Recent reviews by Fist

This is actually just to get the stupid badge for the steam awards.

Vibes and potential are off the chart.

Everything else around the bottom of it.

Give it another two to three years to cook.

There's a a lot of recycled bosses, recycled content, recycled landmarks and recycled enemies in pretty bad mini-dungeons around an actually OK fromsoft Souls game. The more time you invest the worse the side content, its rewards and its encounters feel. The vast majority of bosses are in multiple times, some are in up to nine times and even big lore bosses have clones loitering around. Some are just normal enemies with a health bar.

They made a game too big for them to populate and it's an issue that becomes very obvious the more content you bother to complete.

This review would be a maybe if that was an option, I do lean more into positive personal feelings for the game than negative in spite of the content of this review.

The game is good but it's still very rough, 1.0 simply means they're selling an early access game without it being called early access.

On a literal level, the campaign is simply not actually complete.

In more general terms, the game is plagued by balancing issues, bugs and poor content pacing with most of these issues having been reported multiple months to years ago on their forums. There is every chance something you select on a skill tree literally just doesn't do anything or doesn't work as expected.

Many GUI elements simply do not scale or work properly on a 16:10 aspect ratio (including the Merchant's Guild menus added in 1.0) and I have heard similar even for people on standard 16:9 resolutions.

There are also a variety of obvious QoL and feature oversights such as respeccing a passive tree with over 100 points requiring you to do it one point at a time with a confirmation every time and a complete inability toe select which global chat channels to join. There is also absolutely no UI scaling.

The game does a lot really well and if you are a fan of the genre. There's a lot of fun skills and interactions to explore and you will likely get at bare minimum somewhere around 40 hours out of it.

That said, the more time you spend with the game the more glaring its core issues start to feel, which is never a great feeling in a genre that's traditionally been a rather large time sink.

Playing with friends this still had a huge amount of glaring issues to the point that mentioning it was a finished 1.0 game and not early access became a running joke.

This is heavily focused on campaign as one off submarine sessions would not interest me. I will also note I played before the treacherous tides update so I've omitted a few complaints I had in the hopes that the storage overhaul has fixed them. I doubt it but you never know!

Visuals vary from genuinely very cool in the case of monsters to barely discernible messes to genuinely terrible textures with visible tiling seams that shouldn't have existed even if the game was 10 years old.
A lot of functionality that you would expect to be able to access in terms of sub customisation is locked to a completely separate editor, if you want to do anything beyond very basic changes mid-campaign you are out of luck.
There's not a lot of actual content to encounter and most things are 'one and done' in terms of threat management. A good example is ballast flora, as soon as you work out how to deal with it once you will never have issues with it again. It just becomes a checklist of rote tasks to do to make sure you aren't going to sink. The captain notices flora, someone keeps a vague eye on the situation, it is instantly resolved if a flora emerges.
There's not a huge variety of creatures in general and after a point you will find that even the creatures of the abyss aren't really huge threats and can be dealt with pretty easily. Spinelings are the biggest threats in the game.
Salvaging subs feels like something the developers actively do not want you to do and has a lot of tedium. Something like a timer for the submarine crumbling would be a much better way to create a smash and grab feeling instead of simply letting you slowly loot everything while one or two people sit in the sub alt-tabbed or on their phone.
No creature really actively changes your best course of action. There is nothing that changes
Factions are very half baked, nothing around them is compelling in terms of rewards, narrative or theme.
The progression over the campaign is honestly nothing, you get slightly more hazards but nothing interesting thematically ever emerges for the 'new' areas you are in. You just get lots and lots of the same monsters you already mastered and a new skybox.
Character skills are an imbalanced disaster, most have very obvious choices for best in slot always, many are just bricks or joke paths. There is a lot of missed opportunity for interesting specialisation or crew wide interactions that are just not present in the game.
Skill gain in general was very silly with a lot of things coming down to runescape style grinding for increasing levels.
Some classes also get accelerated skill or level gain which means they can have multiple levels or even completely maxed out primary skills in the time other characters would get one.
Gene Splicing was very much a non-feature. By the time you can do it - even for a smaller sized crew - you will be mostly done with the campaign and with the interesting parts of the mechanic being tied to Korean MMO levels of RNG they might as well not exist.
Many systems feel designed around the expectation you play in bite sized chunks and not actually as part of a campaign which I can only imagine is a reflection of how the developers prefer to play it.

The game in general really just desperately needs 'more' of everything - especially polish - but as it was in development for years and has apparently released as a full retail game I find it unlikely that it will ever live up to its potential.

I bought this just before the price skyrocketed and feel it barely managed to live up to that 10USD price point which itself would the absolute maximum I'd recommend picking this for. That the developers seem to think it's somehow worth 35USD is absolutely insane to me.
Only buy on an abyssal depths level sale and only if you have at least 3-5 people you can rope into playing.

4/10

It's like a crusty mario kart 64 with garfield. The online is shockingly decent. Guaranteed to give maybe even an hour of fun!

It's like elden ring if it didn't have 100 hours of filler.

You start off walking like a crippled old man and end up running like a crippled old man illegally crossing a border to reunite with his family. I rate it 9 super metroids/10

It's like a version of Carrion that's actually enjoyable to play.

bootleg celeste with ori / 10