Recent reviews by dasfrodo

Fun game so far. If you liked FTL you will probably like this too.

A little feedback for the devs:

- Sound design could use some more oomph, it's a bit hollow right now.
- Computers inside rooms with ship systems are too hard too see and I've often sent people in there for them to stand around because I didn't click the exact tile. I don't know how to solve this, maybe with a default behavior to man the station if it isn't when clicking on the room?
- Interface needs work. It's pretty, but too gray / brown. Decoration is a little hard to distinguish from the actual information. Maybe the lights need a green-ish hue instead of the brown in brown? Items / character descriptions need icons instead of text. Stats need to be visible at a glance instead of reading over the same text again and again. But please don't remove helpful descriptions for icons (display when hovering maybe).
- I don't like the old german font you're using for some interface elements. I know what you're going for but I don't think that font fits very well. Should look a LITTLE more sci-fi-ish maybe but retain the old german vibes?

Yet another "I would love to have a meh option". Whether the game will ultimately be great is wholly dependant by how much and how the gameplay sandbox will be expanded in the full game and how much it will cost. In addition to that, the demo has some problems that I immediately noticed. I hope the developer will fix at least some of these for full release. I do think that some of the design decisions are too baked into the game at this point, though.

+ Movement feels great and the sense of speed is there.
+ Soundtrack is good, albeit a little generic.
+ The game is very pretty, crisp as hell and the colors pop like crazy. Game will look crazy good on an OLED display.

- Worldgen can suck at times. Shards that you're supposed to pick up just lead you into an obstacle that will damage and / or kill you
- If you're not in the "rhythm" of the shards you will miss like half of them and fixing that "rhythm" feels awful because you have to slow down. It's hard to explain but play the demo and you will know what I mean.
- I don't know why this game needed a roguelike framework. You're supposed to vibe with the music and the speed and then you're just ... stopped every 30 seconds to chose the next level? If the levels were longer this would be less of an issue but the it is it just ruins the flow unfortunately.
- The items feel like an afterthought and mostly don't change much. I hope this changes in the full game.

The game didn't click for me in the slightest. It's one of the rare games that made me actively angry while playing because I found the game design SO bad. It feels borderline amateurish in the first couple of hours I've played at times. Not seeing things to interact with because my camera wasn't in the perfect position, things not being properly being communicated or other shenanigans like that. Guns feel like peashooters. Everything is on rails but not really. Characters are increadibly incompetent from the very first second.

Not for me AT ALL.

I'll recommend this with an asterisk.

The atmosphere is top notch thanks to Szymanski's style, worldbuilding and the excellent soundtrack. However, the gameplay is just too simple. Basically if you've played the demo you've seen 95% of what the game has to offer in terms of gameplay. There is a tiny bit towards the last quarter of the game but I won't spoil that here. It's not enough. For the entire ~2.5h of runtime I waited for something to shake up the core gameplay, but it unfortunately just never came.

The rest is just more story, levels and worldbuilding. Due to this the game has basically no replay value.

tl;dr: buy if you don't expect top notch gameplay or replay value but a dense and unique atmosphere.

The game mechanics don't really mesh too well into each other and the game is hella janky at times. You can almost completely ignore the survival aspect, the base building and quite a bit of other stuff as it is pretty useless overall.

That said, it's still a lot of fun for a playthrough with a friend or two and the game can be quite atmospheric and scary at times. I wouldn't recommend playing it alone though.

The idea behind the game is great, and it definitely CAN be fun... if you get used to worst interface and controls you have ever seen. It's almost incredible how bad it is. Every single thing about it is unintuitive. The menus are unfathomably ugly and horribly designed on top of that. It's like the developers actively TRIED to ignore every UI design convention that has been established in the last 40 years. It could be used as an example on how NOT to design a UI. The community is in denial about how bad it is and huffing pure copium. Getting used to this UI is like getting used to a fowl smelling infection between your toes. Sure, you CAN get used to it, but it's not worth it and just better to get rid of it.

It is just THAT bad. If there was a similiar game on the market with even slightly better UI / UX everybody would just run away. I have never given a game a bad review due to UI / UX but the state this games UI is in is simply inexcusable. I can't even say much more about the rest of the game since I will not torture myself any longer with this abomination of an interface.

EDIT: see the comments under this review for examples of community copium.

Game surely is for SOMEONE, but that someone is definitely not me. Too much going on, too fast and especially way too hard. Difficulty is more like a brick wall than a curve. If you enjoy pouring 10h into a game just to have basic competence then go ahead, otherwise avoid.

I don't know man, I just can't get into it. I've tried playing this game 3-4 times over the years. Every time I bounce off shortly before or after getting the seamoth. Everything is just so tedious. The inventory is too small. You just have to swim around and hope you find the right stuff.

The game is pretty and atmospheric as hell, but I just found it to be incredibly tedious and boring.

The original release was good, and the enhanced edition is (mostly) even better. If you didn't like the original, you won't like this one either though. It's a very well made survival-ish openworld-ish shooter with incredible environments and attention to detail.

The raytracing truly is gorgeous, though there is some graphical issues here and there that the team seems to have overlooked. These weren't there in the original. A lot of the jank in and outside of the cutscenes from the original release is also still there. Artyom being mute is still awkward as hell, considering he's talking in the loading screens and the dialogue writing is truly terrible.

I'm not even through the content the game has right now, and it's already one of my absolute favorites. The start is a bit slow due to limited arsenal, though I get why it's made like that, gotta learn the mechanics and not overwhelm the player with billions of different buttons to press. But once you got a couple of weapons and the difficulty ramps up... oh boy is it ever fun. Truly one of the best FPS games ever made.