Senaste recensioner av mantis

All of the environments and enemies were very repetitious. The controls are very bizarre on Index. By default you drop your stuff if you don't actively grip them. Disabling this makes combat worse, especially using a bow, which is already a chore. The biggest problem with the game is that the trigger button moves the weapon in your hand. It feels totally unnatural. Instinctively you are going to grip the trigger for stability when striking an enemy but on this it makes the weapon slide around in your hand like jelly. So you end up going to land the finishing blow and your sword just flaps lifelessly on their head. I imagine the game gets better but it doesn't make a strong impression. The only good thing I would say about this game is the protagonist reminds me of the guy from the game Blood.

I am so tired of these VR zombie games. Totally uninspired, tired and low concept. From everything I have seen in gameplay footage and from playing the game for a short period, what you see on the tin is what you get. Repetitive little arenas with tiny walkways and useless little houses with crappy loot. You could do all of this in Skyrim VR or Blade and Sorcery. Does nothing unique and is painful to navigate.

More bugs

Base Game Review:

The game is essentially 5 but with more content and gameplay variety. To truly enjoy the game you have to forget about the campaign and simply focus on your characters armor and weapon progression.

At 70 percent completion the armor and weapon limit is removed which makes endgame content easier to do. So far I have played every character, but have mostly focused on Ranger and Wingdiver. The easiest way to get to 70 percent is to realize that if you complete a campaign at a specific level it gives you 5 percent completion. If you play the campaign through on Hard on one character it clears Easy and Normal, which sets you at 15 percent completion. So the quickest and easiest way to get to 70 percent is to complete the game 4 times on Hard with each character which puts you at 60 percent. Then you can choose your two favorite classes and beat each of them on Hardest or beat one Hardest and Inferno on the same class.

The way that I look at the game is that its sort of like a minimalist action RPG. The missions are basically dungeons and the boxes you pick up during the match are loot. Bosses and higher tier enemies drop more loot. Once you have enough of your weapons upgraded and a significant amount of armor you can essentially outlevel low level content and move onto the next difficulty tier.

When you look at the game like this it seems a bit more interesting than simply killing bugs over and over again. Each character class functions completely differently and is akin to a class in an MMORPG.

For example, Wing Diver is essentially a Mage. High damage but very low armor rating. Her abilities function very similar to magic, with powerful energy beams. She is able to conjure up various methods to evade danger and shield herself.

Air Raider is akin to a Warlock, capable of summoning massive elemental damage like fire and explosives as well as various vehicles that simply poof out of nowhere. A lot of his abilities revolve around drones that he can order to attack targets, much like a summoner's pet. They are also capable of dropping pillars that heal other players, much like a healing totem.

Fencer is the tank warrior class. Capable of doing a lot of damage and can use a shield, able to hold their own in close quarters combat and use various kinds of swords and hammers. A skilled Fencer can tank and hold aggro on enemies while the other classes scope out the situation and deliver ranged damage.

Ranger is more agile than the Air Raider and not as tough as the Fencer. Their weapons are more conventional and their combat style is similar to the Fencer but they are not as good at tanking as they lack a lot of defensive abilities. They can however use various weapons and tools that can heal themselves or other players, which makes them function a bit as a Paladin, able to hold their own in combat but also able to support the team with healing.

When I started seeing the game like this and turned off most of the sound effects, the game is fun to just grind while watching a movie on a second monitor. Intense gameplay but relaxed enough to play casually. The real enjoyment I get out of the game is seeing my character get stronger. Its a bit like Dragon Ball Z or something, seeing my characters power level increase and using their skills and abilities to help carry low level players. Its a rewarding experience when you keep your team alive and know that they couldn't have won without you. The teamwork and skill to beat some of the endgame content is pretty intense.

For instance, despite the game seeming like a nonstop fragfest where you simply aim and shoot hundreds of bugs, on higher difficulties MMO strategies such as kiting and pulling specific enemies becomes paramount. Resurrecting dead players is also incredibly important. You cannot simply rush in and expect to aggro everything in sight immediately like Leroy Jenkins and expect to survive. Every class truly provides a different gameplay style and has an important role on the team.

Definitely worth the buy, despite the aging graphics engine and the excessive price. The gameplay loop is addicting and as of writing there are a ton of people playing so it is easy to fill a match, so long as you are playing on Hard, Hardest or Inferno.

Also, I highly recommend picking up the Lootmaster mod from Nexus. I was initially against the idea but after beating the game multiple times, I felt like I earned the right to add it. Its a very simple installation. Just drag and drop into the base directory. Even if you want to play completely legit you are still going to be forced to use autoloot when randoms join who generally never ask if you want it enabled. If they are using a trainer they can turn it on and off but its a bit cumbersome compared to Lootmaster. You don't realize how much time, effort and stress is removed when you add autoloot. Its almost impossible to beat end level content when everyone is trying to pick up armor crates. So autoloot provides a huge advantage in several ways.

Mission Pack 1 Review:

I didn't have high expectations for this DLC. I assumed it would just be more of the same, just empty shooting galleries with the same enemies and no story. But to my surprise the game actually fills in some details in the story and has a proper ending. It comes with 19 missions but the first and last missions are basically filler. If you have already played a significant amount of the base game the unlocks for Hard mode aren't that great. But if you beat the game on Hardest or Inferno the rewards are actually really good, especially if you have the armor and weapon cap unlocked from having 70 percent progress in the base game. This DLC has its own completion progress so in order to unlock the cap you need to beat the game a minimum of 6 times (hard, hard, hard, hard, hardest, hardest). The enemy variety in this is actually really interesting and it requires a lot of skill and proper timing to complete some of the arenas. If one of your teammates fall, you are almost guaranteed to fail the mission but sometimes highly skilled players can prevent a wipe at the last second. The most interesting addition are the giant pillbugs but the machine gun bees and taser spiders are pretty neat too. I wish they would branch out to other insects but this developer doesn't like to innovate, essentially releasing the same game over over. But miraculously the game is incredibly fun and is one of the best games I have played in years. I have already sunk a ton of hours into this and plan to 100 percent the base game and both Mission Packs.

Additional DLC Review:

I can't give this content a proper review because all sources point to the fact that its a total waste of money. From what I can tell they are low level luxury items that would be phased out by higher level gear within a few missions. This is content that should have just been in the game or cut entirely. Or at least put together into one package that made sense. Would have been nice to get it included with the pre-order package but this company loves to nickle and dime the community to death. So it is best to avoid the random DLC garbage and stick with the base game and Mission Pack 1 and 2.

I found the aliens in this game to be uninspired. Basically every enemy you encounter is just a black mist that shoots at you with energy blasts. The only other type turns into coffee cups and jumps on your face. There are humans and robots in the game as well but they are underutilized. There is only a couple of normal human enemies that you fight and the rest are mind controlled and explode when you get close. Nearly every enemy besides the facehugger mimics are a bullet sponge. I had this game in my backlog and turned the difficulty to the lowest setting just to blow through it. Even on the lowest difficulty, and even with a fully upgraded golden pistol, enemies take forever to kill. I didn't get an opportunity to try out all the abilities but a vast majority of them are not needed as there are many ways to get past obstacles. The game is impressive on some level but there is way too much backtracking and tedious missions that require finding keycards, passwords, locations of corpses and how to navigate the often times confusing level design. Toward the end of the game a ton of my sidequests just disappeared without telling me.

Overall the game is more or less a subpar merging of Dead Space and Bioshock. The story makes very little sense and the vast majority of quests involve finding a corpse or an object. This is not a game with a deep and engrossing plot or cast of characters. Its mostly just you running through the same hallways and corridors, going up and down elevator shafts following waypoint markers and listening to recordings of people as you constantly get harassed by aliens and robots. Even though I upgraded a lot of my abilities, a ton of them had very little use. For instance, one of the addons for your suit lets you scan faster, and another lets you scan a specific thing at one point in the game. The addons to your suit and scope feel really underwhelming and boring. I kept hoping that there was a way to invest in regenerating health or armor. There is a perk like that but you heal when you get attacked, which makes absolutely no sense.

Overall I found the enemies uninspired, the characters boring, the story confusing and the weapons all lacked punch. Besides the mimics nearly every enemy in the game felt like some kind of mini-boss. I kept hoping there was a way to one-shot enemies or lure them into a trap or execute them from behind. I spent most of the game bashing enemies with the wrench and using one AOE zap attack. Sometimes I would have to use it 6 times to kill one enemy. I could have easily beaten this game on a normal difficulty but I didn't want to bother.

Its not a bad game but after having finished it I don't think I would recommend it. Its a poor man's Dead Space/Bioshock. It has some neat ideas like being able to turn into objects and throw recycling grenades for resources, but the main thing holding it back is the art direction and the combat. Its just not punchy and the time to kill for enemies is so high that it becomes a chore. The reward for killing enemies is virtually nothing as well. Bigger enemies drop more loot but in order to kill them you have to waste so many resources like ammo.

This game really lacks in the weapons department. Only one melee weapon? Seems absurd. You would think there might be a blade or some kind of baton, maybe an axe. You run out of ammo so fast and even with your weapons fully upgraded they feel worthless. Even with all the perks to increase weapon damage. Usually people play games to want to feel powerful or impactful, but nearly every combat encounter makes you feel weak and turns it into a chore.

I tried playing the DLC, Mooncrash and noticed that you have to unlock characters, there is no way to save midgame and there seems to be no story. Its just the same basic gameplay that you can repeat over and over. Was not about to waste my time doing the exact same thing I did for 20 hours with a preset character 4-5 times. I was feeling good about this game but now that I have played it all the way through and get a sense of how dreadfully boring it was, I can't recommend it. There are no impactful boss fights, no memorable characters, the weapon upgrade system is boring and the combat sucks. The game is much more of a stealth game than your standard first person shooter.

Once you have played the game for about 2 hours you have a good sense of what this game is about: backtracking, getting calls on your radio and getting attacked by shadow monsters every 5 minutes. I think there was only one jumpscare in the entire game. None of the game feels particularly scary, which is a strange thing given the premise of the game.

If you like games like this I would recommend the Bioshock, Dead Space or Deus Ex series. Observer is also another game that has a similar feel but is a much better narrative. Now that I think about it, the game also has virtually no gore, nothing more intense than Doom 3 back in the early 2000s. That game is ancient but I have much better memories of that game, its punchy and diverse enemy types and weapons and actual horror elements. This game isn't a good horror game, its not a good narrative game, its not a good RPG and its not a very good sci-fi game either. It meshes together a lot of good games and movies but delivers nothing unique. It leaves a disappointing taste in your mouth once you finish it, once you realize that the scope of the game was so small and limited when they could have done so much more.

An incoherent game that feels like a combination of the Last of Us, Destiny, Palworld and a very generic JRPG with some of the worst graphical oversights I have ever seen. At a half an hour into the game or less you are in a house and there are leaves from trees and vines bleeding through the walls. In a game in 2024, this is just sad. And it makes me not want to take this game seriously and put any more time into it, simply on the grounds that the developers did not even bother to fix obvious and basic issues at the beginning of the game.

I am 30 minutes into the game and these stupid yapping characters keep saying tons of nonsense that they just expect you to understand or accept.

Deviations, Stardust, Meta-Humans, blah blah blah.

Luckily when you open up the menu there is an option to self-destruct. Every good game has a dedicated self-destruct button.

Once you are done talking to a bunch of stupid chracters it throws you out in the woods and tells you to play Rust. Your character mines rocks with an axe. Not a pickaxe, but an axe. Of course you don't even make the axe. You just pull it out of your ass after you wake up out of a cryo pod in your underwear.

The crafting menu for armor only lets you make what you are already wearing, but worse than what you already have. This game actually has a baseball hat as the first craftable head armor... in a sci-fi survival JRPG. What the hell?

But make sure you don't walk more than 20 seconds in any direction or you will get to a magical invisible wall. Every survival game needs a giant invisible wall.

Crafting consists of collecting resources and then queuing it up in the table like Palworld and waiting 5 minutes. Very exciting.

Once you finish a terrible nonsensical and easy boss battle against Sirenhead, a blatant ripoff of a stock meme creepypasta character, you get teleported to the actual game filled with players. The map is littered to the brim with crappy little Palworld bases and makes it look like a shanty town filled with crackheads.

The global chat looks like the Barrens chat from World of Warcraft but 75 percent of the people talking are speaking Spanish. What a mess of a game.

The plot to this game makes absolutely no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense and combat involves butterflies. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ butterflies. In a survival game filled with stupid light-head monsters that can be killed by spamming left mouse click that look straight out of Skibidi Toilet. And the magical bird thing that assists you is a direct ripoff of Valheim's Hugin and Nightingale's Puck. They clearly stole the basic gameplay mechanics of PalWorld and slapped together any big budget successful game they could, even down to letting you glide with the bird, straight out of Zelda, Enshrouded, or Nightingale. Nothing about the game feels unique or inspired.

Its as if they took all the components of good games and then put it into a blender and what you were left with was a disjointed mess with incomprehensible setting, plot and objectives. You can tell the game is from Asia because in order to make sense of what the hell is going on you would need to take notes and read the lore on a wiki. I don't even think that the developers of this game know what the plot is about. I think they just hired some amateurs to say random phrases into the microphone.

This is currently the best game in VR.

Great mixture of arcade and realism. A real test of skill, strategy and endurance. Solo play was a really good addition to the game. You can play the game utilizing a lot of varied strategies and there are a lot of skins, trophies and attachments you can unlock which keeps the game fresh. The map is dense and very well detailed. There are a few places where grass floats or there is visible tearing in the geometry, but nothing game breaking. This game is a very good workout and would probably get you in shape in a month with the combination of a VR treadmill (KatVR is currently under 1000 dollars).

The gunplay in this game feels great. No need to hunch over or do weird uncomfortable motions in order to do what you want to do. Every item in the game has a use and a purpose. The starting area is very useful to learn the ropes of the game, as well as the bootcamp mode for players under level 16.

Also, in an act of sheer wizardry the game runs incredibly smooth on max settings with super sampling set to 150 percent. It is incredibly optimized despite having a very far draw distance.

Highly recommend and looking forward to future updates.

gnorp

A game so large they uninstall it for you.

Grindfest filled with mmo style fetchquests, Playstation 2 graphics, bad controls, small lobbies, magical zombies that appear out of nowhere, no gore, no physics, ugly player models and tedious hacked in survival mechanics

Text at the edge of your eyeballs simulator