Recent reviews by Meloshe

Lots of very fun ideas are created out of a simple premise

Very Short

Pretty Easy

Lots of really good ideas, but it lacks the flow it needs.

the level design is often hard to read where to go, the bounce pads and other movement options often launch you at inconsistent angles, the dashing towards weapons and crouch jumping off slopes is also inconsistent etc.

Also, so much of the game is based around the combat, yet you always feel discouraged from engaging in it. Some enemies can be grappled and kicked while some can't and it's impossible to know which is which. Enemies have enough hp that trying to hit them directly often gets you killed. I know this is because you are supposed to use the environment, but that can be hard when the environment doesn't reset upon death. If you get hit once, you are slowed for a long time and can't use your movement, making the combat feel like a chore if not done perfectly. Luckily in normal levels, most enemies can be ignored with little consequence, but avoiding them makes the game feel boring because doing combat and raising the combo meter is the whole point.

Lots of good ideas and some of the advanced tech feels satisfying to pull off, but it needs some serious refining to be a banger. Honestly, I could look past everything else if the enemies simply weren't a chore to fight.

Side note: I was not enjoying the combat already, but the enemies that are immune to anything but fire made me refund. What is the point of giving the player all these fun tools only to not let them use them?

New Content

Short, Sweet, good mechanics, nice feeling movement, very speedrunnable etc.

This game is definitely worth it especially since you can get it for super cheap

pengu

The fact that this game is made by one person is insane. The mechanics and gun-play feel unique and fun. Highly recommend at least giving it a try.

Side note: The game is Infinitely more fun if you play with faster movement and double jump. The air movement in the game feels amazing so it makes for a great movement shooter. My friends and I never play the game any other way.

The fact last literally no one plays this game is a crime. (Look at Steam charts i'm not kidding it's literally zero most of the time).

This is the most fun arena shooter I've ever played, the concept and mechanics are executed spectacularly, the grappling hook is easily the best grappling hook ever implemented into a game. The time trials are a blast to perfect, and the guns and secondaries all feel crisp and satisfying to use. This is one of my favorite shooters of all time and you deserve to play it. It was killed way too soon.

One of the most fun co-op games ever, one of the best and least toxic gaming communities I've ever seen, and the least greedy games company I've ever seen. Genuinely one of the best games of all time.

The game itself is interesting. The art style and art direction are fantastic and it all looks great, and so far i do genuinely like the game so far, but there are some macro and micro issues that must be addressed.

Micro: The game is very buggy and generally unpolished (It's early access so this is expected, but i still hope these things eventually get buffed out).

Some of the glitches include getting stuck on the hand crank not even 10 minutes into the tutorial< visual glitches with backpacks and menus, soldier outposts sometimes just not activating and staying in an unloaded state, and worst of all, guns and items clipping into the ground upon death making it impossible to recover (not just resources, but grappling hooks and guns. I've already lost 3 guns i was working on to this glitch. Please fix this one first it is unironically game-ruining)

What i mean by unpolished is that many aspects of the game just don't feel great to interact with. The game has an obsession with animations for most actions (which to be fair do look very good). The problem with this is that almost every action you can perform takes forever to finish. Want to switch weapons? It takes a full second to do that. Want to build something? It takes over a second for your character to pull out his hammer. Was that not the menu you wanted? Well wait for your character to do the animation for putting the hammer away and continue with the long animation for the menu you wanted. Overall this feature does make the game look cool and probably is fun for the YouTube/Twitch viewer, it makes the game feel sometimes unbearably slow to play, especially in high intensity scenarios like shootouts.

Other aspect i wish could be more polished is the menus. This is a survival crafting game with some of the most unintuitive menu system I've ever seen. Not only do you have to click through multiple submenus just to get to the one basic part you want to craft, but also many of these menus do not have any sound effects yet making it very difficult to tell if you did it correctly, especially in the early game. Also if you need to craft an item in order to craft a different item, (Example needing to craft chemicals in order to craft grease), you must navigate the menus, craft the right item, go out of all the menus, collect the item, go back into the menus, and only then actually craft the item you need. The fact that the menu system feels clunky despite the fact you spend so much time of this game in the menus crafting items to progress is quite unfortunate. They do eventually get easier to navigate a few hours in once you get used to them, but it still feels aggravating in those beginning stages

This is a smaller gripe compared to the other sections but the player's feet always have their hitbox active making it very annoying to get back onto the train especially from the back, and the fact that this is the way the game orients you after "holding F to pull up to the train" feels bad.

Macro: Despite what i said in the previous part of this review, i am enjoying my time in the game so far> However in my opinion, the game doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. On one hand it wants to be a survival game in the style of Raft, however hunger is not really that vital of a system, dying has little punishment, and the enemies in the void are uncommon encounters and are not difficult to deal with, and frankly the void feels like something is missing most of the time.
On the other hand, the gun combat with the soldiers is actually rather fun, the soldier AI is impressive and fun, (They have the ability to weave behind cover and work together with other soldiers to flank you), and the act of jury-rigging guns together from scrap pieces is satisfying, however the gunplay side of the game is sprinkled in as small chunks while the majority of the time is spent resource gathering the same basic materials in the mostly empty void.

What i would like to see in the game would be at least a game-mode with a much higher difficulty spike. Imagine tracking along through the void where sharks and enemies are spawning like crazy and are more dangerous, floating off the train to fish resources is a calculated risk, managing resource gathering with fighting enemies and repairing the train. This would give an actual use to the train's ability to speed through the level, making the enemies easier to fight, but resources harder to get, or picking the level clean would be a strategy, but allow the enemies to swarm you. Every station platform would be a sigh of relief instead of a slow inevitability. Maybe increasing the likelihood of random events like train on train fights or soldier outposts to ad to the variety.
Basically the combat is more fun than the resource gathering so imagine if the game was more "Sea of Thieves" and less "Raft"

Overall, the game's presentation and atmosphere and art direction are great. The game feels like it has a ton of potential to become amazing once it finds it's footing and fixes the bugs. I am enjoying it so far and will probably keep an eye on it as it develops, but in it's current form i cannon recommend anyone pay 30 dollars for it. Let's hope this game continues to build upon it's great premise.

Before I get into my opinions on this game, if you are looking to get into this game and potentially spend money, just knwo that right now the playerbase is heavily inflated due to Youtuber partnerships and sponsorships. There is a good chance that the player base will seriously diminish after the Youtube hype wears off

The game doesn't feel smooth to play or look good at all. (probably because it's literally a mobile game that wasn't upscaled or tailored to PC at all. Even the menus are exactly the same as mobile which gives the whole game that low quality mobile game look)

Because it's a mobile game, of course every menu is drowning in shops and battle passes and different premium currencies.

Most of the characters are all very generic and forgettable in design or are just designed poorly (example being one of the woman characters whose main design point is that she has inhumanly large tits and very little else design wise).

The voice acting is well done but it's implemented in ways that make it feel forced and canned (for example just dropping a small pool of generic quips or one-liners after scoring a goal and having little diegetic characterization outside of that. This causes every character in the game to feel stiff, lifeless, and just generally uninteresting.

Overall i think the game, especially the game-play itself has a lot if potential to be fun, but the fact that the whole game feels clunky due to the mobile game origins, the character upgrade boons feel unimpactful, every goal being followed by canned marvel quips that get old fast, i can't forced myself to give it any more of a chance.

Those were my thoughts on the game itself, but also i feel its important to note that the game itself doesn't run well and is missing many features. The que takes forever to put you in a match and sometimes after minutes of waiting it will give up and make you start the que all over. Basic functions like surrender are not implemented, which is important since matches are much longer than in the beta along with leavers, AFKers, and trolls are rather prevalent, forcing you to stay in a match for several minutes with them. i can't speak for everyone but in my experience lag can be an issue sometimes, especially in a fast paced game like this. If i'm experiencing lag on an Ethernet, i'm sure it's unplayable for people with worse internet