I mean, it's fine. On surface level there's not really a lot going on here, and I'm honestly not sure how it's gotten so popular: maybe it's a generational thing, because I'm very much a millennial and this game feels very zoomer-y, if that makes sense. I've only played maybe 10 hours or so of this with a friend, and we did have some fun, but I kinda feel I've got everything out of it I'm going to get.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.
There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.
I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...
So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy this, because Lethal Company was pretty fun... once we worked out how to play it. The onboarding in this game is terrible, and at first we assumed we were supposed to both go scavenging, which just ended up being a painful and aimless experience filled with unavoidable deaths. Once we started leaving somebody in the ship, our time got considerably better; having one person guide the other over walkie-talkie with a finite battery life leads to a pretty fun dynamic, and there was always a genuine 'oh shit' moment when the scavenger would go silent and you didn't know whether they'd died or just run out of power. Lethal Company has a pretty good vibe to it, and in general it succeeds in both its horror and its innate silly comedy.
There are a lot of different enemy types and quite a few different planets in this game, but it all ends up getting pretty samey pretty quick. Almost all of the interiors look exactly the same, the exterior layout on each planet is exactly the same every time you visit, and every enemy was functionally exactly the same for us because we never worked out a way to deal with literally any of them except 'run away'. I get the impression this game would be a lot more fun if you went diving through a wiki to learn enemy behaviour patterns and how to unlock secrets; as an example, once we went into an interior only to find a huge old-fashioned library instead of the regular steel corridors. I'm sure there must be hundreds of other secrets like this in the game, but yeah... we never had any idea what caused that area to spawn and we never saw it again. Again, I'm sure I could pore over the wiki to find these things out, but that's just not how I like to play games. And it feels like LC discourages organically discovering any of these secrets, because the cost for exploration and player death is usually so high.
I think the vibes here are generally strong enough that I'd be willing to push through the difficulties I'd had with this, if not for the quality of life in this game being pretty awful. For some reason you have to use an in-game Command Line on a terminal to do pretty much any in-game menuing, the exterior maps are overly large and easy to get lost in despite having nothing to see or do, and for some goddamn reason there's no way to reset the game! There were many times when it became clear we weren't going to meet the next quota, but in order to start again you have to land the ship however many times you have left and then sit through the cutscene of you being fired by the company. Every single time. And we fucked up a lot in this game; like I said, LC doesn't feel like it designed to be played by people who haven't read the Wiki, so we quite often would die and not even have any idea what killed us. For some reason if you both die, any scrap you had stored on the ship gets magically deleted, so yeah it can be obvious pretty early in a run that you're doomed... and yet the game forces you to go through the motions yet again. There's only so much of this I can take, and it's the single biggest issue I had with this game. I know there's mods that can fix it, but I'm not a big fan of modding, and this is a review for the base game so I'm not going to give it points for mods that happen to exist...
So yeah, there are some nice ideas in here, many of which are actually quite well implemented, but the poor quality of life and lack of player feedback really drag this one down for me. I imagine this is the kind of game that would be much more fun if one player knows what they're doing and the other doesn't, but two novices playing this together got pretty stale before I feel we'd really scratched the surface.