

1 person found this review funny 6 11 people found this review helpful1 person found this review funny

Not Recommended 24.3 hrs on record

I can't recommend this game. I picked it up because it both sounded like and I had been told it was essentially "Dark Souls with Guns!" and because it seemed to offer a more intuitive matchmaking system in regards to co-op play compared to Dark Souls games which have some clunk.



What I ended up getting was a mess that didn't seem to know what it wanted to be - it felt like first and foremost it wanted to be a third person shooter, but then it decided to try its hand at being a Souls-like (though I tend to loathe that term, that's what it is) and to that end it succeeds in the typical fashion - you get limited full heals per rest at the designated checkpoint, resting respawns all the enemies in the area and refills your limited heals, you have stamina, take damage fairly easily, and there are bosses. They even shamelessly ripped off the fog gates instead of coming up with something unique, and a lot of the rings you can find in the game are basically direct rips too with different names. I'm not much of a Dark Souls fanboy but even I noticed the similarities all over the place.



On top of this it seemed to desperately want to be a dungeon crawler with procedural generation - this probably would have worked well for it had they stuck to this as their primary mechanic, as the world generation and enemy variety is extremely lackluster. In the first location, Earth, during the campaign I went through two large areas that looked identical spread apart with three sewer dungeons that also looked identical and even came with the same canned "Whew! That smell!" response from my character to boot. I was confused and concerned but I pressed on with the game but this feeling only repeated itself throughout each new location, there's very little variety at all and the same path with enemies follows - an area begins with chaff weak melee enemies and a stray elite, you do one dungeon, then enemies with guns appear with lots of melee enemies and a few more elites or special types, then you do another dungeon and elites begin appearing very frequently with more gunner type enemies and few melee enemies filling up the spaces. Every single region followed this design.



Whatever me and my friends concerned might have been, we pushed through the vanilla story and the DLC story completely unsatisfied with the equipment we had obtained through the entire game - indeed, I was still wearing my base game armour set - and when we completed it, decided to look at what equipment was actually in the game, and there we discovered to our horror that there's actually a fair amount, but it's all randomised behind an awful RNG system that randomly determines what items you find and what bosses you fight during a campaign "roll / seed" - and in order for us to obtain gear that would have suited our tastes better, we would have had to grind the campaign again (or the shorter, but no less equally boring and repetitive, Adventure mode) in the hopes the gear would spawn.



For what purpose? This game isn't an MMO, but even if it was, what is the point of grinding for equipment you'll use to complete a game or kill a boss easier if you've already completed the game or beaten the boss? There is no point - we could run through each region repeatedly hoping for the game to throw us a bone, but what's the point and where's the fun in that? Sure, we'd end up with efficient equipment sets but nothing left to actually do.



The amount of grinding this game expects you to do is immense, it's nothing short of false padding. If you want to experience every boss, every dungeon, you best play through it multiple times! We ended the game at around level 110, enough to max out 5 traits out of at least 40 or so, and we'd picked up enough money and materials to upgrade our weapons and equipment to around the +18 to +20 mark. The thought of upgrading any other weapons and armour all over again was an appalling prospect, even with the equipment to make it more efficient or faster. There's just no point, no motive, no incentive. The maximum trait level is 1000, letting you max out every trait, but that seems both insane and quite unnecessary to me.



Builds are formed by your equipment and by maximising a certain bunch of traits that complement it. There's plenty of ways to play and pick your set up, but every class is more or less identical - and obtaining the items and fully upgrading the weapons and armour is going to take you a long time, and by then there's absolutely no point in carrying on playing unless for some reason you actually enjoy the game.



Also there's a certain degree of jank here too. If you use a controller and gently press on the thumbstick to make your character walk, your character model will just use the animation of you running but you'll be moving at walking pace - it looks comical but it's also kind of sad. Bosses are also incredibly dull - a very vast majority of them spew additional enemies out during the fight constantly, it gets really boring dealing with them with almost every fight, this isn't Borderlands where you need a second wind or Destiny where you need ammo and yet it tries so hard to be just like that, it really sucked the fun out of most of the bosses we fought, they ended up feeling like raid bosses with phases and in some cases puzzle platforming rather than straight up fights.



Another negative point - more of a petty nitpick than anything, but whatever - was the fact that even though there's all these armour sets in the game, the game insisted on giving you an ugly, nondescript brown backpack at all times, which clashed with everything. Nothing beats wearing some golden alien armour with blue heraldic banners and then an ugly brown human backpack on the back you can't get rid of. Very lame.



Finally, level scaling. It seems to be based off your "Gear Level" which in turn seems to be whatever your highest weapon / armour stat is, up to level 20. Traits don't seem to have any effect on the scaling, at least from what we could tell. It was quite noticeable though, if one of us hammered a bunch of their materials into a weapon and made it to say +15, but the other player didn't and remained at say +8 armour, they'd die so fast in combat afterwards. I'm not sure exactly how the scaling worked, but it didn't seem very multiplayer friendly, I don't even think it scaled from the host, but just whoever that the highest stat on their gear. Deciding to try out a different weapon or armour, but lacked the materials to upgrade it to your main gear? Tough luck! Go and grind!



Survival mode was interesting, but more of the same stuff really - just a lot more condensed and with even more RNG, yay! You need something like 1000 Glowing Fragments to buy a bunch of pointless skins and stuff, me and my friend did three bosses in a row and got bored and let ourselves die, and we gained 12 fragments from it - this being on the Hard difficulty, which is really "Normal" difficulty I suppose - still felt like a major grind and another awful layer of padding with very little reward incentive anyway.



This game might have done better as a dungeon crawler, with floors / levels rather than corridors and regions. As you go further down the room themes change and the enemies too, random bosses at the end of each dungeon floor, random loot to haul back to base and then mix and match to make your own builds, that kind of thing. As it is now being a game that expects you to reroll areas and play through campaigns / adventure modes repeatedly to grind materials or even find equipment, it sucks the fun out of everything - especially with the limited variety of enemies and extremely repetitive identical areas to sift through.



It's shallow, boring, repetitive and grindy with an immense amount of padding. There's some fun to be had with friends, but they'll need to really really really love this kind of game to stick around for long, I bet.