Recent reviews by Axodah

The current course of action and dev/mod behavior has caused me to change my review to negative. If you aren't being controlled by Sony as has previously been claimed, you can fix this.

When you do, I'll fix this review. The game is absolutely wonderful...when not mired in Sony politics.

Edit: Sony walked it back! :D

Old review: Used to be good game, why ruin with Fortnite dances and microtransactions?

Update: Changed review from "No" to "Yes". Sway and suppression could use a little tuning, can be a bit extreme at times, but feels much better over-tuned than under-tuned. This is night and day from old Squad. For once, micro-transactions actually funded good game design. Never thought I'd say that. No more can snipers camp with impunity, or lean spamming dolphin divers treat this like hardcore COD. We finally have a game that prefers milsim over arcadey, but isn't afraid to use some arcadey bits for ease of access.

We have enough reaction-based arcadey wiggling dolphin-diving shooter games already. We now have one that's more realistic. Please don't kill creative design by making everything fit in the shoebox that is "COD-like shooter game".

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TL:DR

You are not a one man army.

You are one man.

The Matrix isn't real.

Stop your stupid noodle wiggling.

Though this might be a controversial take on balance, I see this game from the light of our character's fragility. Being the little guy in a room full of giants, we have to adapt. Tricking our enemies into falling off cliffs, finding their weaknesses and exploiting them to the fullest, training (farming) those weaker than us, and using terrain to our advantage are all valid strategies to grow beyond your current limits. Some of the outcomes are called "overpowered" and are accused of breaking game balance and taking the fun out of fights. On the flip side, that moment when you discover a mechanic like that on your own while struggling feels monumental, because it totally changes the dynamics of your fight.

I was having a heck of a time with a particularly large boss in a very small cave, because I couldn't dodge far or fast enough to get out of his way (light encumbrance). I noticed that some of my shields were using less stamina, and learned about the block boost on shields. By buffing that up, I was able to block the attacks without losing all of my stamina, but I still wasn't able to deal enough damage. I had been using bloodflame on my stabbing weapon to try to get some bleed and realized the boss was pushing me into corners with my shield, so maybe casting some scarlet rot DoTs and setting myself on fire with a resist talisman would kill him too? Providing some passive damage to my blocking? Then I discovered the interaction between self-immolation and bleed enchantments. It took the fight from one that I always lost to one that was manageable. And the strategy didn't always work well for other bosses either, so I had to continue to adapt. Is the interaction a bug? I honestly don't know. Was it fun from a gameplay/discovery perspective? Absolutely.

The upshot is that you can use whatever you want/discover works best for you in each fight. You don't have to play using what you consider to be overpowered means if that's not what you want to do. Just remember, you never HAVE to optimize the fun out of your game, we don't always need high barriers to entry to have fun, and things can be tuned separately for PvE and PvP. If you are a good player, some tools may feel too strong or oppressive. For newer/weaker players, those same tools might take the game from an impossible challenge to something that's manageable. That level of accessibility to me, in a game where the lore/exploration can be just as fun as the fights, is an absolute win.

If you want to buy this game, buy at half price or less. It's not worth $60 US.

In Story mode (breaking the loop), the game has frequent micro stutters on a high end PC, especially when in online mode and in combat. I suspect anti-cheat, server communications, and game engine limitations among other things. The stutters are so bad that the screen turns into a slideshow, and can make combat impossible due to the subsequent input delay.

PvP mode (protecting the loop) is nearly unplayable due to massive lag. Rubber banding was incredibly frequent.

Even if all of the above was fixed, the story is extremely short for the price of this game and having only 4 maps makes it get repetitive very quickly. Every time you forget to do something, make a mistake (including selecting the wrong abilities), or die three times, you have to go back to the beginning of the day and replay the level to fix it. Some might find this appealing. I found it tedious.

I was able to beat the story by switching to offline mode and massively dropping the graphics settings. Only by doing both was I able to reduce the stuttering to a level that allowed me to aim and shoot.

Overall: 5/10

Reviewed at Pre-Alpha: 10% completion.

The game isn't very user friendly at the moment and has almost no content. That said, it's within reason of what I'd expect for a 10% Pre-Alpha build, so I will recommend to help the dev grow his game. Keep reading to know what you are getting in to.

TL:DR Many contract state triggers are too rigid and don't always fire when they should. DON'T DO ANYTHING/ GO ANYWHERE outside the scope of your current contract, or you risk soft lock (you may still soft lock anyways). If you enter the mercenary cave, expect to rebuild some/all of your automation when you return as it shifts each time. Check regularly for trash monsters, as there is no notice of their appearance and they may be made of only two pieces of trash. Frame rate is spotty, even on a high end rig. Watch the update log for future progress.

This was my experience in my first two hours:
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- I bought conveyors before the tutorial completed, soft locking the contract in my first 5 minutes of gameplay.

- Started new game to try to reset tutorial, did not work, couldn't reset career selection and tutorial no longer worked.

- Uninstall/reinstall was the only way I could get the tutorial to return. (Though looking back, before trying this, make sure when you start a new game that you don't skip the intro cutscene. May be a required trigger in it).

- Built a conveyor facility to automate garbage collection. Conveyors often scatter the garbage beside, on top of, or behind the intended facility, as the garbage bounces due to object collision. Began babysitting the automation.

- Some sort of trash monster spawned with no warning/tutorial description. Shot it with my new pistol, but had no idea what spawned it or why it was present. Figured it was due to high trash volume, so upped my processing rate.

- Random trash monsters spawned when only two pieces of garbage were present. Could barely see it. Due to highly inaccurate pistol, could barely shoot it, resulting in extensive damage to my automation. Eventually killed it and rebuilt base with turrets.

- Turrets did nothing, they hit a trash monster once and missed every other shot. After being hit by a turret, the trash monster made a beeline across the map to fight me rather than engaging the turrets.

- Most quests had spotty progress registration. No way to reset/restart quests. Had to restart several times due to soft locks.

- After leaving the mercenary cave for the first time, the outside world broke somewhat. All my automation was subtly shifted, causing trash to move incorrectly and preventing machines from lining up. As I could no longer add new machines in line with the old, I had to rebuild everything. Leaving the cave also soft locked several quests, including the one that has you blow up 4 rocks. This left rocks in place that couldn't be destroyed and soft locked it's state in the log. Started a new save and worked my way back here. Still had soft lock issues with this quest.

- Once site automation was complete, since quests were in broken states, there was nothing to do. Through this entire experience, I never ran low on any resource, never noticed any impact from my career selection, and never had much to do. My general approach on each soft-lock-induced restart was to slap down dozens of conveyor belts where the trash comes in, and funnel it back to the main base to pass through refining machines. A few air purifiers, solar panels, and batteries was all I needed to keep everything in the green 24/7, and these were achievable within 5-6 minutes after game start.

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All this, including restarts, was completed within the first two hours. The quest I was soft locking on appears to be close to the end of what is currently available.

Was trapped between three strike forces hunting me down and couldn't decipher their messages. At that point, I could either retreat and hope I could hide, advance blindly into the fight, or stumble around trying to decipher their comms. When I was unable to decipher their messages, I decided to commit to the fight since I was low on fuel and retreat would likely be impossible. At the last second, I received a message from the last known direction of a transport fleet I had encountered previously. I had marked down their name on the map and realized that it was the same length as the message sender field. Adjusted the cipher to match their name and cracked the code. Was then able to read the strike force messages detailing their movements. That let me prefire cruise missiles into their path and take them down one at a time in much more manageable fights. Without that code break, I would've been outnumbered and destroyed.

10/10 will ELINT again

There is just something about flying around in a wingsuit that keeps me coming back. Even after unlocking all content multiple times, as I go to click uninstall, I find myself flying around for the next 30-40 minutes just enjoying the scenery and mechanics. If you like flying in videogames, get the Bavarium wingsuit in the DLC, and just cruise. It's addictive.

This game is a true diamond in the rough, with the only rough being that there is usually only one online game at a time, and it is password protected. If the community for this game grows, it will be a game that I will have trouble putting down. AI mode is fun, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to have a little human interaction now and again.