock, it's got some solid shooting mechanics. You get a pickaxe, pistol, shotgun, SMG and sniper rifle and they all work well enough. Enemies can kill you pretty quickly so you need to be on your toes and you can't carry that much reload, so you have to be strategic with when you fight. It's functional but I feel like a sequel would need to flesh this all out more. Also some of the enemy types are annoying like the suicide bomber droids, which I just hate seeing in an FPS.
The story I found to be quite interesting with some good dialogue and voice acting. The only issue is the story doesn't really resolve properly by the end, and it's pretty much sequel bait for the already announced, Industria 2. Because of that this game can feel like a tech demo and the second game will probably be what the devs wanted to make in the first place. Still an enjoyable game. I would recommend grabbing it while it's still free or get it when it's on sale.
All Games I have Played and Reviewed Ranked - https://www.backloggd.com/u/JudgeDredd35/list/all-games-i-have-played-and-reviewed-ranked/
Picked it up for free on Epic. Like the visuals and the gunplay. Now for the fun part:
-Less than 3 hours for a 20 dollar game that ends on a exposition filled cliffhanger.
-The exploding bots mixed damage
-The multiple sections of the library(Aware that the librarians are mentioned at the end, but wtf are they.)
-Feels like the story just build up to nothing
Hopefully Industria 2 addresses its issues in its first game and is longer this time.
-Less than 3 hours for a 20 dollar game that ends on a exposition filled cliffhanger.
-The exploding bots mixed damage
-The multiple sections of the library(Aware that the librarians are mentioned at the end, but wtf are they.)
-Feels like the story just build up to nothing
Hopefully Industria 2 addresses its issues in its first game and is longer this time.
For what the game tried to be (inspired by HL2 and Frictional Games), it fell extremely short - even for the smaller dev team. Frustrating and limited gameplay, nonsensical story trying to be more than it is for such a short runtime, abrupt ending, and painful optimization for what the game was outputting graphics-wise.
great music and atmosphere this game presents a lot of interesting ideas but it kind of feels more like a demo then a full game, a lot is left unexplained and unexplored, interested in seeing where the sequel goes
The game runs so badly that it's the first thing to come to mind about it. Doesn't even look that great despite sacrificing any hopes for decent performance.
The combat is slow, simple, and not particularly satisfying.
Level design is fine, but the incredibly slow movement speed makes it feel boring despite it having lots of detail.
To encourage exploration, the game has a ton of resources hidden in lockers, drawers, and boxes laying around. Too bad the ammo limit is literally one spare magazine per gun - the main character can carry a pistol, smg, sniper rifle and shotgun on her, but not two magazines for any of these weapons. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't make gameplay better.
The only reason I had to stick around was the story. The voice acting grew on me, and I thought the setup for the story had potential to be interesting, but the story ended before it really began, and it spent most of the runtime simply faffing about, not exploring any character or the world that much. There were little interactions that I found cute, but that was during banter, not actual character moments.
The combat is slow, simple, and not particularly satisfying.
Level design is fine, but the incredibly slow movement speed makes it feel boring despite it having lots of detail.
To encourage exploration, the game has a ton of resources hidden in lockers, drawers, and boxes laying around. Too bad the ammo limit is literally one spare magazine per gun - the main character can carry a pistol, smg, sniper rifle and shotgun on her, but not two magazines for any of these weapons. It doesn't make sense and it doesn't make gameplay better.
The only reason I had to stick around was the story. The voice acting grew on me, and I thought the setup for the story had potential to be interesting, but the story ended before it really began, and it spent most of the runtime simply faffing about, not exploring any character or the world that much. There were little interactions that I found cute, but that was during banter, not actual character moments.
My impressions when I played the demo for this during the Steam Nextfest a few years ago were mixed: on one hand it was hard to overlook the interesting sci-fi setting and environments, immediately evocative through the richness of the atmosphere of a late victorian-looking world taken over by killer machines; on the other it was just as difficult to ignore the lackuster combat and less than optimal performance. I was hoping these issues would be ironed out by the time the full release came around, but it wasn' so. If anything, things got worse.
This is a 2-3 hour game whose playtime is evenly split between shooting, puzzle solving and just plain wasting the player's time crossing empty areas, either listening to radio exposition or scavenging for supplies. The developer ensured you will be on the lookout for pickups by greatly limiting the amount of ammunition you can carry, as well as making the enemies quite spongy in regards to their health pools. unfortunately this also greatly limits the fun, because few things are less entertaining in an FPS of this sort than having to watch every shot you take for fear of running out of ammo. You also have a limited flashlight (always a bad idea) with a depleting meter and related battery pickups, but which doesn't seem to ever run out, even when it hits zero, which begs the question of why the mechanic is there to begin with.
Regarding ammo, a little math: you can carry 36 pistol rounds and 64 SMG rounds, but a standard enemy takes 5-8 shots to kill, meaning you will see your resources dwindle very quickly, to the tone of 7-8 enemies leaving your supplies dry, and that's if you are accurate and waste not. There are also a shotgun and sniper rifle (12 total rounds each) which are a bit more ammunition efficient, but will still end up empty in any situation involving sustained combat. It's just not fun at all, especially since the melee attacks are beyond useless, as most enemies will damage you instantly when coming close enough.
The game being this short, the enemy variety is lacking to say the least: there is a vacuum cleaner-looking robot that kamikazes to you and explodes, there is a slow melee based one, a soldier type with a machine gun (which drops no ammo), a slighly faster late-game melee variant that arcs electricity at you, and a dog-like type you'll only face once. Not much at all, which makes even such a short game feel repetitive.
AI isn't great either: near the end of the game there is a Half-Life 2 set piece where you need to activate two levers and wait a minute for an elevator to come down, while you fend off waves of respawning enemies. Now, you could stand and fight them, depleting your stocks of ammunition in a second flat, or you could just jump on a table and in so doing break the enemies' pathfinding, since they can only "see" you when you have your feet firmly on the ground. The results are pretty hilarious, since you can just wait on top of a table as the enemies swarm around it, unable to find you, and then make a run for the elevator without firing a single shot.
The story is nothing you haven't seen before: in late 1980s East Germany, a dimensional travel experiment goes awry, sending its creator somewhere else in the space-time continuum, with his inexplicably militarily gifted colleague/lover going after him to the rescue, only to find that time has passed very differently and 20 years have gone by between the point he arrived and when she does. The rest is pretty much what you expect, without any major twists and turns.
The real issue here is that the voice acting leaves a bit to be desired: while the part of the man who talks to you over the radio is generally well acted, the protagonist is not, often using the wrong tone for the situation and generally coming off as inexpressive and irritating. One more example of a script that could have yielded better results with some simple emotional annotations for each scene. Also, and quite disconcertingly, everyone sounds American which, for a game starring people from East Germany, and made by a German studio at that, feels quite out of place.
There are a few simple puzzles peppered throughout the experience, usually nothing much more complex than activating a few levers and valves in the correct order or following a chemical recipe on a blackboard. To stretch out the play time, aside from the aforementioned walking segments and direct exposition, we have oniric interludes in which you run around an empty office building reading text files and looking at some sort of theater play that doesn't seem to mean anything. It feels pretty transparent why all of that is there. The most aggravating thing about it, is that designing a few more combat set pieces would have been a far more engaging way to squeeze and extra hour out of the game than whatever this is.
One final mention goes to the technical side: while the game looks pretty good, thanks to Unreal Engine 4, as well as good art, lighting and animations, the performance is just as uneven as it was in the demo, even on computers that far surpass the recommended system specs. Stutters and frame drops while dynamically loading new areas are very frequent, and there are quite a few unresolved bugs at that. From the Steam discussions it sounds like the developer has given up on patching the game and moved on to the sequel, so what you have here is what you'll get. At least they patched a game-breaking bug that plagued early adopters on release, which is something.
Industria makes a great first impression, but it doesn't take long to realize the combat is unsatisfying due to stupid and spongy enemies, the story is lackluster and the performance is barely acceptable. Maybe the sequel will be better and fulfill the potential left untapped, but as for this first outing, it can't really be recommended.
This is a 2-3 hour game whose playtime is evenly split between shooting, puzzle solving and just plain wasting the player's time crossing empty areas, either listening to radio exposition or scavenging for supplies. The developer ensured you will be on the lookout for pickups by greatly limiting the amount of ammunition you can carry, as well as making the enemies quite spongy in regards to their health pools. unfortunately this also greatly limits the fun, because few things are less entertaining in an FPS of this sort than having to watch every shot you take for fear of running out of ammo. You also have a limited flashlight (always a bad idea) with a depleting meter and related battery pickups, but which doesn't seem to ever run out, even when it hits zero, which begs the question of why the mechanic is there to begin with.
Regarding ammo, a little math: you can carry 36 pistol rounds and 64 SMG rounds, but a standard enemy takes 5-8 shots to kill, meaning you will see your resources dwindle very quickly, to the tone of 7-8 enemies leaving your supplies dry, and that's if you are accurate and waste not. There are also a shotgun and sniper rifle (12 total rounds each) which are a bit more ammunition efficient, but will still end up empty in any situation involving sustained combat. It's just not fun at all, especially since the melee attacks are beyond useless, as most enemies will damage you instantly when coming close enough.
The game being this short, the enemy variety is lacking to say the least: there is a vacuum cleaner-looking robot that kamikazes to you and explodes, there is a slow melee based one, a soldier type with a machine gun (which drops no ammo), a slighly faster late-game melee variant that arcs electricity at you, and a dog-like type you'll only face once. Not much at all, which makes even such a short game feel repetitive.
AI isn't great either: near the end of the game there is a Half-Life 2 set piece where you need to activate two levers and wait a minute for an elevator to come down, while you fend off waves of respawning enemies. Now, you could stand and fight them, depleting your stocks of ammunition in a second flat, or you could just jump on a table and in so doing break the enemies' pathfinding, since they can only "see" you when you have your feet firmly on the ground. The results are pretty hilarious, since you can just wait on top of a table as the enemies swarm around it, unable to find you, and then make a run for the elevator without firing a single shot.
The story is nothing you haven't seen before: in late 1980s East Germany, a dimensional travel experiment goes awry, sending its creator somewhere else in the space-time continuum, with his inexplicably militarily gifted colleague/lover going after him to the rescue, only to find that time has passed very differently and 20 years have gone by between the point he arrived and when she does. The rest is pretty much what you expect, without any major twists and turns.
The real issue here is that the voice acting leaves a bit to be desired: while the part of the man who talks to you over the radio is generally well acted, the protagonist is not, often using the wrong tone for the situation and generally coming off as inexpressive and irritating. One more example of a script that could have yielded better results with some simple emotional annotations for each scene. Also, and quite disconcertingly, everyone sounds American which, for a game starring people from East Germany, and made by a German studio at that, feels quite out of place.
There are a few simple puzzles peppered throughout the experience, usually nothing much more complex than activating a few levers and valves in the correct order or following a chemical recipe on a blackboard. To stretch out the play time, aside from the aforementioned walking segments and direct exposition, we have oniric interludes in which you run around an empty office building reading text files and looking at some sort of theater play that doesn't seem to mean anything. It feels pretty transparent why all of that is there. The most aggravating thing about it, is that designing a few more combat set pieces would have been a far more engaging way to squeeze and extra hour out of the game than whatever this is.
One final mention goes to the technical side: while the game looks pretty good, thanks to Unreal Engine 4, as well as good art, lighting and animations, the performance is just as uneven as it was in the demo, even on computers that far surpass the recommended system specs. Stutters and frame drops while dynamically loading new areas are very frequent, and there are quite a few unresolved bugs at that. From the Steam discussions it sounds like the developer has given up on patching the game and moved on to the sequel, so what you have here is what you'll get. At least they patched a game-breaking bug that plagued early adopters on release, which is something.
Industria makes a great first impression, but it doesn't take long to realize the combat is unsatisfying due to stupid and spongy enemies, the story is lackluster and the performance is barely acceptable. Maybe the sequel will be better and fulfill the potential left untapped, but as for this first outing, it can't really be recommended.
A game that could be better. It could look better with a better designed steampunk universe.
Apart from that, he definitely needs to improve in kombat. When using an ax in the game, it looks and feels like you're hitting the air. When it comes to firearms, it can be said that they have better feel than an axe. Although they are a little weak, the sniper rifle feels very good.
The enemy animations in the game save the day. The animations of our character are not bad. It cannot be said that there are many of them in the game anyway, they are generally at the level of saving the day.
As for the story, the content of the game is inadequate compared to the story. I hope this will be corrected in the second game.
I have to say that I experienced sudden fps drops in the game, unfortunately it is not optimized very well.
Apart from that, he definitely needs to improve in kombat. When using an ax in the game, it looks and feels like you're hitting the air. When it comes to firearms, it can be said that they have better feel than an axe. Although they are a little weak, the sniper rifle feels very good.
The enemy animations in the game save the day. The animations of our character are not bad. It cannot be said that there are many of them in the game anyway, they are generally at the level of saving the day.
As for the story, the content of the game is inadequate compared to the story. I hope this will be corrected in the second game.
I have to say that I experienced sudden fps drops in the game, unfortunately it is not optimized very well.
The feels I got from that Wings of Desire library! What an unexpected surprise...