Has very quickly become my go-to "I have fifteen minutes, lets gaming" game. The matches are just the right length for a pick-up-and-play session and the combat has just the right level of depth to reward smart-not-hard play.

The initial tutorial feels incredibly intimidating, but it's pleasantly surprising how quickly the combat triangle begins to make sense; it's a very intuitive and execution-light version of the fighting game attack-throw-overhead wheel, with a bit of Counter-Strike knife duelling thrown in for good measure. The beauty of the system is that while it rewards solid execution and micro-tactical decision-making, the game is still more than happy to reward you for stepping outside the tryhard metagame to hurl a broom from 100 yards away or drop a barrel down a bottlenecking staircase like you're a fucking Ye Olde Donkey Kong. When I stood on top of a trebuchet hoping to physics-glitch my way to the front battlements, I was overjoyed to realise the game had fully expected players to do that and played a unique voice line and animation. Just pure dumb multiplayer joy from start to finish.

Not only is the game really fun to control, it's also really fun to just experience and take part in. The developers have fully embraced the stupidity of their quasi-medieval setting and crammed this thing full of himbo heraldry and ironic-macho chit-chat about the indignity of war and middle age(s) life, which ends up giving the whole thing an almost Terry Pratchett vibe. It's hard to get mad about being decapitated when it prompts your opposing number to do a thuggish Eng-er-land football chant about pissing down your neck. And even when you lag at the bottom of the leaderboard, chances are you'll get to see five guys 300mph ragdoll away from a catapult boulder or watch someone's head whizz off like a golf ball when it's struck by a warhammer. Bladdy 'ell my liege/guvna!! More of this "OTT Euro 2020 fanzone gone wrong" vibe, please. Long may it continue. Chivalry is not dead.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: At the end of a quick play match I got a connection error but my XP bar continued to fill for 25(!) ranks, presumably because the XP filling is somehow tied to an animation or the match itself ending. This accidental XP/gold bribe may have influenced my perception of the game. )

15 hrs in as of writing this

It's hard to write about Lethal Company because its still in its infancy but I think the groundwork here is very impressive compared to the wave of co-op horror games that have plagued early access these last few years. Zeekerss is a hugely skilled developer with an incredible 5 games under the belt and their (?) knowledge of game design is reflected on Lethal Company. The gameplay loop is simple but the quota makes every expedition a constant weighing of risk when you can't guarantee that you'll make it out either alive or with enough scrap to meet the deadline, and the monster AI strays from the typical -straight line to you until you can hide- that a lot of other games in the genre use when the monster gimmicks wear off-- think of games like Phasmophobia or Forewarned where the enemy AI just goes straight for you even if they do have gimmicks in their enemy design-. The best example is the huge spider which instead of just making a beeline towards the player it'll stay put if it has no webs set up and rather clings to walls which makes the experience much more scary than just having every enemy have the same copy-pasted AI. Obviously anyone who has played the game also knows the voice chat is the strongest selling point of the game due to how well designed it is and is part of what has made the game an overwhelming succes with its indirect marketing proving its worth with every site being filled with funny clips where someone screams viscerally after failing to do parkour jumps or meeting the neckbreaker for the first time.

There's still a lot to polish though. I don't think the loop is completely airtight design wise which can lead to repetition when thriving or frustration on failure when youre on the last day and fail to meet the deadline-- what's the point of the 0 days remaining instance when you can do nothing but land and instantly take off to just reset the run?-.
The outdoor segments also need a lot of work still. Weather can make runs very unfun (looking at you Stormy and Flooded) due to how debilitating they can be without any extra reward therefore making evading the planets the optimal decision which defeats the risk management thats crystallized in a lot of the game's design and the outdoor enemies are just complete balls, specially the Forest Giant who employs the design I complained about earlier. Nothing about the outdoor obstacles feel like they make you switch it up in a satisfying way and just lead to a lot of frustration, especially since a lot of the enemies just like to camp the ship after nightfall.

Lethal Company is, in any case, one of the most fun multiplayer experiences you can have nowadays without emptying your wallet to do so. I hope the game continues to iron out what faults it has right now and just gets even better, and the game as it stands is still really impressive considering its an early access game with a single update

the "japanese take on half life" idea of breakdown is kind of hard to write off completely honestly, though it is different. want to call this an immsim even though that's not really correct, values realism of the choreography of your individual actions over providing a large multitude of possible interactions that're more streamlined in how they are perceived than they would be here. there's 3 kinds of food that are most of the health items in the game that aren't collected but eaten on the spot right then and there with very long animations, and a lot of exposition that isn't from character dialogue is exclusively in the form of clipboards your character flips each page of methodically, pretty much foregoing any system shockian wall scrawls or audio logs or other more varied conveyances of information. it really isn't concerned with "immersion" in how you perceive the world as much as being within derrick.

this kind of embodiment is also centered in the emphasis on hand to hand combat which requires an up close approach, with attention to enemy tells and your own attack distance/speed (and a surprising amount of combos/special attacks you can pull off if you experiment, even if their application can feel kind of crude), over controlling the level and utilizing varied modes of firepower that fpses prioritize. there are guns of course and you'll need them, but only 4 (except for THESE BABYS [fists][strong]) and they amount to locking on and hoping the bullets hit. and its definitely a slog at times with just how much you are fighting guys in empty corridors, but this was mostly not enough to be a big dealbreaker for me. in fact there is one point getting near the end of the game that i actually think it uses tedium pretty effectively, to emphasize how strong you become later on. that being said the un-lock-onable stealth t'lan are bad and FUCK that gauntlet in the big white room near the end in particular!!! shockwaves and neckbreakers are your only friends in this world.

i think the game is kept from being truly great partly from the above but mostly from a lack of strong connective tissue altogether. it has quite a few impactful moments and there's some interesting ideas within the twists of its sci fi story i think, but i feel disappointed with how little of it ties together satisfyingly. despite that i think its still largely good, this game feels kind of ahead of its time in its own immersive qualities and shows some ambition at times i find admirable, yet has a dumb fun wonky spirit that is irreplaceable. there's a part early on where you come into a cafeteria decorated with limp bloodied corpses, soft piano muzak playing from speakers to highlight the grimness of the scene, and then happen upon a hamburger on one of the tables for your character to aggressively grab, inspect with fascination like its an alien artifact, and then take a few chomps of in front of your camera and toss away. stuff like that is the heart of breakdown and puts its in stark contrast with the western fpses its compared with; its not so beholden to its representational atmosphere that it doesn't have a silly time with itself.