Recent reviews by Cake Man

Let it cook for another year, then see if it's worth it.

Building out the train is an annoying grind. Walls and ceilings alone for a single car can cost an upwards of 50 material. You'd be lucky to find about 20-30 per outpost. That's without taking into account the resources, and blueprints needed to get the train moving in the first place.

On top of that annoying grind is the degradation of the engine. Not because of damage, but because of use. Alongside the walls and equipment getting damaged during attacks. Which will now demand even more resources from you to maintain.

Now for the Heat mechanic. Which requires you to spend blueprints to research it, and the special resource it needs. Then spend even more resources to build them through out the train.

Hopefully most (if not all of this) could be tweaked numbers wise to make it less of a grind. Along side degradation being on damage taken, instead of on use. Like the Dynamo not degrading on use.

It's more Project Wingman. What else can you ask for?

Over all, it's mediocre. It has a good setting, good character design, and decent weapon variation, that's it. My biggest gripe is with the constant use of platforming, and some annoying level lay out.
Now combine this with some janky character movement, with some lackluster environments of grey metal and stone hallways. Over all, the worst thing about it is the platforming. With this being dark souls inspired you can, and will lose Axions(their version of souls) due to falling off a platform, or missing one of the many MANY jumps over instant death pits.

The whole thing feels like wasted potential.

Let's start this off with the good. The graphics are wonderfully done, everything can be easily noticed and identified. Along side the wonderfully retro design to the towers and the spacesuits, it all feels and looks cohesive. The voice acting is decent. Most lines are fine, but some of them come off like they're bored. The story is also pretty decent. It takes you through a great setting with plenty of questions with a few answers, and a few ways that a sequel could go back to the story.

Alright, now on to the bad. There are 5 towers to choose from by end game, and 3 of them kind of get shafted by that time considering how powerful the others are. For instance, the basic turret is effectively useless by the time you get the drone tower. Only being "useful" because they like to leave that as your only starting tower.

Then there's the oddity that is perks. In order to get them you'll need to perfect the level that holds that perk. These can range from extremely useful (almost mandatory late game) like Energy Boost, Hurry Up, or Quick Support. Then you have the near useless perks like Refund, or Reinforcement, which is useless mainly because it takes way too long to reinforce without Quick Support. All of this could have been fixed if they allowed multiple perks to be equip at the same time, instead of swapping out perks while in the level with a cooldown.

There's also minor glitches (sometimes annoying). Like how the towers sometimes stop firing at an enemy and let them run past while still focusing on them. Or how if i restart a level sometimes it will start me with no perk, despite having picked one (though i'm not sure if that's an oversight or a glitch). Another is based around the explosive zombies, it's not explained if the orange health bar is to destroy their explosives or not. I've had plenty of near dead explosive zombies rocket off and take a chunk out of one of my buildings. Again, I'm not entirely sure if this one is a glitch, or just not explaining how they work.

TL;DR The game over all is decent, but has far too many glitches and bugs. Just wait for it to go on sale.


In my relatively short time with the game, I've been able to find visual glitches, audio glitches, de-sync issues, and have seen plenty of machines shooting through objects and walls (and no, it's not bullet penetration).
Don't get me wrong, the game over all is decent and enemies are usually fun to get into gunfights with. The scenery is nice, the selection of weapons and ammunition for them is also quite nice.

Now to get into the bad parts and the glitches. The first and most noticeable with my time is the hit detection. I've had shots from my rifle and handgun be able to get a clear hit, but with no damage done. It's not even that their armor deflected it, there was simply no reaction from the robot. Or worse, I've seen my bullets not register with an enemy, it goes through them, and then registers hitting the ground behind them.
This also extends to the robots, sometimes their gunfire can go through you doing no damage. Sometimes they'll shoot through cover that they shouldn't be able to penetrate, like rocks or a jackknifed truck.

Now for the visual stuff. For the most part they're pretty harmless, if unintentionally hilarious. The most common thing I've found tends to be misplaced rocks, and some stairs that will let you stare into the void.
The only bad part from this popped up when i was trying to take cover on some rocks and got caught up on one cracks from a misplaced rock.

The audio glitches are also pretty minor so far. I'm not entirely sure how it happened but I've had the SFX cut out a couple times. Happily enough you can fix it by hopping on a bike.

Then there's the robots, usually they're fun to fight. Until you start running into the Big Boi Bots. Which can and will kill you hilariously fast, which is fine. Except for when you need to be able to put multiple shots into vital parts on a Hunter, and the big bastard won't stop running around. I've even seen one spinning like a ballerina.

I'm hopeful they can fix some of the major glitches, i just hope they get to it before they start adding in more DLC. If you can put up the stuff I've listed, i'd say go ahead and purchase it, though it may be better to wait for a sale and try to get a friend or two to play along with you.

TL;DR Over all it's a decent baseline, but there are too many unacceptable bugs and it's pushed far too hard in the enemies' favor in terms of combat.

To start everything off i'm happy there's a "stealth" option in this game, but that is quickly snuffed out when you start to realize something. That in order to consistently pick off enemies at around the halfway point and onwards you'll need to start using cheese tactics. Like wasting an ability to knockout an enemy so that you can plink away at their armored 20+ health, with stealth weapons that do terrible damage (around 4 minimum 5critical) without using tons of weapon parts that you need to upgrade your loud weapons so that those are useful. To be honest X-Com 2 has already made a much better progression system, mainly that as you end up facing tougher enemies you steadly inch your way up to them, mostly based off how many soldiers you can throw into a mission (6 max). in Mutant it's always 3 max in your team, even once you get access to mix and match the 5 playable characters by mid game, it's only 3 in the field.

And now for the bugs. With my time in game i've had the twitch shot (twin shot) ability not activate when i use it, even though it still puts the ability into cooldown, and that plays a part in making the cooldowns in this game annoying as hell. By which i mean that all the cooldowns in this are kill based not turn based, except for the fact (hopefully a bug that can get fixed) that enemy abilities are "turn based". Meaning that I've seen enemies use an ability, and then use it again in the very next turn. Like the Tank who likes using his charge ability constantly which should end his turn but sometimes can still fire his gun somehow, and the charge can only be countered by armor or headgear that's resistant to charges. Then there's the other bugs like being seen through walls and floors while sneaking around. Or while I was ambushing an enemy and get spotted from the oppisite side of the building, not heard, spotted through the walls and floors.

And yet i still find some enjoyment in this game, as aggrivating as it can get. The story is good, the characters are fun, and the combat can be really fun once you embrace the cheese tactics. But I can't reccommend this because of the bugs and the constant lean in the enemies favor. Hopefully the bugs will be fixed and hopefully we get tweaks to balance.

Oh and that Denuvo ♥♥♥♥ needs to go.

I can not reccommend this game as of now. It's a decent skeleton of a game, but there are far too many problems that weigh it down. My main problem of which being how you command ants, and how much they wander around without even staying in the same general area of the marker.