Recent reviews by krassell

Overrated garbage.
This game wants to be so many games at once, and manages none of it.

This game wants to be a boomer shooter, but fails to achieve three most important things for boomshoot to "click": Good weapons, good levels and good enemies.
In general, the weapons feel weak and thoroughly unsatisfying to use. I'll do a heinous thing and add low player movement speed here, since you are a weapon yourself in boomshoots and your speed and movement options often compliment your arsenal and vise versa. No, the overused dash mechanic doesn't really help.
The levels are an absolute sham, I've seen Doom WADs from first-time mappers that played better.
You may see reviews praising the level design of this game - pay them no attention, these people do not know the difference between art direction, environment art and level design. This game has a somewhat original art direction, the levels have details and pretty showpieces. But none of it feels good to play. The first 'world' is where you can see it very clearly - the level design is a glorified linear progression with absolutely no interesting secrets to find. Later 'worlds' try to obscure this with more switch hunting and generally more complicated layouts but none of them are really open-ended. I am not even mentioning lack of secrets, player guiding, constant invisible walls in places where they shouldn't be and lack of 'em where they really oughta be. You'll phase through what looks like a solid object only to get stuck on an invisible wall where a ledge looks climbable.
Finally, the enemies. The lessons of Doom 2, Quake and Half-Life are thrown to the wind here. Enemies feel very bullet spongey and disgustingly samey. The average enemy feels like a mancubus on speed here, thankfully mostly without the fireball volley part. Mostly. Instead of clever enemy usage you'll see annoying enemy usage - like the rocket spam enemies being placed outside of the fog range to spam at the single entrance into the room. Did I mention that once triggered, these enemies never stop shooting at you even without any line of sight? Try guessing the correct time to slip into the room and not get blown up, I'll be waiting for you in the room where not-archvile's doing the trendy hiding-in-the-fog thing.

This game wants to be a Souls-like but whiffs the world design, RPG aspects and progression completely. One of main strengths of the original Dark Souls is the exploration you can do to grow more powerful or attain helpful loot. Here, the world is very locked down with invisible walls, there are practically no rewards to find by exploring. This is probably done so that you'd engage with the weapon melting system, but it's both a meh system and a huge hit to the souls-like-ness aspect of the game. Bad design decision all around. As previously mentioned, the game is very linear (apart from choosing the 'world' at the hub), and RPG progression follows the trend by doling out not-estus upgrades at plot progression milestones. Why even have them as optional items if they aren't optional?!
Speaking of RPG things, that was the last of RPG things. All you get here is upgrades, and weapons can only be upgraded once. No stats, no levels, none of that, but arguably it's for the best.
There's a plethora of other Souls/RPG aspects that don't work as expected. Hitting up the not-bonfires does not respawn enemies, so you're free to abuse free refills as much as you want. There are no items to use (think homeward bones and such) even though GZDoom engine includes a system that would be absolutely PERFECT for that usage.

This game wants to be a Morrowind-like, and I freely admit that it can pull its own weight in the art direction department, boasting this weird combo of signature Morrowind look with Conquistador-era influences, plus some Sci-Fi thrown in for a good measure. There are cases where the art direction is a total kitchen sink, but this game manages to somehow fit it all together. That's a hefty "Check" for style. Everything else, however, did not exactly get included. Complicated questlines? Nope. Leveling system? Try again. One cohesive world map? Forget about it. Factions? LMAO.

Ever heard of 'wide as a sea, shallow as a puddle'? Well, this game is wide as a pond, shallow as a puddle.
All style and no substance.
Needs half a year in the oven more and a TON more polish on top of that.

Worthless, crashy, buggy garbage with the most obtuse control scheme ever conceived.

Play the original game instead.

This is a buggy, extremely poorly optimized mess with atrocious [lack of] art direction.
Combat design is garbage, weapons feel awful to use and you'll be softlocked more than once since devs spent most of the time jacking off their dumb ARG rather than polishing the game.
I couldn't even load into main menu without getting softlocked!
Devs have been perfectly aware of numerous issues like that for years, yet didn't lift a finger to fix them.
I'd be perfectly fine with aforementioned issues had this been a free mod, but they ask a hefty price for this absolute dumpster-fire.

The newly bolted-on Xen chapter is a unique brand of mental deficiency. All the prettiest textures and models in the world cannot make it up for making Xen even MORE of a slog than the original was, while adding an unreasonable amount of buggy plug puzzles, a magic tree of questing, absolute fanfic tier Xen tech and cities and, of course, entirely too many chase sequences.
Remember the obnoxious gonarch battle from the original? Imagine that but ten times longer and also it chases you. And then do the same thing again but with gargs. I haven't mentioned it yet but all gargs are ALSO scripted to be invulnerable for the entire time, and no, you don't get to blow up even one of them because the collective brainpower of level designers remains at about 4 IQ. This isn't the last time you'll see enemies blatantly godmodding, either. It's like they brainstormed all the most obnoxious mechanics and ways to make this chapter even more of a slog.
If they really did it, then it was a resounding success: Xen chapters are such a slog that at one point even mappers gave up and started placing shortcut teleporters. Not even organic Xen style teleporters, just plain generic tech plates on the floor.
At this rate of developers' mental faculty degradation I fully expected Nihilanth to be another chase sequence, but thankfully no, they just made him go full anime like he's a final raid boss in a Korean MMORPG, complete with locking sectors of arena down with summoned rocks and artillery spam with impact zone markers.
Pathetic.

If this is a love letter to Half-Life 1, it's the one written on a used toilet paper with snot pickings and glitter.

Well, gents, I have some bad news.
Looks like Cruelty Squad was a lucky fluke.

Seasons changed, years passed, the dev still kept getting filtered by the monumental challenge of writing a piece of code that doesn't drop the framerate harder than he was dropped on a head as an infant.
To be fair, performance of the code is not the biggest concern here by far. Quality is.
Despite having a very successful trial run with Cruelty Squad and ample time to actually git gud the dev still continuously has a skill issue implementing an AI that amounts to anything more than an aimbot-on-wheels.

The lessons of CruS armor bug similarly went unheeded, and Ville (the developer) continues to completely dismiss any and all criticism, opting in for seething on his private xitter account about CruS fans not appreciating his magnum opus and requesting the game to be... actually fun, the ruffians!
Why is that? Well, you see, the crux of the issue here is that the gameplay is indeed not really fun.
The previous game, CruS, had many elements that made it fun: wackiness of implants, crazy bite-sized levels with many routes which were quick and fun to try and retry, varied and unique enemies, a menagerie of weird weapons and a number of movement techs.
This game lacks MAJORLY in all these departments, all because Ville had a different vision.
And now he's malding about people not praising his vision as they did CruS.
Mainly because said vision turned out to be a load of crap that no one asked for.

Typical mad cuz bad behavior on his part. Dev issue, even.
Shoulda lrn2gamedev, really.

Rectally Seared Fanboy Squad is arming their jester ratings right now, but they can't refute the fact that this game is a major downgrade compared to CruS, and, to be honest, just about any other game in the imsim genre.

In this current state I cannot even rightfully call this game an imsim. It's more of a very shallow Dark Souls but instead of poison swamps there's bureaucracy. Or perhaps a worse version of E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy with mechs.
Unfortunately, the mech gameplay is similarly fun-depleted and loses to just about any mech piloting game out there.
What a shame.

I must admit, the $40 price-tag plus officially allowing people to pirate the game is a bold strategy to get only the sufficiently-invested players to review the game.
No bias whatsoever!
Let's see if it pays off for him.

TL;DR: If CruS was very fun garbage, PPR is just garbage.
This was written very early into Early Access, so things may change. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Do with this information as you will.

P.S.:Steam shows only 0.1 hour clocked in the game, I'm not sure why; I played this on and off for about a day, just to be clear.

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.