I remember being shown some twitter clips of this game and being certain that it was hand designed for me. I love retro movement shooters, I'm a sucker for the cheesy Ghost in the Shell aesthetic, and the soundtrack rips hard.

I finally get a chance to play it and at first I'm impressed with the intuitive movement, the bullet time mechanics, the neat platforming. But after a couple of chapters it becomes clear that while the game's style and polish are strong, its core combat, level, and enemy design are shockingly and frustratingly underdeveloped.

Weapons are varied but feel so weak and/or inconsistent. The Shotgun is maybe the most egregious offender. I use my slick parkour movement to get right up into a normal enemy's face but I'm one pixel off of their body? Miss. A clump of enemies just asking to be shredded by by a blast of shotgun pellets? Only hits one person, enjoy taking 5 seconds to pump and fire again.

The game seems to want you to use specific guns in specific situations, but they're all just kind of underwhelming enough that I just simply found myself scrolling between them, shooting whatever happened to have ammo.

To that point, Enemies, especially in later levels, just take an annoying amount of time to kill. Because the guns generally feel weak (aside from some select guns with oneshot potential). there are really no enemies that could be considered "fodder". Even with the "weakpoint" mechanic (Which half of the enemies don't even have) it feels like most guns have me shoot enemies multiple times for the kill. This is fine early on when each wave or room of enemies is like 5 people. It becomes annoying when you hit arenas of enemies with like 30 targets all shooting you at the same time.

Additionally 90% of the enemies spend all of combat running directly at you. This makes combat eventually devolve into kiting a conga line of enemies back and forth as you pick them off one at a time.

And this leads into the level design, which rotates between confusing maze-like claustrophic hallways and confusing cavernous expanses with the aforementioned conga lines of enemies. The game takes maybe the worst queues from retro FPS level design by having endless secret walls and hatches that you need to locate to progress, frequently shuffling you back through the same core area without a clear goal in sight. The game also frequently makes it hard to understand if I'm even supposed to be killing all the enemies in an area or just running past them. Often I'll be wandering around an empty room looking for an exit before realizing I didn't kill a random guy stuck in the corner, after which I spend another 5 minutes looking for the small door that opened up after I killed him.

Overall, the frustrating thing for me was that this game seemed to have all the building blocks for a solid shooter, but just failed to produce a solid core design for those components. Even with all the wall running and slow motion, I just think it failed to make me feel cool or powerful in the way that games like DOOM and Ultrakill do, which is disappointing for a game that has everything else going for it on the style side of things.

This is maybe the most appropriate use of early access I've ever seen. It's clearly not a complete game by any stretch, but the framework is there and it's incredible to play around with. The granular ship building and destruction is incredibly cool, I've lost myself in the ship builder for hours building even a relatively simple ship. It's a fantastic feeling of accomplishment to go from steel beams to a fully functional creation.

Ship building is surprisingly intuitive once you learn it, but learning it definitely requires a video or two. And if you don't want to bother with it, you can buy community made ships in a car dealership-style lot, which is fun.

The problem is it's really not clear what you should be doing once you have an acceptable ship. There's clearly content outside of the "safe zone" (A great idea that lets you learn the game in an area free from PVP and other hazards), but the game's tutorials still haven't really gotten to that part, and the resources online are still pretty slim or outdated. It's hard to build the courage to bring a ship you spent hours building or buying into an unknown area where anything can kill you. There's a discord I haven't checked out myself yet, but I imagine that's the best way to learn the game at the moment.

Overall, I think this game is really bringing what it's selling in the trailer. But it's also an early access, alpha-level game. To really reach its true potential it's going to need the 2+ years of development they claim to even get close. Buying the game now gives you a chance to see some incredible stuff, but I think you have to accept the fact that things will be buggy and incomplete for a long time.

$35 is worth it for me though, even if it's just for building ships I'll never use.

Memes aside, this is a super clever implementation of chess mechanics. It will make you feel dumb at first, then suddenly you'll understand how time travel works, and then you'll still feel dumb.

I'm only just getting the hang of some of the movement patterns for pieces across time, but when you make an intentional move that traps someone in a different dimension, it makes you feel like the smartest player in the universe.

Fascinating stuff, I'll never be good at it but I love that this exists.

Any complaints people have about the game are almost purely external to the game itself. Some community drama with streamers, bans, and microtransactions. But this is almost entirely unrelated to the gameplay.

The premise is a simple Battle Royal 1v99 (Duo/Squads too) deathmatch where you need to scavenge for supplies and weapons while trying to stay alive. You'll die a lot, get frustrated, get unlucky, but what sets this apart is that you'll never waste your time. Everything from the scavenging, to the stealth, to the combat is gleefully satisfying. And when you die, you can immediately queue up in to a new match, one in which you'll wait <10 seconds to join.

If you like tactical shooters like ARMA and survival games like DAYZ, this game has the best of both (Both in gameplay and the fact that the developers of each game are closely related). But the extremely fast turnaround makes games more agressive and exciting.

The game is incredibly well made, surprisingly well designed and has me coming back for more every day. I've never seen such a stable multiplayer game at such a large scale before. I can count on one hand the number of games that have been ruined by latency or server issues, which is an incredibly low figure for a purely online multiplayer shooter.

Anyway, I'm not great at writing reviews but know that I'm a huge fan of the game. They're incredibly responsive to the community and keep pushing great updates to the game as it progresses out of early access. Definitely a company and game people should be supporting.

(Also if you check, all these negative reviews still have hundreds of hours. Nobody actually cares about microtransactions, they just like to complain. The game is good.)

Bullet Hell meets action hack n' slash. I'm not even good at these types of games andI fell in love with it. Fight a decent number of unique and challenging bosses. A soundtrack lined with incredible artists putting together some insanely good original tracks. It feels awesome when you get into a flow.

Can't recommend this game enough.