The good 👍
- Co-op game that works well, without net code problems

The bad 👎
- Rare problems with grabbing other player near platform edge

Conclusion:

It is hard to find a good co-op online game, that is not a big shooter or MMO. And this one works well. It has easy-medium difficulty puzzles, easy to understand mechanic and various enough levels. It doesn't have plot or anything deeper though.

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Details

📘 Story ☑ Bare-bone ☐ Average ☐ Good

☐ Interesting lore ☐ Well written NPCs Jelly blobs managed to escape the factory and realized they can shift mass from one blob to another? There is hardly a story here.

🔄 Gameplay loop ☐ Boring ☐ Average ☑ Good	☐ Grindy ☐ Repetitive There are 3 maps and each consist from rather short levels, good for short sessions. We need to play with mass, boxes, lasers and timing to reach the level end. It is a bit repetitive, but the game introduces new mechanics here and there, so it doesn't get too much of a problem.
🪄 Abilities ☑ Basics (walk, jump etc.) ☐ Magic / powers ☐ Advanced combat	☐ Skill tree ☐ Statistics ☐ Crafting We can move / throw boxes and shift mass. The small player can squeeze through narrow spaces and jump further, while the fat player can lift and move bigger boxes, plus work as a counterbalance in places with momentum. We can move mass between blobs to make small one big and vice versa.
🎮 Controls ☐ Clunky and stiff ☑ Adequate ☐ Fluid and enjoyable	☐ Not customizable ☐ Stiff animations ☐ Sometimes confusing It works fine enough. Though there are some problems sometimes with being unable to grab and lift 2nd player on edges. Not sure if it's due to lag or collision detection.
📇 Inventory and menus ☑ Basic ☐ Detailed ☐ Over complicated	☐ Made for gamepads ☐ Hard to navigate Really basic. We pick character, select cosmetic and play.
🤖 Game AI ☐ Brain dead ☐ Really basic ☐ Average ☐ Smart and responsive	There is no AI. If we try to play SP we need to control both characters at the same time. I could not bother to play like this, as it was quite clunky.

💸 Microtransactions ☑ None ☐ Skins ☐ "Time-savers" ☐ Direct purchase ☐ Custom currency (gems etc.)	🏆 Achievements ☐ None ☐ Story progression ☑ Few collectibles / easy to get ☐ Grindy collectibles / hard to get ☐ Require multiple playthroughs	💾 Save system ☐ No saves ☐ No saves, progress carries over ☐ One checkpoint, too rare ☑ One checkpoint, frequent ☐ Manual saves
📊 Performance ☐ Can run on potato ☑ Medium requirements ☐ High requirements ☐ Too low for what is visible on screen ☐ Optimization disaster	🌌 Graphic ☐ May look good 10 years ago, but not now ☐ Blurry textures / geometry problems ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Beautiful	🔊 Sound ☑ Nothing to remember ☐ Good voice acting ☐ Good weapons & effects ☐ Good OST ☐ Music flows well with the action
🦚 Customization options ☑ Resolution, volume only ☐ Basic graphic settings ☐ Advanced graphic settings ☐ Adjustable HUD ☐ Accessibility options	🧭 Map ☑ No map ☐ Basic ☐ Detailed ☐ Minimap ☐ Fast travel	Details:

The good 👍
- Console cheats
- Stats that actually impact the gameplay

The bad 👎
- Brain dead companions
- Game speed is low in general, but can be offset with console cheat
- Action points cost is displayed on the abilities used outside of combat, which is useless and confusing
- Abilities outside of combat has a cooldown on top of making our character tired
- Companions aren't really interesting or have much to say, it may be hard to find them after we tell them to leave the party
- It happened 2 or 3 times to see text placeholders instead of text
- At the end of the fight characters with damage over time get "remaining" damage instantaneously, which can send them to their grave...
- Game does not pick default option when lockipicking or hacking, when "helpers" (like lock pick) are not necessary as our base ability is sufficient, and it's impossible to fail check
- Around 3/4 of game combat gets tedious and repetitive

Conclusion:

It is a good RPG, but due to being low-budget it does have it's share of issues. 4 stars is for character creation, impact of skills on quests outcome and dialogues. Ability to solve most quests in more than one way. But game mechanic, combat and AI is poor.

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Details

📘 Story ☐ Bare-bone ☑ Average ☐ Good

☐ Interesting lore ☐ Well written NPCs One day an alien bio-sphere appeared on Earth, and corporations found that there are various artefacts inside. Expeditions started to go inside to extract them, but there is a caveat - once someone enters the sphere, it's not possible to leave. It's a one-way barrier. We start as a new recruit right before the Maelstrom incident - a huge storm of PSI energy that isolate settlements under the dome, and turn people into brainless zombies. Our job is to stop Maelstrom from causing any more damage, and help humans under the dome to survive. It is interesting, thought in the end story falls flat with predictable ending.

🔄 Gameplay loop ☐ Boring ☑ Average ☐ Good	☐ Grindy ☑ Repetitive The game consist from many small map-levels, that are accessed from the overmap. There is no order in which we must access locations, and they can be re-visited anytime. We move between them either by foot (at the start) or in a car (if we have ability and find one). The problem with this system is that it takes way too long to jump between location. Even with the speed hack. This "real in-game travel mechanic" just adds unnecessary wait and padding to game length. Gameplay maps are usually on the small side, and the goal is to walk to the objective and most probably just kill enemies on place. Pick some object to take back to the quest giver. There are few hub locations with quest giving NPCs. I think this game could actually benefit if there would be less bare-bone locations, that take too long time to travel between.
🪄 Abilities ☐ Basics (walk, jump etc.) ☑ Magic / powers ☐ Advanced combat	☑ Skill tree ☑ Statistics ☐ Crafting This is actually the best past of the game. We start from picking a fraction. Fraction gives some bonuses to stats, and unlock fraction dialogue options here and there. And then we go through rather complex character creation. Main part are the attribute points for dexterity, strengths etc., they cannot be improved later on. Which can mean that some builds may be broken if we assigned points into bad stats. There are many skills, divided mainly into combat and exploration. Combat skills focus on mastery in a weapon type (melee, handgun, assault rifles, energy weapons etc.) and exploration skills focus on everything else (hacking, survival, medicine, influence etc.). Levelling up skill unlocks associated abilities (like ability to treat different types of damage in medicine skill). Skill cap looks pretty ridiculous at first (last ability unlocked after investing 150 points), but by the end of the game I had most of the skills maxed out. Though at first it's pretty hard to decide if we want some more damage, ability to hack something, or maybe more HP. The last part are perks that add modifications, and are either granted by doing stuff in-game, or can be picked each x levels we gain. Things like being harder to spot in night, higher cric chance, not getting hungry but unable to have companions etc. Some of them are simple stat boosts, while others are based on a trade-off. They also require us to have attributes at specific level. Sometimes more than x, sometimes less than y. A lot of abilities feel like a filler, like most medicine (it's easier to heal ourselves with med kits that are everywhere) or survival (ability to cook, there are food items scattered everywhere). It may be more useful on higher level (I played on normal), but I started to invest in those only after I had nothing to do with points later in the game. Combat abilities are a bit skew, as there are tons for unarmed combat, but only few for long range weapons. I played as ranged character and the ability to either do base attack, AoE or incapacitate attack feels really limiting. While melee NPCs I travelled with had so many abilities they did not fit into one row, and it's not possible to remove them from quick menu even when we don't use them. So annoying, changing which action bar is visible is necessary. There is also an annoying part where the game doesn't pick up a default skill when we meet requirements. Say we have hacking at 100 and want to hack PC with difficulty of 20. Game will still ask us if we want to use lock pick or hacking program. Not simply do the default action. And fact that using skills most of the time add tiredness, and tired character gets stats nerfs. Want to heal after combat? Fatigue. Want to hack PC? Fatigue. Want to move to another location? Fatigue. Use some combat abilities? Fatigue. To get rid of it, the character either needs to find a bed to sleep or use stims that remove fatigue. Companions can also use the skills checks. As a ranged character, I had low muscle, so had to swap to a melee NPC each time I had to break some rocks or go up the rope. Which is meh. If I don't meet the requirement, but my helper does - why not give me the option to tell them to do something (a bit like it keeps asking if I want to use lock pick when my skill is way above the requirement). Instead of having to manually take control over NPC, move them by the object, and click to do the action.
🎮 Controls ☐ Clunky and stiff ☑ Adequate ☐ Fluid and enjoyable	☐ Not customizable ☐ Stiff animations ☐ Sometimes confusing It's an isometric game with turn based combat. We click to move the character and companions will follow, like brainless sheep they are. Right click opens up action menu. It's not possible to click on character to change the active NPC, their portrait must be clicked on. There is a chain between character portrait that show how they are action-connected, if there is chain connection then characters are controlled together. But. If we positioned one character somewhere individually and then click on the chain by mistake and re-connect it - they will start to run towards us through the shortest possible route, no matter if it's minefield or enemy camp. It does sometimes feel like early access game because of such problems.
📇 Inventory and menus ☐ Basic ☑ Detailed ☐ Over complicated	☐ Made for gamepads ☐ Hard to navigate Menus and inventory are detailed but not overwhelming. Items are organized neatly in categories, it's possible to sort them by value or size. It's easy to compare weapon and equipment stats. The only problem I have with it is that when we highlight intractable objects, there is no option to hide already looted boxes. There are so many boxes, small boxes, pots, briefcases, janitor trolleys etc. to loot, the game sometimes looks like Diablo II map with all this junk loot.
🥊 Combat 🏹 ☐ Boring and generic ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Great	☐ Well designed weapons Sadly it's not great. We start the round with a specific number of action points. Both moving and attacking uses them. There are not that many of them, and they are burned through fast. As a melee character, we have access to more abilities, but at the expense of being always tired - both getting hit and using most of the abilities cost fatigue. Ranged characters are more bound on the action points side and scarce ammo. All I could often do was one shot and had to pass rest due to lack of points. Without moving around. We share abilities with enemies, so we will see the same set of attacks and animations all the time. It is also really predictable what enemies will do. There is not much tactical approach, as enemies will simply charge at us and hit us repeatedly till they run out of AP. And we basically do the same. There is no cover mechanic, high ground modifiers or similar. Weapons are really similar, and it's hard to come by something better than we already have. Waiting with crafting schematics and materials till game end, to upgrade one weapon we use is the best option. Companions have their default weapons that get under levelled fast, so we either must upgrade them or hope to find something they can use.
🤖 Game AI ☐ Brain dead ☑ Really basic ☐ Average ☐ Smart and responsive	Enemies and companions can move around. And it's all they can do. Companions AI is so bad they must be micromanaged all the time. I would think that investing a lot of points into discovering draps would be beneficial. But no, even detected traps are not something they can comprehend, and will happily run through any mine field. Dying. Their path finding is bad, if I try to sneak around enemy camp and need to use ladder for that - I click on it and expect first character to go up, move to the side. 2nd character goes up, move to the side. And the same with 3rd compation. But it never happens. 3rd companion will try to use the ladder at the same time as 1st character, and as space is occupied - they always decide best course of action is to take the most around way to the objective. Through mine fields, enemies, radiaton zones. They are always in the way of opening loot boxes. I walk around, opening boxes. And after a while there is message "this cannot be used" or "this is unaccesible" (or similar...). Because our companion decided to stand in front of this box, and there is no AI to tell them to move away to allow me to interact. I want to use the elevator, but see "you don't have full party" - turns out one companion decided to run around. And are behind the elevator barrier, outside of detection range. If not for the fact I was weak physically and needed tank companions to survive - I would not use them at all due to how bad their AI is.

💸 Microtransactions ☑ None ☐ Skins ☐ "Time-savers" ☐ Direct purchase ☐ Custom currency (gems etc.)	🏆 Achievements ☐ None ☐ Story progression ☐ Few collectibles / easy to get ☑ Grindy collectibles / hard to get ☐ Require multiple playthroughs	💾 Save system ☐ No saves ☐ No saves, progress carries over ☐ One checkpoint, too rare ☐ One checkpoint, frequent ☑ Manual saves
📊 Performance ☐ Can run on potato ☑ Medium requirements ☐ High requirements ☐ Too low for what is visible on screen ☐ Optimization disaster	🌌 Graphic ☐ May look good 10 years ago, but not now ☐ Blurry textures / geometry problems ☑ Average ☐ Good ☐ Beautiful	🔊 Sound ☑ Nothing to remember ☐ Good voice acting ☐ Good weapons & effects ☐ Good OST ☐ Music flows well with the action
🦚 Customization options ☐ Resolution, volume only ☑ Basic graphic settings ☐ Advanced graphic settings ☐ Adjustable HUD ☐ Accessibility options	🧭 Map ☐ No map ☐ Basic ☑ Detailed ☐ Minimap ☐ Fast travel	Details: