Recent reviews by krassell

What this game absolutely nails, is the spirit of adventure.
The real deal, not the theme park variety offered by countless other games.
The exploration, the mood and sheer creativity for locations are all off the charts here.
Not to mention the artstyle. No, seriously take a close look at it. It's the prettiest ugly game I've ever seen!

But unfortunately, there's a number of downsides.
First of all, the gameplay is... not great.
And by that I mean it's hot garbage on a good day. Movement is janky - you constantly either get snagged on geometry, get launched off a cliff by a tiny bump on the floor or slip off treacherously-angled rocks to your doom. All of the weapons feel somewhat clunky to use and have a certain learning curve (and not enough ammo around to really practice without savescumming). Surprisingly enough, your first weapon, the sling, turned out to be pretty satisfying to use and I kept using it throughout the game for as long as I could.
Second of all, roughly last 20%-25% of the game fall off hard, mainly due to the fact that levels become heavily linear, and feature little to no exploration but also lots and lots of combat, often incorporating all sorts of unfun gimmicks. Like fighting a gaggle of flying enemies while trying not to fall into pits of doom generously sprinkled all over the arena. Or doing puzzles while being pestered by invincible enemies. Or being forced to use a special weapon and not having enough ammo to deal with all enemies. Or fighting fast-moving flying enemies. Or infinitely respawning enemies.
It's not that bad of a difficulty spike but the pacing is irrecoverably broken from that point on.
The adventure momentum you've built up during the game is largely lost by the time you're done with the first area abusing combat gimmicks, and once you realize that the game is still not done, it starts feeling like a chore. At this point you might as well whip out Cheat Engine, 'cause it's only downhill from there.

All of the potential of this game is wasted upon the absolute garbage of an ending (this is your first and last spoiler warning btw).

TL;DR: There is no treasure. it was all a set-up to get you eaten by giant moles. The game also prevents you from using jetpack and dynamite does nothing just so the developers would have a few stupid giggles at your expense.

This game isn't worth the asking price. Why? Here's a handful of reasons.
- It is too short and shallow; You never actually get to do anything interesting with the mechanics and the upgrades are pretty basic. It would be much more fun if the game was five times as long (i.e. deep) and split up into various locations with their own mechanics, ore tiers and various unlocks. Establishing forward bases for stashing and hauling off your hard-won ores would fit right in.
- it does not respect the player; The entire game is just a long-winded setup for a troll ending.
- it does not respect the classics it rips off. Otherwise you'd be able to blow the moles sky high just like Mr. Natas in the Motherload.

If I had to describe game in one word, it would be "Churn".

The game constantly puts churn between you and actually exploring the SCP+HL1 ripoff facility.
You're always forced to do some menial rubbish in one way or another. Hauling water, cooking (the waiting part, I'm okay with soup mechanics), repeatedly raiding places you've already been to for supplies, and of course, having to constantly kill enemies in the same areas over and over.
The last part is so bad that you can clear out an entire building's worth of soldiers, cleaning up them slowly and methodically, exit the building, look up to admire your bloody handiwork only to see the freshly-respawned soldiers standing guard, as if nothing ever happened. So now you are down all the resources spent on the clean-up, and have to go through the churn to get it back even partially.
This is a 100% real in-game situation that happened to me and my friend, by the way.

I'm not even mentioning the very basic stuff like enemies completely ignoring radiation, bleeding (among other survival combat mechanics), not dropping their weapons and barely dropping any ammo. And when they do, the weapons are specifically gated behind both leveling and crafting components just so you wouldn't have too much fun by skipping the subpar and mediocre choices offered by the game.
Why can't you pick up armor off any of the soldiers? Are ceramic plates dna-locked, too?
At this moment a considerable chunk of chromosome-enriched fanboys is probably frothing at the mouth at me for daring to question the questionable. However, not a single one of these intellectually-impaired individuals would be able to rebut the final assertion of this review. Well, skill issue on their part.

Let's talk base-building. It is surprisingly decent, but with one BIG caveat. Our protagonists are scientists and create some pretty damn mad-science-y contraptions, however for some unfathomable reason they cannot figure out any sort of automation. How come they can't figure out a way to pump water?
This might seem like an absolutely arbitrary question, but I posit that this game will never see any sort of automation of this churn for one very simple reason:
This churn IS the game and this game IS the churn.
It exists to check the survival checkboxes and choke-hold the stream of content to a measly drip-feed to pad the hours, making it de-facto THE heart of the game.
Not exploration. Not fighting for your life against aliens and mercs alike. Not unlocking the secrets of the facility.
But fetching crummy pails of water.

One of the best, if not THE best game in the genre.

This is essentially a bundle of all submachine games, except they're reworked, interlinked, polished and turned into one big unbroken experience, all the while providing you with ability to go back to any chapter and explore some more!
Sound effects and music were upgraded, but thankfully you have an option to change some sound effects to classic ones. I really missed the original metallic 'thunk' of room traversal.

What are you waiting for?
Get this game, dim the lights, put on your headphones, nab a pen and some paper and get ready to explore the submachine, one room at a time!

It didn't hurt.
Game literally made me 360 and moonwalk from responsibility.
10/10

Being a hardcore megastructures fetishist, I bought this game day 1, and, let's just say that it left me ambivalent.
I had high hopes for this game, but it managed to disappoint and infuriate me at the same time.
Note: If there was such a thing as 'neutral/consider' rating on steam, I'd give that to this game.

Medium-grade spoilers ahead. BEWARE!

Pros:
This game is like KreedZ Climbing, Slide Race and Surf all rolled up in one + giant maps!

Megastructure! It's not even close to Nihei-tier but the game honestly tries to demonstrate the scale.

Atmosphere is genuinely good! And quite eerie at times, especially in the caves. By the time I reached the end of that one spooky off-shoot, I was ready to excrete enough bricks for a fancy tool-shed.

Cons:
There is no free-cam photo mode. I'd love to take a couple (of hundred) of screenshots of levels from different angles.

Dev doesn't know how to deal with depth buffer float precision errors arising from levels' considerable scale. Many decals and narrow elements of geometry flicker due to Z-fighting.

It's very hard to judge whether you'll slide or manage to stand on a given surface.

Riding/falling out of a trash chute gets old real fast as an area transition trope.

Movement is inconsistent, particularly anything to do with sliding/surf. Best example is getting that one crystal in that one cave area with waterfall. Tic-tac move falls within same category of working only sometimes.
Frustratingly, you can only climb precisely vertical walls, you can't control your movement on slopes with icepicks at all, even if the slope is 0.0001 degrees away from being perfectly vertical.
Edge grabbing works about 50% of the time.

Speaking of water, water's killbox is very large. This makes jumping on things that are almost water-level finicky and prone to killing you. And there ARE mandatory sections with almost-water-level islands...

See that part on the game's page where it says "not frustrating"?
It's a straight-up lie.
There is usually only 1, maybe 2 ways to proceed, which would be frustrating enough on its own, but oftentimes these routes are infuriatingly obtuse, meanwhile obvious routes will get you killed since you fell a hair-breadth longer than game allowed.
For example, beginning of level 5 is so painfully inept with directing the player that I managed to climb out of bounds while trying to find the intended way to the waypoint. To make everything worse, that part is also very stingy with checkpoints, making exploration a very, very frustrating experience.
Strangely, the further in the game you go, the sloppier levels get (usually levels pick up in quality thanks to level designers gaining experience and developing their own style).
First of all, there's a lot more of slip-n-slide surfaces, especially over bottomless pits.
Second, further on checkpoints get sparser and sometimes their placement cannot be described by any other term than 'cancerous'.
Third, player direction drops off hard. You'll be asking 'What the heck do you want me to do here, game?' a lot.

The game generally starts slowly falling apart around the "Foundation" chapter. Environments cease to be interesting and natural-looking, instead becoming an obstacle course maze soup with few cool setpieces here and there. Gone are interesting details and any pretenses to sandbox-y exploration. You're just going from A to B hoping this dumb stretch will end anytime soon.
To be honest, I haven't found any particularly curious... anything after Waste Tunnels, outside of things directly in the main path. And I actually poked around, finding only dead-ends. That kinda killed my motivation to turn every stone towards the end.

See that another part saying that you can take your time exploring?
Guess what, it's only partially a lie. There are timed segments which are extremely frustrating as you're forced to climb, run and jump without any prior planning.

When backtracking, your checkpoints will often point you the wrong way.

Dash ability 'helpfully' disables when you hit terminal velocity, god forbid you actually use it to save yourself.

The last part of the game is one giant timed segment, and I hate everything about it. Having to use mechanic that was just introduced, trippy visuals impeding your judgement of whether this fall is deadly or not, annoying 8-second music loops.
Every single janky mechanic will catch up to you in this part. You will die by lightly touching a wall while at the terminal velocity. You will bounce unpredictably off slopes. Your grappling hook will fail 'cause you pointed at the part of the wall that will move. You will be suddenly dropped down off the edge while trying to bhop the columns. You will mess the ledge 'cause game decided that it didn't want to grab it. You will bounce off the edge you really needed to land thanks to capsule collider. You WILL be stalled or launched in unpredictable direction thanks to absolute garbage that is grappling hook code. You WILL fall into the final pit before the light because you can't see a damn thing with all the effects going on.

Why?
Because developer simply couldn't be arsed to polish the game.

As for the ending, I will not spoil what it is exactly.
But it needs to be said that it somehow manages to be a cop-out while trying too hard to tie in with game's name and 'subtly' go meta as an excuse for said cop-out.
Thanks, I hate it.


Addendum.
Not really make-or-break bugs, but just in case the developer decides to fix these...
At some point in Sunken City after respawning I found myself in the room with ton of skulls. Checkpoint hitbox was too big, perhaps?
There was at least one time where I expected to get a scan, but there was none (corpse near closed pipe in sand caves). It was a hidden place, took a long trek, and it generally screamed "crystal/scannable here!", yet there was nothing. Not sure if bug or just inconsistent level design.
Pull-up animation can push you inside walls. I encountered this a lot in the Sunken City.

MILD WEAPONS/BOSSES SPOILERS AHEAD!
Here's a list of everything I found wrong with the game, in a particular order:

Game is very clearly HL2+STALKER inspired but manages to only take superficial parts from either games, and none of the subtler player-experience aspects that make aforementioned games stand out.

Despite having very considerable hardware, my frames are getting dropped harder than dev in infancy! Could be a proton issue, driver issue or unreal issue, sure, but it is likely to be just plain old programming skill issue..

Atrocious level-design. Tons of spots with untextured backfaces or just straight up holes to skybox. Boxy rooms, nonsensical architecture and, of course, leaking lights.

Very heavy asset reuse, and everything looks the same due to samey-ness of prefabs levels are constructed out of. You'll see the same hand + scanner/breaker switch/lever/spinny red light prefabs all over the game, just copied and pasted with no real rhyme or reason.

Bad pacing. Many parts stretch on and on, for far longer than they should. Coupled with repetitiveness of levels and heavy asset reuse every location feels like it overstays its welcome.

Exploring every corner of the map isn't rewarded in any way, which multiplies the sameness effect of the location. All the while HL2 provides a neat example of stashing interesting things in various corners of the map.

AK, VAL, pistol, all feel weak as hell due to soldier enemies lacking flinch reaction to being ventilated. Dev mentioned implementing hit reactions in possible upcoming features, but as it stands, enemies soak up damage and ask for more.

Shotgun ammo drops in absolute pitiful quantities. I can understand not dropping sawn-off ammo too fast, but the regular shotgun is going hungry most every day in my playthrough.

Can't tell which shotgun I just got ammo for.

Gacha ammo dispensers. Supply crates dropping NOTHING. FFS, if you copy HL2, at least have common courtesy to copy weighting supply drops towards what player needs at this moment. HINT: Prioritize health first, then fill out lowest ammo type.

VAL and AK are too similar, Add some gimmick to VAL or make it so that you swap AK for PKM.

Iron sights pictures for all weapons are pretty much terrible.

Pistol quickly becomes useless since most fights require higher firepower.

Once one enemy saw you, they all turn on wallhax and know exactly where you are at all times. They will aim perfectly at you coming round the corner and have virtually nonexistent reaction times.

Snipers actually have magical sniper shotguns. No, seriously, they shoot several bullets at once and all of those hurt a lot!

Enemies just bumrush you, making everything that isn't a shotgun nigh-useless.

Bosses are annoying. Assassin is complete trash (fast-moving bullet sponge that 1/2 taps you) and a good enough reason to rearrange dev's facial bones.
Helicopter boss (on a train) requires RPG ammo but you don't have infinite RPG ammo source. HL2's infinite ammo crates, anyone?

Would be nice if sprinting worked in any direction (forward being the fastest, sideways a bit slower and backwards the slowest).

Sounds lifted straight from HL2, and I'm not talking about generic stock sounds.

EXTREMELY garbage weapon selection system. Please, just copy HL2's, along with the 'last weapon' key.

Picking up health doesn't show your health amount.

Grenades should probably be on a bind rather than being selectable weapons, since weapon-switching in battle gets you killed real quick.

Bunch of effects copied from SMod (dripping gore, blood droplets on the screen), and are done WORSE than a 15+ year old HL2 mod. Bravo!

Mega-cringe dialogue, but I'll let this one slide since solo dev, indie, etc etc...

Very samey gameplay, despite using HL2 formula. More enemy types in the roster would likely help, but this is also caused by very basic AI, samey areas/arenas and samey workhorse-weapons,

Sawn-off carnage absolutely carries the game, though.

Leading simulator of getting 360 noscope'd by a friggin' smoke cloud.

With how heavily the balance is skewed towards summoning strats this game may as well be called Rift Summoner 2.

Parrying minigame for the intellectually-impaired posing as a full-fledged game.