YEAR #1 - 2024 RECAP

The premise is that I don’t often play boomer shooters. From my little experience, though, what I recall is that a boomer shooter should be hard or at least punishing. Well, this one isn’t punishing, but it can become quite hard for entirely the wrong reasons. I didn’t find it punishing because not only most enemies, apart from maybe the boss at the end of the second episode, are very easy to read and kill, but also because the save points are way too frequent. I found it hard at times, instead, because the monsters are huge HP sponges, even at low levels, and I think this may be the main flaw of this game. You often risk running out of ammo if you try to clear a whole map of them. That means that if you really want to kill them, all you have to do is take your time and wait for the very slow reload (even with runes that speed it up) of the only weapon that doesn’t require ammo or, alternatively, you must know beforehand where all the secret stashes are in the game (which means you need to have played the game already or have a guide of some sort with you). Not particularly fun, I must say.

That’s too bad because the very first impression of the game was good and the first 2-3 hours were quite fun.

I liked the graphics and I liked the level design of the first few maps. But as you progress, you soon realize there’s been less and less care put into the level design. The last two episodes were the ones that were designed the worst in my opinion. They had no interesting new monsters (or worse: they recycled some of the old ones and simply gave them more HPs), plus the maps felt a bit rushed, with many unpolished areas where you can encounter many invisible walls or actual walls but that aren’t really there, since you can’t jump on them. That’s most notable when you’re searching every nook and cranny of a map for secrets, which for the reason expressed before is something the game requires of you.

A thing that I liked instead was the plethora of easter eggs. There are dozens of them, and not only references to other boomer shooters that clearly inspired this game (Quake, Blood, etc.), but also to other games or movies (Mortal Kombat, Fallout, Terminator, etc.).

As a whole, I didn’t particularly like this game and I can’t recommend it.

Interesting little game. It’s nothing overcomplicated as it may seem at the start. It only felt a bit repetitive by the very end. You basically have to get a stable income of basic resources, which allow you to get coins (=money) that help you stabilize your food production. Once you’re at that point, you can upgrade your structures for more advanced resources and upgrade your fighters in order to prepare for the *big* end-game fights.

There’s a first final boss, after which the game gives you access to a whole new area where you get the items needed to summon the *real* final boss of the game. In this new area you have to basically build everything back from zero with little to no help from the mainland (the new area is an island). Well, I didn’t really like this start-over concept. It was interesting the first 5 minutes, but once I understood monkeys aren’t hostile but rather an actual source to exploit, everything felt like I had to replay the game from scratch again.

Furthermore, everything, as I said, is done in order to prepare for some supposedly hard boss fights, but in reality if you have enough fighters (I went with 7) and at least half of them are equipped with something that can stun enemies (let’s say even the most basic iron shield with just 10% stun chance) you can take down all the bosses with ease, since they end up being almost perma-stunned. That makes the fights quite trivial.

There are DLCs too that expand the number of cards and add new game mechanics, but I didn’t meddle with them. I assume they may enhance the whole experience, since the base game is quite poor imho and doesn’t have much replay value. Not a bad game, but I don’t feel like recommending it.

We’re slowly progressing through the game. We explored a handful of new areas and beat a few more bosses.

I’m still of the same opinion as last month, except for the fights, which are a bit better since I managed to get better armor, so I don’t die right away like before. But given that I die less, fights are even more underwhelming, since we kill even strong monsters with relatively little effort.

By this time, I don’t think there’s enough left to make me change my opinion about this game.