Recent reviews by tipsta

🤡

I was giving a copy of this game for free. This is a first impressions review.
This game was given to me under a Steam Group for Doom Clones, as space for retro FPS like Doom or Duke Nukem, and as far as that's concerned I don't think Apastron meets the definition.

To be 100% frank, I can't really mention any redeeming qualities for this game other than it's stable and ran fine on my pc (specs below). It clearly has a story inside, but I didn't play enough to uncover it, though there does seem to be a mystery elements to it. For this reason they may be a fiction rationale behind some of the gameplay decisions that will be lost to me. What little of plot seen in my short play time was often cryptic and vague.

This game uses low fidelity art like many other indie projects, however in this case it made some sections hard to read or decipher where to go next. Sometimes this is somewhat minor, like functional doors and purely aesthetic doors appearing identical. This also applied to combat, as the Ground Pound was lost on me for a while. On that topic, there's a slight quirk where both the standard melee and ground pound animations can overlap. There appeared to be sections that would only activate or be playable after a certain trigger was set, often speaking to a dialogue box. There's an untaught ledge climb/vaulting ability that is required to reach certain locations, and while find running around seeing exactly how far I could get enjoyable, I was seldom met with any reward for that effort, and it appeared to work against some of the games other movement mechanics (such as no in-air movement control). What what little of the game I saw the only meaningful weapon decision is magazine capacity. I believe this because the pace of a battle is set mostly by your gun's rate of fire and pauses to reload, since all guns have infinite ammo and threats where so mild I was never in danger. On the topic of combat, there was a lack of clarity when taking damage and also enemy attacks.

If I were to speculate, it appeared to what what is seen here might have only ever been played by the creator, who knew where to go and what to do. I believe some quality and responsive playtesting could have ironed out many of my concerns.