Recent reviews by I2obiN

Fun souls like with interesting mechanics, combo system is interesting and it adds more than one dodge/roll type on top of the parry system. I think special moves would've been more interesting than the beta attack stuff but it's pretty okay. Bosses and monsters have interesting design, env is nice and varied so far, music is well above average

edit: so after completing this and putting a bit more time in it's actually criminal this isn't goty, i think if this had come out on PC in 2024 it would've been a much bigger hit.

80 euro downgrade from eternal, the gunplay is mediocre and is largely overshadowed by the melee system. you can spam combos as much as you want with no repercussions for not using guns. the on rails sections of the dragon, the turrets, etc go on FAR too long. the open world aspect is simply lazy versus actually designing clever levels. secrets are pointed out to you on the map. the story takes a front seat when it couldn't been less relevant.

interesting experiment but hard to recommend this for 80 euro if you're expecting something on the level of eternal

crazy epic

the most helpful review is still 100% accurate. good gunplay and customization but there's no content here

gun go pew pew

borderline actually unplayable due to the AI

Way too much focus on the procedural generation tech and not enough focus on the game itself. the AI is atrociously bad on both your team side and the enemies. the models used are also very bad and just low quality from the marines to the vehicles. the color of the fatigues just seems massively off, maybe it's the tonemapping. things like pockets aren't modelled at all and are just textures on the model. the proportions of the neck and shoulders are all just way the ♥♥♥♥ off and a lot of the times their heads look way too big for their bodies. body armour/webbing is normally thick and bulky, it doesn't wear like another layer of clothing. their bdu is too long versus body armour too because once again the artists proportions are just way off. just a really low level of attention to detail there overall and it sticks out massively when it all adds up

animations also are half assed. when you swing the weapon around their whole body turns instead of just their upper torso making them look rigid and like mannequins. so yeh, lack of proper turning animations.

the audio is halfway decent. the rifles sound legit but then the SAW sounds terrible by comparison. grenades look awful as well somehow, again really low quality model, low quality effect. doesn't really feel like a grenade going off at all. smokes also feel way off, the sheer volume of smoke i feel should be increased x2

the gunplay is mid, instead of handling it the way Ready or Not has, it's done a mix of CoD style shoving the acog in your face with no eye relief and some weird over the sight picture which in reality wouldn't work at all.

personally before anything else is done i would massively upgrade the models, animations and gameplay for just about everything. they all need at least one more round of serious iteration to improve them

at one point i cleared a tiny 2x2 room, turned away and the game spawned an insurgent in the room i had already cleared. so how enemies are spawned needs to be looked at because at the moment it just doesn't make sense at all a lot of the time. why are you spawning enemies at all? can the game engine really not handle 10-20 npcs at a time?

great concept, good design, audio that was fixable, but terrible execution from game developers. the problem now is there is a tremendous amount to fix that inevitably won't get fixed because it wasn't done right the first time around. you would be better off remaking this entire thing as a mod/dlc for Ready or Not because it already has everything you want in the AI department and gunplay department for a small squad tac shooter

i could forgive a lot of this but from a casual "i just want to play and have fun" perspective, the AI is in a game breaking state

↑ → ↓ ↓ ↓

The size and scope of this game is mental. An astounding achievement despite the challenges and a great expansion of the Stalker universe. A fantastic baseline for stepping into modding a UE5 shooter too. For excellence in immersion there are few games that can pull something like this off. It's a good example of bugs not ruining the experience. If you make a good game with good fundamentals, people will play it and enjoy it.

10/10, highly recommend playing on dx11 instead of dx12 stability and frames

Worth a play. Not nearly as bad as people made it out to be but definitely some very questionable design decisions.

The Good:
- Decent length

- Some cool physics, destructibility, enemies pick up things and throw them at you with funny results some times

- Guns are generally good, theres a few that i tried once and never used again. audio is fine in this department mostly. some guns have very cool alt fires

- Environment/architecture/asset design is excellent and there's a lot of neat details, everything is well done section to section

The Bad (it's a lot):
- No quicksave, this is a pretty big sin but the checkpoints are decent

- Level design, there's a lot of very bad sins here. Figuring out where to go was never this bad except in the worst games. A lot of times I had to use a video guide just to figure out where something was and progression is often via a completely unassuming room you'd write off as a side exploration area.

- Vehicles, in 1999 this would've been impressive for sure but the main thing letting it down here is that you're usually on rails for these except for the Halo jeep scenes. The weapon on the jeep leaves a lot to be desired, the lack of stagger is very odd here considering it's a mounted mg

- Enemy variety, I think you should've done a 3rd race for a game this length

- Upgrades, you very rarely feel they come into play. I never used the shield once and the fist I rarely used because the range is so limited. The weapon upgrades should improve the weapon not just offer a different firing style. Many upgrades are just badly thought out, the aoe reload is something that never helped once.

- Lack of any real attempt at NPCs, there's some cops that fight with you which would've been an opportunity for some nice one liners or comedy but they just stand there. There's one guy that shows up to give you a magnum and then you never see him again. Seemed utterly pointless

- Puzzles, I think modern devs struggle to understand what makes a good puzzle and that's reflected a lot here. A lot of puzzles are just finding a hidden item you have to just look for. You have an engine where you can pickup almost anything in the game and I don't think that's used once. Physics aren't leveraged really.

- Gunplay/Gameplay, a lot to say here. the stagger system is very confusing. in some cases a smg will stagger an enemy but a high caliber or explosive weapon won't. the whole thing feels very inconsistent and you can end up on the backfoot so often because you feel your weapons have no weight to them or ability to crowd control. it seems like knockback was implemented for the shotgun with gsf grunts and then they washed their hands of it completely

- Unfinished ideas, the bladesaw is an example of this where they put in a whole weapon that basically only opens doors. this could've been expanded on so much in puzzles. eg cutting power wires or cutting holes in walls. You randomly get a magnum pistol towards the end of the game that seems very thrown in at the last moment.

- Movement, the jump slide chaining is there but it's not particularly do-able. Getting at items is often awkward and movement in general just feels slightly anemic. I think they backed off letting you go nuts on the jump slides once the physics issues kept cropping up which is a shame.

I think the problem here is they should've got the basic fundamental gameplay down first but I think this probably suffered from too many chefs in the kitchen. A lot of ideas for vehicle sections, weapons, power-ups etc but no one was paying attention to the actual gameplay feel. You have so many tools and they all feel like a half-measure

I think a sequel that addresses a lot of the gameplay issues would be great, but please get the gameplay down first then start with the ideas.