Recent reviews by Hud

Whilst it currently has many glaring bugs and issues which directly impact the quality of play, the content and setting is still of a high enough quality that I will continue to pour an unreasonable amount of hours into it.

Delightfully excessive simulation with a deep modding scene of all tastes, including those who view the Geneva Convention as a restrictive framework.

This VR game take obvious influence from the Metro series. It is still fairly Early Access, with no story line to speak of yet however the Raids mode, where you enter a generated dungeon crawl, collecting items to sell for rubles to get new equipment, is a blast. I spent the majority of my playtime on this mode and hope the developer focuses on this modes development due to the "one more run" feeling it gave me.

A nice rougelite in the terms of character and overall progression. Each run has a "one more area" pull to it as you progress through the story in a race against your infection. At the start the game can seem a little unbalanced against the player, such as infection progression speed. This is intentional, to balance the upgrades you can make to improve your overall survival and length you can turn each run in to.

However this does not make the game too easy, misread a situation and getting surrounded can easily lead to an early demise if looking at your surroundings and prepping your gear, such as loading your firearm, is not done. The only balance issue so far is probably low carry weight and lack of impact the endurance penalty has, which is being looked at for balance.

Update: The developers promptly addressed the XP concerns I voiced below and as a result I feel that its adequate enough to recommend this game for the positive points I listed below. Original review kept for transparency.

A great concept with absolutely smashing graphics, cool character concepts, and interesting powers, fantastic universe with lore to boot.

My personal gripe is the amount of bunny hopping as a tactic but thats a common issue with BR games, jumping should making firing extremely inaccurate.

I cannot recommend it though for the extremely low XP rewarded per game. 100 for a kill. 1000 for 2nd place, just shy of 2000 for making it to the end time wise. The first XP tier requires 30,000XP which is only achievable through completing the challenges offered daily and seasonally. It feels as if the players time commitment is completely neglected. The battle-pass premium offers XP boosts of 10% every 20 or so levels, but an extra 10xp for a kill is a joke.

A promising idea which is flawed in the execution. The tutorial states players winch the chest to freedom to win. This changes to a hold out style wave based defence at the end of each match, which an automatic loss if the Sherrif, whom can only be stunned and not killed, walks into a circle if you play PvE.

There is little point to stealthing the heist if the end forces you into combat, where someone holding a sword to their face to block cannot be hit with any ranged attacks targeted anywhere at the body.

The PvP component can be fun, and keeps the winching mechanic, however the amount of "Robin" bowman popping heads or Tooke flail swingers can make the end a stale tug of war over the winch.

Lazy design decisions undermine a fun coop stealth game mode and the PvP can be a little, dry. Worth trying to see if you enjoy it though.

TD;LR: Time critical to gameplay, yet each person in the whole party needs to be micromanaged for literally everything excessively, including picking up components and eating, with only one controllable at a time leading to time wasted on the other three members.

A really promising and interesting concept that has been poorly executed mechanically. The premise of the game is to scavenge what you can during the day to repair your helicopter, fending off the dreamers during the night and when it becomes too heavy, move to a new high rise.

The issues here is time is critically important however there is no active pause to issue commands to the four party members. This means, unless a member is performing a longer timed task, 3 out of 4 party members are often idle as you can only control and issue commands to one person at a time. This leads to a massive waste in action economy of the party, burning time needlessly.

A secondary issue is the inventory micromanagement of clicking individual items per party member to pick up, then having to manually consolidate each item between the party members to avoid doubling up the same item and wasting carry slots. This, without active pause or any AI automation, eats in to time needlessly.

To address this I would suggest adding an active pause, to allow the issuing of commands per party member and a semi autonomous scavenging option that means once something is broken down, all the relevant components they have space for are collected and finally a centralized inventory between the party or a container at the top of the high rise to centralize resources needed which will be sourced from for projects and which are then left if not carried on to the helicopter.

A moving story that progresses the journey of Artyom beyond the confines of the Metro. Rich graphics and story telling with plenty of snippets of lore to find, with a focus on a smaller more personal group rather than aiming to save faceless factions of people.

Great open level design allowing for plenty of exploration and wandering, with a fair and balanced difficulty system, including the fantastically designed Ranger Hardcore. Worth playing the previous two for story context but absolutely should not be passed up.

10/10 would Artyom again.

A lot of gameplay for a great value, still bugs and issues to be ironed out but most certainly worth a play. Of note; the conversation mechanic is pretty detailed with various contextual bits of information being wrapped in to make the characters and world feel more vivid. The towns are fairly small, around 5 buildings and could do with a bit more expansion to make them cover more than just a junction.
The infected are vicious and it is very easy to be taken down in this game if you are under equipped or unaware, especially to the "higher" level infected. The same goes for human enemies too whom are armed.

The building and tool mechanics are good however the weight on some items makes no real sense, such as empty containers weighing the same as full containers. This kind of inventory issue can make transporting empty containers fairly annoying as the point of emptying them should be to reduce weight but currently there is no reason to.

Like an original Fallout (1/2) game with a Russian spin. Absolutely worth purchasing and easily replayable. It has been an absolute joy to explore it and learn the lore throughout this unforgiving soviet romp.