devtrackers.gg
Last week I saw a few friends playing this, so it got me interested and put it on my Wishlist. I joined this Subreddit and read the Steam reviews which all looked very interesting to me too. Yesterday it went on sale, so I thought: Why not!
I just wanted to peek in after buying it and I spent over 2 hours in the game. I did not do much. On the starting screen I first went through the Patchnotes, which are massive. I only very briefly looked through the ESC menu and then went into the Tutorial mission. I am not very good at FPS, so I appreciated that the Tutorial introduces you slowly to each key that is important in the game. Although everything is colourful and looney toons in its best years (which usually causes a bit of an overload in my brain), it was easy to follow and I felt comfortable pretty quick.
Back at the base I just explored that a bit. Of course I had to press "the button", kicked some barrels and threw a few of those canisters into the moving thingy. That most of the terminals are locked in the beginning is welcoming too for me, because I could see that there is tons of stuff to do / use in the base, but nothing of that matters for now. So I can focus on the gameplay first. That´s very well designed.
OK, I started my first mission then on some kind of salt asteroid or how it is called. Although I was tempted to switch the difficulty to easy (as I am not good at FPS and I lack the reflexes some of you Jedis have) I decided to play on normal first. Also I picked solo, so I can learn on my own pace how everything works and I am not an obstacle for other players.
I do not want to go into too much details in the mission, but it took me a bit over 1 hour to finish the primary and secondary objectives, with 0 ammo left when I called the pod to end the mission (I used up my one resupply pod already which I learned by the way that it can squish you if you stare at the spot where it is supposed to land!). Of the 5 minutes I had to reach the escape pod (with 0 ammo!), it took me about 3-4 of pure running and throwing flares (which where empty all the time), dodging the bugs manually and hoping that I reach the escape pod before those bugs eat me. Unfortunately I was much faster than my mule and I had to wait at the closed gate of the pod for it to arrive... timer went down, big bug tried to eat me, but somehow did not catch me while I was standing at the closed gate. I am not sure if this is a "bug" or intended behaviour, because otherwise I would have been dead. As the countdown reached 30s, finally the mule also arrived at the escape pod, gate opened and with somewhere in the ballpark of 20s left, I finished the mission.
What a thrill!
Funnily in those 2 hours I got 2 achievements in Steam: Played first mission and "spent over an hour in a mission", so I suppose those 1h5m I spent in the mission are not the norm (maybe it will for me) and games should be shorter ;-)
What I liked:
- Although the game should be overwhelming with all you see and can do in the menus, space station and missions, it opens up everything in small pieces so you can get familiar with one aspect of it and learn more as you make progress.
- I felt like I have all the time I need to explore the caves, but I am not sure if this was just a coincidence. I do not know yet if the bug waves are timed or triggered by progress. If the latter, that means that you will run out of ammo sooner or later if you are a slow player?
- I dig the graphics. I have an old rig (6th gen i5 + GTX 970) and it runs fantastic while still looking very nice. They picked an art style that works very well with a reasonable amount of polygons it seems.
- It looks like there is a lot in front of me to explore (gameplay wise / mechanics), so I am really looking forward to it and can´t wait to play my next missions :-)
What I did not like:
- Well, with 2.x hours played only there is nothing to say yet. ;-)
Flair: I do not know if this was the right one for this type of posts, but the rest did not really fit.
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