Recent reviews by Matrix

Hmm, it's a mixed bag of a game.

On one hand it has a great setting, cool visuals, great music (especially the crab grave one), some humour, some cool bosses (some bad ones too).

But on the other hand it has quite floaty controls, not so precise attack patterns, some really infuriating trash enemies, pretty bad level design (although memorable), platforming is annoying at best (many ledges with small gaps for you to fall into) with lots of verticality, various bugs and glitches, and most importantly - you play through this game with the same weapon you get from the start. It makes the game very repetitive, even though various shells and some skills do bring some variety here and there, but it's not enough.

Another thing I would have wanted - double jump! This thing alone could have made so many areas of this game much more bearable (combat, exploration, platforming... even bossing).

It's a 6/10 game at best. I don't want to give it a thumbs up, but... F*** it. I will.
It's a pretty unique game, but I will never ever gonna replay it. Just too annoying overall.

Pretty well done visual novel. Great art style, quite interesting and mysterious story that can branch out in several different ways. Some segments of the story seemed rushed and underdeveloped (illogical?), some were a bit shallow (like romance for example).

I liked the overall presentation and vibe. It's a decent and short (few hours) game.

I can definitely say that the positive reviews did me dirty. I thought I will get a really cool alien-themed xcom-like'ish game, but... that's not the case actually.

There is very little "xcom" in this game. The only "xcom" stuff you'll find here is all the activity between the long-a$$ missions (soldier upgrades selection, new weapon unlocks, Xeno upgrade research and other minor stuff, that's it).

But the main gameplay is basically a real time strategy where you control a squad of 4-5 colonial marines and give them various commands. And even then, the main activity that you'll actually do is: put a lot of motion trackers across the map and watch many white balls move on the minimap while you try pick the best time to sneak past them (more often than not - unsuccessfully). Rinse and repeat for 30+ hours.

This is not really an action game at its core. Because of the stress mechanic (which is extremely annoying to be honest), you're more incentivized to view it more like a stealth game with some unavoidable action sequences. The more you engage in combat - the dumber and uncontrollable your soldiers will get (you know, for soldiers who are trained to shoot aliens and enemies - shooting aliens and defeating them is very stressful!).
And since you can only control them as a group and not individually - things can/will get wild pretty quickly and not in your favor. At least you get some autosaves before some big scripted encounters, so if you screw up - you can quickly reload and do things differently (you'll need to do that a lot if you don't want to lose your higher level marines to high stress or injuries). Some people love that. I did for the first few maps, then it got old really quickly.

Anyway. I didn't like the core gameplay. You are never the one who knocks for the most part. Only after the middle or near the end of the game, when you have all the tools at your disposal (snipers with silencer ftw) - you can have more freedom and deal with various encounters more efficiently. Anyway.

I didn't like how big the maps are (many times with multiple floors). You usually need to comb through them a few times in order to finish them completely. It's by design. I would have preferred much smaller, one-and-done maps. Would have helped the pacing of this game a lot more. I think the first half of this game is a big drag. Later on, some levels were pretty cool and exciting actually. The last level was big disappointment and dumb all-around.

That brings me to the story. It's just nonsensical. The whole thing is so dumb to be honest. Plus the polically correct language inserted into an old-school sci-fi universe is another wtf moment:

A pilot says: A buffet-full of robots but no creatures to eat them? Ain't that the luck!"
The dumba$$ girl-boss administrator whose a$$ is liked by everyone by the end of the game: "I think it's artificial persons now, Corporal..."

Like, what the actual F***! GTFO! This thing alone makes the whole thing worthy of a trash bin.

The Graphics are blurry, lack sharpness.
Sound design is actually great. Really liked the atmosphere.

And bugs, lots of bugs. Small, big and annoying. You'll encounter every kind of them if you're lucky.
Some achievements doesn't unlock (datapads one for example), have to do some tinkering with game versions and stuff for them to pop up (if you're lucky to have the correct saves).
If you'll have a marine with a drone - prepare for a "fun" bug where you'll not be able to use an elevetor. This fun bug will force you to walk back to the drone (usually across the whole map while avoiding aliens too! Ah, so fun!), and once it gets unstuck - you'll have to walk back to the elevator while avoiding the enemies once again. And this can and will happen more than once.
There are some pathfinding bugs, info pop-ups not disappearing, alien boss getting stuck, fake mission objective indicators in non-accessible areas and other super "FUN" stuff from this "glorious" game.

I know I forgot another big thing I disliked, but It was probably too annoying to even remember.

A game with a really interesting overall idea, but too undercooked and too dumb in some areas.

If you liked NFS: Most Wanted 2005 and don't like open world racing games - this game might fullfill that small void a little bit. It's definitely not a high quality action racing game, but it's decent enough to play through a campaign once.

What I really liked is that on missions you can use several types of weapons in order to take out your opponents or at least to slow them down. Felt a little bit like Rock'n Roll Racing, which is a good thing (there should be more games like this).
Funny enough, the campaign has a good length, but half of the campaing are missions (which are fun) and simple races in quite repetitive circuits. They have absolutely no meaning for the story, just a filler content that you have to do. 95% of all races are very easy to be honest, only a few off-track ones can be a bit challenging, but still quite doable on first try. Once you unlock Razor CTR racing car - every single race will be like a cake walk (missions too ^^).

I actually liked the controls overall. Very arcady, but in a good old-school way.

Graphics are like a time machine to 2005 or so. Sadly, the performance is quite awful. On max settings I got like 40 fps on 1440p with 9070xt. After some tweaking I could reach 80-100 fps in races and in missions it would still drop down to 50 fps on some occasions.
Music is very generic and doesn't fit the game. I turned it off completely and played my own on an external player.
Dialogues are also mediocre at best with some weird accents.

As I said, it's a mediocre game, but it can be a decent fun if it clicks with you. Get it on a big sale.

Played until the first boss. Then it became a bullet hell game instead of a shoot 'em up. Controls with keyboard and mouse is abysmal. You can't aim with you mouse. Machine gun always shoots up, Rockets always shoot from your front and has low reach, while the laser is a long range one and you can't spam it (but it's not needed since every enemy usually dies in 1-2 shots from it).

Why release the game on PC and not make it so that you could aim with the mouse? it's beyond my understanding. The vehicle controls are strange. The way it turns around makes you involuntarily kiss most of the mines on the ground, which eats your precious hp and then you usually die before reaching the checkpoint.

I didn't like the gameplay overall. It's a copy-paste of Jackal formula from NES, but everything was made worse.

Could have been a cool little game, but this is not it.

There is basically no game in this game. A very simple 20 minute story, with some 10 monster waves in between that you beat in 15-20 seconds.
After you finish the campaign, you can play a mini-game 1-2 times where you jump and collect cheese, and what's left is to farm some monster waves for another 20 minutes or so in order to unlock every upgrade/outfit and that's it.

Didn't expect it to be this fun and immersive. Really solid, yet simple gameplay. Some scenarios are really intense (bombings) and chaotic (earthquakes). Most importantly, it's easy to understand from the get go.
If I didn't have any other games to play - I would spend many more hours on this game.

Just don't advise people to electrocute themselves or burn their homes while doing stupid stuff. Just saying. ^^

Visually super cool looking game with transforming vehicles. Unique game overall, has some old-school game vibes from the NES era. Kinda.

Missions are so varied and over the top that even the Fast and Furious creators would be impressed. Sadly, all missions have many scripted scenes, and it takes you out of the action very frequently, which is pretty annoying.

I played with a keyboard and the controls layout is below average (at least you can remap some buttons), but the plane controls are very bad, when you press up, it actually goes up, not down... Super hard to adapt to with no settings to change it.

The biggest pet peeve of this game is that in order to progress through the campaign, you have to complete 10 different challenges during the first 4 missions in a given chapter. Which is no fun and restricts your gameplay freedom quite a bit. Funny enouugh, I only needed to redo 1 mission for an additional challenge during my whole playthrough, but even that was too much. Just give the full access to the whole campaign and side quests and leave the challenges for people that are interested in doing them.

Anyway, other than that, its a decently fun free-flowing driving action game for a handful of hours.

A teeny-tiny recommendation, the size of an anorexic flea.

I enjoyed playing this game. It has all the usual indie/AA jank/rough edges everywhere, and still it was fun.

I played on "Challenge" difficulty. First several hours were hard enough. Once you get a few dozen of skill points, and get some more damage/hp/stamina, you'll see that most enemies become easier and easier to get through. Especially once you find the amulet that slowly regenerates your health - the whole game changes from a bit hard, to pffft, let's go Rambo style! Find a good two hander and plow through hordes of enemies with no regrets. The challenge of "Challenge" difficulty disappears in about 4-6 hours.

This game has 2 main big areas and a good amount of small side-areas. The first big area is fun to explore and more linear. The second one is basically one big freakin' area with lots of the same stuff just with x5 amount of enemies on screen. I haven't died in the second area a single time. Didn't even use the "teleport" or "rest" thingy on shrines (both respawns all enemies), so the whole area was empty after I finished it, haha. You become really powerful by that time.

The story is kinda meh. Only a few main characters. Voice acting for Achilles could have been better, but I kinda got accustomed to it by the end of the game. ^^ Other characters also didn't leave a big impression, but some were pretty good. Quest design, especially for the side quests, is pretty bad. In order to complete them, you have to manually activate them from the menu, or else, even if you go to that area - nothing quest-related will spawn down there. Sometimes you'll need to return to the already explored areas twice because of this.

The sounds of this game is overall vastly repetitive. 1 tune that's on repeat for the most game. Repetitive ambient sounds for crows or birds, and it spams itself over and over again. Very "immersive". There are other sound issues, like enemies sheathing and unsheathing weapons once you enter/exit their field of view or something. And many other little ones.

What I really disliked was the auto lock-on on enemies (I played with mouse and keyboard). It made me die to some of the stupidest things imaginable. And the funny thing is - I found out the option to turn it completely off only after I've defeated the last boss...Holy Sh|t! Ehh...F***. Anyway. After I tried to play without it - the game felt waaay smoother and much easier. Holy F***. Well, lesson learned.

I think one thing this game still needs for better combat smoothness is an ability to hot-swap to another weapon. This would make the combat much more varied. 5 small enemies approaching? Swap to a sword and shield, bam bam and done. A few cyclopses incoming? No problem, switch to a two hander, sparta-kick one out of this world and chop the other one in half with a massive running attack. Now that's fun. Sadly, here you just pick one weapon type and go with it all the time (nobody has time to go to inventory and play tetris there to equip/re-equip everything for different situations/bosses).

Anyway. I had fun. It felt like an old-school'ish arpg. You'll either like it or hate it, but it's a good buy on sale if you like this genre.

It's an above average survivors-like game that's really fun for the first 2/3rds of your playing time.

Once you unlock all maps and do all the challenges associated with them - the only thing left is to max out your characters and ... grind for the meta currency in order to max out all those passive abilities.

Obols (the main upgrade currency) is just too scarce and drags the whole thing to an unbearable boredom. I had to waste like another 15 hours by farming endless runs with the aim of maxing out everything and push that "rebirth" button for the last achievement. I think the acquisition of Obols should be increased by 30-40% as a bare minimum. This is the sole reason this game overstays its welcome and in the end leaves a sour taste in one's mouth.

Other than that, it runs quite well, looks really great! The whole structure building mechanic is pretty fun (whereas in endless mode, structure hp becomes way too low once you reach 45-50+ minute mark. Structures will get destroyed in half a minute due to enemies spawning off-screen. Even if you get +400% structure durability - it won't change a thing).
There are a good amount of different characters with their unique active and passive abilities. Although the variety of core abilities (that every char has access to) is a bit lacking, and after a while most runs will feel the same'ish.