Game is nice, but not enough content. After 5 hours of playing already feels boring (including top content from community). Not really fan of playing dungeon but levels are nice, sad that such nice game feels this way.

This game is both too small and too big if that makes sense. It's one part proof of concept that didn't quite work out but with some tough and satisfying challenges, and one part infinite beach where the locals visit to make sand castles of every size and skill level.

What kind of game is this? The experience is of playing the bare-knuckled action hero of a first-person B movie which got rated R for violence, blood and gore. Combat is the kind of chaos where you can disappear into the flow of punching, kicking, and attacking with a large variety of real and makeshift weapons; like breaking a knife off in someone's face, then grabbing a frying pan to finish the job.

The “main game” features 5 official scenarios with decently designed but generic areas (with one getting day and night versions) and your one job is to kill everyone so the level exit will appear. Every scenario is a tense marathon battle without healing or mercy. A small sandbox where you can spawn weapons and enemies with various ongoing effects is a great place to train.

Scenarios also offer a bunch of modifiers, including: lights out and living dead for a zombie apocalypse feel, zero g and hard hitter so your kicks can send enemies bouncing off the ceiling, green mode if you want no blood or splatter mode if you want more, weak enemies for an easier time or weak player for a challenge, various ranged weapon modes with an option for unlimited ammo, slo mo to replace running with slowing time, modes to start with different special abilities and unlimited special power, different combinations of the above … it's just too bad there's only the 5 official scenarios.

There's also the Arena with 5 difficult challenge runs of 7-10 fights in a row – some of which are like neat puzzles – where you heal half your health after each fight. Another option in the Arena is the tough and extremely random Endless mode, but don't try this until you've gone Beneath.

The roguelike Beneath campaign is the late-arriving star of the game, a solid but somewhat basic descent through large procedural generated mazes where you die at the end but your next character might get a bit deeper. There are classes which have different powers and playstyles; the ranged Warlock is probably the easiest long-term, while the speedy Spectre is a lot of fun. Perks found along the way don't feel like they become unique builds, and some feel like they should have been the default, like adding to max health with each kill.

Sadly the story is a bit simple (we dug too deep) and the elder god bosses can be a bit easy – but there's no shame in looking up the method to reach the third. There's also a bunch of new fantasy monsters in the mazes, from basic zombies and cultists to weird mages and demonic beasts. A strangely cute hydra is plain annoying to kill. Overall Beneath is fun and stands on its own as an experience, but doesn't have the polish to be its own full game.

Finally we get to the real source of hours spent in this game, player-made levels. There are tough missions where you storm castles and fight off hordes, maps where you can wander peacefully around small beachside towns or through the wilderness, huge city zones where you can enter some of the buildings to visit businesses and apartments, and tiny little single rooms with 88 enemies and an unbreakable sword.

There are over nine thousand (well over 13K) player-made maps, which of course follow the usual bell curve of some gems, some trash and too many okay maps. Unfortunately a lot of good ones are probably lost in the pile and you could spend a long time combing through. Try collections to find good stuff: https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2677284524 This one seems to have quite a few, and there are also videos and lists on the web. Personally I believe the Workshop should have had better tags to sort the levels from the start.

And that's it. That's the whole game: not enough of the good official scenarios and Arena challenges, a basic but addictive roguelike, and many thousands of player-made levels. But the flaw for the game would be its combat and core concepts; the ability to gouge off the voxels that make up enemy bodies is sick as hell yet mainly cosmetic only.

You can strip an enemy's face to the skull below, but if they have health remaining, they can still fight with no problem. Or if you attack their arm, you might break off a limb, but it barely inconveniences them. Legs are more reliable quick-kills, but some enemies are just immune to that. What's the point of breakable voxel bodies if they just have hitpoints?

Also melee attacks feel limited with just a quick thrust, a strong side swipe, and a knockdown kick – especially the swipe, because you can't change the angle to cut downward or diagonally. The game is about turning ordinary items into weapons that break bodies, but I can't call this a martial arts game because attacks are simple and only sometimes precise enough to break enemies as intended.

Melee weapons feel a little weird too because they don't have custom animations. A baseball bat or a tire iron make sense when you power swing them, but feel strange with the quick thrust attack. The spear and pike grant amazing range with the thrust, but don't suffer from close quarters on a big swing other than perhaps hitting someone you didn't intend. A hammer or club always look wrong because they feel like they should have downward swings.

With all that said, this game is still great. If you like extreme action movie violence, like watching a guy whose arm just got cut off stopping to look in horror at his stump, this is the place to experience that in first-person over and over and over again. If you want to cut through a room of disco dancers with a katana and then make a gif of that to share with friends, this is your game. If you want to desensitize yourself to blood, come paint the town red.

sigma game