December '20 Play Log III: New Years Edition

Decent over the top shooter. My biggest complaints revolve around the achievements and not being able to change the difficulty mid-game.

Pros:

• Great weapon variety
• Some good one-liners
• Great music
• Can select all levels of all chapters right from the start
• Good enemy variety

Cons:

• Can’t change the difficulty mid-game
• First story achievement is broken
• If you select any level other than the first (e.g. if you want to change the difficulty) you are locked out of all story related achievements and the collect all the secrets achievement
• Several extremely grindy achievements
• Most of the achievements require multiplayer
• Some of the enemies seem designed to be annoying
• Some points try to overwhelm you with waves of enemies. I frequently found these parts got boring due to dragging on too long.
• HUGE number of secrets, many of which are very well hidden. There’s no way you’ll find them all without a guide unless you plan to spend a lot amount of time playing.

Verdict: 6/10

First, note that this game is in very early access - there’s not much content. It definitely shows some promise, but has a long way to go. I’ll try and update this review as the game is updated.

Pros:

• Good graphics
• Has the potential to be very interesting if things like relationships, story, more areas, quests, etc are added
• Still being actively developed
• Having to actually man you shop is a really good idea

Cons:

• Very little content
• No background music
• Purchasable houses, shop rating don’t appear to have any use

Verdict: 6/10 (not enough content to give it a higher rating)

Overall this is a decent game, but a few bad choices hold it back from being good. This is very unfortunate since the game definitely has potential. The good thing is that a lot of it could potentially be fixed if the developer were willing to fix it.

Pros:

• Plenty of replayability
• Decent voice acting for an Indy title. No cringe-worthy acting, but some parts could have been better
• I enjoyed never having to reload weapons
• Choices actually do affect the story
• Lots of autosaves, so even if you don’t save you’ll likely be able to find relevant parts if you want to go back later to see what would happen if you made a different choice without a full replay, or for achievements
• If you select a particular save it will show you the results of your choices so far. I found this to be a really nice touch.

Cons:

• It’s actually a sequel to ARG. You don’t need to have played that game, but I think it would have been more enjoyable if I’d have played it first.
• Impressively bad load times, and the loading screen frequently froze. There are load screens between significant story points, and being a choices-matter game if you’re trying for a particular outcome, or aren’t terribly good at combat, there will be a lot of loading. This by itself almost prevented me from doing a replay.
• The load game screen only shows timestamps, not the save name, unless you click on it. Given the number of autosaves, and the number of saves you’ll likely want to make, this makes searching for particular saves a bit of a nightmare.
• Chances are you’ll want to replay this. It’s not really intended to be played only once. It’s also dialogue heavy. So in subsequent runs there will be lots of dialogue you’ve already heard. Unfortunately there’s no way to skip through it, which also makes replaying it off-putting.
• There’s a lot of reading (logs, news reports, etc), some of which is fairly necessary to read. This in itself isn’t a bad thing, but IMO the game doesn’t build the world up enough to make me want to spend much time reading.
• I prefer to use subtitles for games. This game supports them, but rather than only showing one or two lines, this will scroll them half way up the screen so I can’t properly see what’s going on.
• I found using non-fatal weapons much more challenging. For normal/easy difficulties I don’t think this is a good design choice.

Verdict: 6/10