Playtime: 12 Hours
Score: 7/10
Been wanting to play this game for a while since it came out, and it was free on Epic, so I finally gave it a playthrough. I was interested in this game since it came to us from some of the devs who worked on the System Shock and Bioshock games, with the latter in particular being one of my favorite game series of all time. Plus I am someone who reads comics and have been passionate about them all my life, so the comic book art style was something that attracted me to this game as well! its basically like System Shock, if it were a roguelike.
Playing the game, it will definitely feel familiar to those who have played System shock, with the enemy types, the feeling of isolation in space, and the ships you move through. They definitely nailed the atmosphere and the feeling you could die at any moment. Each time you die, you play as a new character with their own traits. It is possible to swap traits out at specific machines or find these gene altering anomalies in space, which change your traits when you fly your ship near them. The gameplay loop involves your going from ship to ship, looting items, trying to find the main item you need and then hightailing it back to your ship. You also need to keep track of resources like fuel for your ship and food for your character. Each ship is procedurally generate with its own specific traits, that can work both against and for you. E.g. security bots being on your side, hazards like electrical wires, fire and radiation leaks.
I definitely enjoyed the gameplay loop of this game and the weapons are all fun to use. You do at the very least keep your weapons and upgrades when you die and just lose your ammo and supplies (but you start out with a small amount at the start of each run). I love the comic book art style and the soundtrack is also pretty awesome! The game can also be very funny at times, with some very dry British humor.
Some of the things I didn't like was the RNG aspects of it. You can have some runs where you get lucky and your having a great time playing, and other times where the dice doesn't roll in your favor and you just get frustrated. I don't mind RNG in games like Borderlands because its just specifically tied to the weapons you find, and not the levels themselves. I much prefer handcrafted levels that all feel unique from one another. After a while the ships all start to look the same and the gameplay starts to feel repetitive but the game ended for me right about when that started to set in, so it balanced itself out. I also just wish this game had a proper story campaign to hook me, as the games story is pretty basic and is just there to give the player urgency. Even if they perhaps included audio logs or lore entries for you to find, that explained why the universe is the way is, would have helped, but I understand that wouldn't really work with the games RNG nature.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and I can recommend it to fans of System Shock or roguelike games. It does require a lot of RAM to play properly on PC, so if you don't have a gaming pc, I'd say check it out on console.
Score: 7/10
Been wanting to play this game for a while since it came out, and it was free on Epic, so I finally gave it a playthrough. I was interested in this game since it came to us from some of the devs who worked on the System Shock and Bioshock games, with the latter in particular being one of my favorite game series of all time. Plus I am someone who reads comics and have been passionate about them all my life, so the comic book art style was something that attracted me to this game as well! its basically like System Shock, if it were a roguelike.
Playing the game, it will definitely feel familiar to those who have played System shock, with the enemy types, the feeling of isolation in space, and the ships you move through. They definitely nailed the atmosphere and the feeling you could die at any moment. Each time you die, you play as a new character with their own traits. It is possible to swap traits out at specific machines or find these gene altering anomalies in space, which change your traits when you fly your ship near them. The gameplay loop involves your going from ship to ship, looting items, trying to find the main item you need and then hightailing it back to your ship. You also need to keep track of resources like fuel for your ship and food for your character. Each ship is procedurally generate with its own specific traits, that can work both against and for you. E.g. security bots being on your side, hazards like electrical wires, fire and radiation leaks.
I definitely enjoyed the gameplay loop of this game and the weapons are all fun to use. You do at the very least keep your weapons and upgrades when you die and just lose your ammo and supplies (but you start out with a small amount at the start of each run). I love the comic book art style and the soundtrack is also pretty awesome! The game can also be very funny at times, with some very dry British humor.
Some of the things I didn't like was the RNG aspects of it. You can have some runs where you get lucky and your having a great time playing, and other times where the dice doesn't roll in your favor and you just get frustrated. I don't mind RNG in games like Borderlands because its just specifically tied to the weapons you find, and not the levels themselves. I much prefer handcrafted levels that all feel unique from one another. After a while the ships all start to look the same and the gameplay starts to feel repetitive but the game ended for me right about when that started to set in, so it balanced itself out. I also just wish this game had a proper story campaign to hook me, as the games story is pretty basic and is just there to give the player urgency. Even if they perhaps included audio logs or lore entries for you to find, that explained why the universe is the way is, would have helped, but I understand that wouldn't really work with the games RNG nature.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and I can recommend it to fans of System Shock or roguelike games. It does require a lot of RAM to play properly on PC, so if you don't have a gaming pc, I'd say check it out on console.