While the module is designed for AD&D, we currently use Pathfinder in my campaign, but conversion is not all that difficult as long as you can make calls on the fly and have access to the Pathfinder creature manuals and NPC charts from the Game Master Guide.  The module is heavy on story rather than stats, which is great when trying to convert on the fly.  I didn't have to do a lot of math, or search for obscure rules and changes to see how to handle anything too specific to the older game system.  With a module like this, heavy on story, I think a creative GM could insert it into just about any game system with relative ease.  The module is designed by author Lisa Smedmen with cover art by Fred Fields and Interiors by John Dollar.

Stitching it all Together

The adventure book itself is organized and laid out quite well, with detailed maps and lots of macabre artwork.  A large poster map covers the meat of the adventure, when the characters descend into the depths of the city to uncover the secret cult, and the book has a card stock cover detached from the interior so smaller maps are easy to access.  There are some drawbacks to the layout to cover first though.  The biggest challenge I had was with the poster map.  Most DMs that I know of use a screen, and have a small section of the game table already taken up by their notebook, dice, pencil, source books, adventure book, and sometimes more, and then you also have this large poster-sized map you're trying to keep out of view of the players but also fold and maneuver so that you can read it yourself.  I would have preferred the map been individual pages, card stock, or fold-ins stapled into the book itself.  As it was the beautifully illustrated poster map was a nightmare to deal with.  The other design aspect I would have preferred a change on was the listing of creatures the party faces.  The design of older modules like this one puts the creatures in the first encounter entry, but newer modules from a lot of publishers have started putting a second entry in an appendix at the back of the book.  It makes it so much easier for the DM to be able to flip to the back to find what they're looking for rather than have to search each page trying to remember where they last saw the giant spider because the players now want to know how much the poison gland sells for.  I would have also liked the player handouts, four sheets that include three nicely written letters, to have been on separate pages or cards that I could hand out.  I like props for my games, but I got around this by making a copy of the page in the book and cutting it into four sections.

The parts of the design I did like make this series one of my favorites.  The entries that the DM is supposed to read to players, flavor text, descriptions, and dialogue is easy to differentiate from the rest of the material, being in red print rather than black.  The maps inside the cover of the module, and throughout the pages are clear and very detailed, and beautifully drawn.  The story timeline is also fairly well done and easy to follow from one scene to the next without a lot of jumping around in the book, which helps a DM who already has a lot to worry about without having to skip all over a book to see where to go next.  The art throughout is nice and, in Ravenloft style, dark and macabre.  The writers even begin each chapter with a quote from dark poetry and stories, also in the Ravenloft theme that makes the source books unique.  Overall it's a lovely book, in a morbid sort of way, with only a few hangups in design.

The layout of the adventure path is pretty good, but there are some concerns with challenge.  I had to cut back quite a lot to make things doable for a party just below the intended level, but even if they had fallen within the 5-7 range I think they would have had a lot of trouble.  Level drain abilities are present in most of the encounters, and this can quickly reduce a party to uselessness, especially in a low magic campaign without a lot of disposable money to purchase items to restore levels.  That said, it wasn't hard to make adjustments accordingly.  Taking out some of the special attack features, like the level drain, didn't break the plot and I'd be surprised if the players were even aware that it was something that was taken out.

Tales to Chill and Fright

The story behind Death Unchained is really quite good, but there are a few flaws that make it a little difficult to run as a DM.  The beginning places the party firmly in a grisly scene right out of a nightmare, people impaled on stakes all around them as the mist clears.  A dying old woman on a post begs them to find her daughter, who is already dead on another stake nearby.  It's a grisly introduction to a world infamous for making players' and PCs' lives difficult.  It's not long before the party learns just how awful Lekar is with a strict curfew, human-only laws, arms and armor restrictions, slave gangs, and one pointed sentence for just about every crime, impalement.  While they get their bearings in the city they bump into other strangers who will put them on the path, and into the sights of the Ebon Fold, a cult of assassins stealing the life force from people all over Lekar.

Something the writers did well, with the assistance of Ravenloft's reputation, is turn some of the most innocuous events into things truly sinister.  Crumbling masonry falling from a tower is believed to be people casting stones at passersby in attempts to kill them.  Red eyes in the dark are imagined to be nightmarish undead rather than just curious rats.  At one point the players even speculated that the meal served in the school might actually be the missing child they'd heard about moments before, rather than just regular food.  It's one of the aspects of Ravenloft that makes it so fun to DM, and when writers tap into the setting's reputation it allows player's minds to create all manner of new and twisted nightmares that aren't actually there.  Nothing makes a DM's job easier than players running away with all the various possibilities their minds create.

The heroes are given enough clues to lead them to the cult's lair, but I found that some areas lacked enough incentive to move the players along the story.  I had to get creative, and make up a few clues to keep the players from giving up all together and pursuing something completely unrelated to the plot.  I do my best to avoid rail-roading the PCs but sometimes the writing in the module just doesn't offer enough to keep them moving along.  My best advice to other DMs that pick up this book, give them nudges and hints along the way, give them some options outside a single path, but find ways to keep them relatively close to the central plot.  Especially in a Ravenloft adventure, getting home tends to become a major motivation for the party, despite whatever events they might run into as they go.  It's easy for this to become the primary plot rather than the adventure you have planned so it takes some creativity for the DM to keep it a side quest so to speak.

I have said in conversation several times that the biggest sin a game can do to be boring. Now, I shall spare you the ego of flattering myself and pretending that I am origin of this deeply-philosophical bumf, but I raise the sentiment because it is a reoccurring thought which would not leave me as I played. A thought that hung heavy around my neck akin to a stone, gaining increasing weight, and with it, a larger share of my consideration, as I ventured further and further into the game. First-person shooters are without a doubt my favourite genre, so why was I … well, to be frank, bored out of my mind? This is a game that lovingly cleaves to the Warhammer 40,000 setting with obvious care, but unlike other outings, it lacks that heart.

Yet as a critic, it was never enough for me to just say it was shit and move on — I wanted to understand why, how it got that way. In that sense, Necromunda: Hired Gun became something of a white whale for me as I sat down to write this review, because all the pieces are here, this is all stuff I should find engaging and enjoyable, done in ways other games have approached these mechanics that I have enjoyed here, so the million dollar question becomes: well, why not this one? Ultimately that comes down to the game comprising less than the sum of its parts, but examining that is a surprisingly complicated affair, because it involves examining not the pieces themselves, though we shall certainly look at those, but rather instead looking at how they come together, because it is in that, which Necromunda ultimately fails.

Easiest to begin this autopsy is how the game begins. After choosing from a decent selection of different player character appearances, you go through a simple mission in media res that essentially forms a tutorial. Dodging side to side, sliding on the ground as a sort of dash, and wall-running are introduced, as they form the core of the mobility mechanics — if not all of them. Then a handful of simple combat encounters, after which follows arriving at the hub of the game preceded by an introductory cutscene. So far so good, this gameplay is plain bread and butter and hardly blowing the world away, but it is perfectly serviceable, and we rarely see a tutorial level set the world on fire.

It was in reaching that cutscene we find the incipient among our major stumbling blocks: the plot. I say incipient as it is a growing thing in and of itself, and it also comes to encapsulate the growth of a list of complaints. Each and every such complaint seems to have its genesis in cleaving to this hackneyed plot as a hungry tick, bloating itself in satisfying its hunger to adhere to this grand design, at the cost of my enjoyment of the game. I would generally forego mention of it if I felt I would stand alone in that discontent, but I sincerely doubt that I am the only person with this assessment.

Now, I am self-aware enough to realize that I said that the individual parts were mostly alright above, and when it comes to the mobility mechanics, or the shooting, and such, I would stand by that opinion, but — without getting into the kind of spoilers that earn me lovely “fan mail” — the plot at hand is the exception to that rule. As I said, I do not really want to go there, even if I do not in any way, shape, or form, feel that the narrative presented here is a magnum opus that deserves being experienced. I will say this much though: this is among that particularly-annoying brand of story where at every turn there is a contrived twist to place you into a bind, and the story has the really strongly-negative habit of pumping the brakes on the action every time I started to find myself starting to enjoy things.

I find considerable joy as a writer in having an above-average vocabulary without resorting to a thesaurus, but even with one I could not find a better word for the chief thing the plot does which is to the games detriment. I resort to what I shall, with considerable hesitation, label “puzzles”. It is a very generous term for these, because they essentially come in two very simplistic varieties: elementary jumping puzzles where figuring out the path from point A to point B is the challenge, and “collect a handful batteries from the immediate surroundings to power a random piece of machinery.” My partner has since informed me that the technical term for this matter of time-wasting tomfoolery is “buggering the player about.”

In theory, platforming puzzles should make sense in a game that places emphasis on its conveyance and movement mechanics, and I wouldn't quarrel much with that assertion, but here they are presented in situations where the objective is not, for instance, discovering optimal paths that allow you to efficiently engage in gunfights or close the distance for melee takedowns. .No, they rather are the connective tissue. They are simple, and even me with all my long history of having, shall we say, directional challenges in games, figured out the paths without much pause. What making them the interstitial content results in is the feeling that we are stopping the happy fun shooty-bang-bang times to jump on random outcroppings in the scenery to traverse to the next fight. The association becomes that these puzzles are the thing you stop the fun parts to do to progress to the next combat encounter, which does not cast them in particularly-good a shade.

Unfortunately, the parkouring around the grim darkness of the far future reveals our first smaller issue to contend with: the movement mechanics feel very slippery at times. Indeed, while the gunplay sections were decently-challenging and I had a few that went down the wire (especially the boss fights) it was not the combat encounters which claimed my doddering hired gun - it was gravity. Each and every instance of protagonist-death in my story was a death where I missed a jump, or the grappling hook they later give you decided it didn't need to attach, or the wall-running didn't end at the instant I let go of the key and my grimdark avatar happily careened into the void that is Necromunda's depths, which I imagined happening with childish glee, since it at least conferred on me mild enjoyment of the deaths rather than mere frustration.

Such fates are not inherently a mission failure state: you can buy up to three “stims” which revive you at the last point before said death. I never actually ran out of the three stims, but presumably you fail the mission at such a point. But, this softened consequence meant that it was never a desk-flipping situation when it happened, and what have in the end was that it mostly felt Necromunda was just burning my time so as to be able to say there are things other than shooting in it. Perhaps some particular programmer was filled with pride of the parkour system they put together, and wanted to make sure we had to do it — I can't pretend that I am immune to doing this in my hobby projects. However, if that was their intent in so doing, they only guaranteed that I possessed a worse opinion of it than I would have otherwise. Left confined to the combat I probably would have felt that it made a very kinetic engagement that I enjoyed a lot. Adding chasm-climbing nonsense to the equation had the same effect it did in Doom Eternal: breaking up the flow of the experience for no gain, except that of irritation. I'm willing to concede that there exist a plethora of gamers who are likely not as bothered by these sections as I was, I would rebuke that point in the simple fact that even if they do not present a detriment to your own gameplay, neither do they add anything of any redeeming value.

The second variety of puzzles we're dealing with are a non-entity: while detractors can certainly argue that the parkour sections have a component of problem solving to them, the “find the McGuffins and shove them in the machine” puzzles are basicaly testing that you have eyes in your face to see things. And well, despite needing four to see things and basically being legally blind, I did not need naught but a moment to ever complete these sections, and they had the overwhelming vibe of wanting to extend the runtime of the game or, perhaps, have something other than the combat. I can't divine the minds of the programmers so I don't really want to impose an assumption on the design, but in either case it fails so we don't have to. If the intention is to pad out the run time, the longest segment is maybe about 5 minutes if you miss one of the batteries for a machine thats in a corner behind something. If it's meant to be an interesting intermission, a middle calmer middle action, well I could understand that, but the problem then becomes that this is not stimulating at all, its babby's first puzzle level of hidden object game, and the it comes across patronizing of the player, honestly.

That brings us to the part I was annoyed that it would stop: the gunplay. This is the part that is most frustrating for me, in the sense that it's the good part and it kept getting interrupted. There's little I can say that isn't praise here at the first blush of it: it is a kinetic system with good feedback, feels enjoyable to engage with, and the takedowns do genuinely replicate the visceral enjoyment that made the new Doom installments as controversial as they were in certain sectors. You get to select up to six guns from a large assortment for any given mission, and each of the firearms does a good job of making it feel the differences came not from a lack of balance or one of them being better than the other, but rather in having different weapons for different playstyles. I am not going to say they're perfectly-balanced, because nothing is, but the differences between the guns felt as if those weapons were simply better suited to my own playstyle better.

Unfortunately, as the game went on I found myself just skipping the combat with increasing frequency, and that is a problem I ultimately lay at the feet of the story and its puzzles. As the story dragged on, and became predictable in its twists, and the puzzles became enough fuckabout, the end result was that I just wanted to complete the mission and have it over with. By then, the enjoyment diminished, and so too did my willingness to engage with the combat. The parkour might make the combat feel kinetic and energetic, but my desire to engage with that parkour after just having spent 10 minutes doing a jumping puzzle is at record lows, and so I found myself just pushing through by means of healing kits and cheesing the AI. I don't generally want to do the latter, but I got to the point where the greater concern for me was completion, rather than mild gaming principles.

Meta progression in the game is in essence upgrading bionics for yourself, and your hound, and then getting better weapons. The hound is functionally a dog-shaped missile, and it does become important in encounters to distract - and after it is upgraded enough, kill - enemies. It becomes an effective way to manage the number of enemies you deal with at any given time, since it will both draw aggro and tie up enemies. So, upgrading it is a good idea. Upgrading yourself, on the other hand, is necessary. Along with expected upgrades to health and shielding and such, you also have a double jump, which the game neglects tell you about, and is all but essential to complete the jumping puzzles once you progress far enough in. At the start, the game has multiple routes that allow you to use it, the grapple, or wall-running, but towards the end, the amount of effort is falling off hard, and you find yourself increasingly shepherded into narrower paths with less options. The last couple of missions are, regrettably, entirely linear.

That is worthy of note as well: I don't know if it was money, or time, or the publisher's cocaine pile was running low or something, but the game was definitely lacking and rushed towards the end. Along with the optional paths vanishing, the story leaves a fair few loose ends, and without spoiling that conclusion, ends in a sequel hook that gave the impression that the game developers were begging for resources to complete the game. Yet, alas, they would not receive this, and we ultimately end up with the game we have, not, I suspect, the game Steum On Studio intended for us. That having been written, while I can appreciate the feeling this was not the intended state of the game, it is what we end up stuck with.

Nowheres does this become more apparent that the game was rushed to release than in the endgame content: the shell of an endgame is here, but there is no meat on its bones. You have successive difficulty levels of missions, randomly generated, that have a contractor faction you're doing it for, and a target faction. Or factions, in a few cases. This has a reputation you build with these factions. So ... what do you get as a reward for building reputation? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. This appears to be a system they had much higher aspirations for that just, never got realized into its final form as designed.

I do feel I'd be doing this game a disservice if I ended the review without commenting on how the game nails the Warhammer 40,000 themeing. The soundtrack, while it isn't going to win any music awards, is energetic and leans heavily into the atmosphere and theme. The maps, meanwhile, skillfully evoke the gritty and grimy, visceral feeling of the underhives of a 40k Hive World. This is a world that feels inherently dirty - as it should, for Necromunda.

Wrath

There are basically three types of weapons: one of three standard firearms you pick up at the start, upgraded versions of one of those three, and then special weapons, which are available as mission pickups exclusively. So essentially there are three “workaday” varieties of which you can choose one to begin with, and then a selection of other special weapons you can pick up during the course of play. The choices at the beginning are a pretty standard trifecta: a shotgun, a machine gun (more of an assault rifle), and a railgun. All of them are pretty much bog-standard FPS weaponry in their mechanics: the shotgun fires a spread with perhaps the weakest shotgun firing sound effect I think I have ever heard in a game, the machine gun plinks away at a decent clip with similar sound effect issues, and the railgun is pretty much a sniper rifle, and pretty much the only starting gun that “feels” powerful, if only because of the high damage.

Indeed, the lack of weapon feedback is a problem in Strafe. It's a problem that permeates all of the weapon designs, so we might as well cover it now lest I start repeating myself unto infinity: the enemies never even so much as flinch when they're struck, even in situations where they lose an arm or something like that, they will just keep coming at you. Combined with how much blood the game practically wants to drown you with, you have basically an issue of a sort of desensitization: you never feel any impact from a gun, they all just fountain various-colour blood whenever you so much as scathe them, which occurs whether it is a highly-damaging hit or basically the equivalent of a stern glare. This makes it very difficult to tell at a glance whether you are really having any effect, especially as you progress further and the enemies start getting tankier.

Weapon upgrades can do a lot to ameliorate this, but unfortunately, I did not find them something I even noticed. You have two means of upgrading the default weapons: you can upgrade the one you started with at various stations throughout the game to offer different effects, or you can grab upgraded standard weapons during play from randomly-generated corpses. The stations give you one of several vaguely-defined upgrades to which your only hint at what it does is a very pixellated icon that, while you will no doubt recognize them on subsequent playthroughs after having experimented with them the once, I have to believe no one on the face of the earth that is not stoned off their arse is going to really know what exactly they do the first time. Moreover, some upgrades are so gently-incremental, that you really aren't going to notice them. Moreover, if you are given a random corpse one then there is literally no knowing what bonus it has until you equip it, and even then the indicator takes the form of a small icon on the left of the screen that you - or at least I, in my infinite blondeness - could easily miss in the action of the moment. Once again, this traces back to a lack of feedback from the weapons - I did mention that was going to be a reoccurring theme in this review, didn't I?

The unique weapons seem to want to add some variety to the game but the kind of cookie-cutter progression they have fairly stymies that aim. Here's the list: a grenade launcher, a dartgun, a fusor, a heavy pistol, a plasma gun, a rocket launcher, a pulsar gun, a smart gun, a quad tracker (gun..?), an airbuster, and the gimmick gun that is the inflater. Now you may be reading that list and thinking: “but May, that sounds like quite a selection of weapons”, and normally you would be right to think so - I certainly had the impression it was at first. What you will realize however, is they follow the same mould as the first three: a CQB spread weapon, a mid-range automatic rifle, and a long-range slow-firing rifle. As an example, the grenade launcher is a spread weapon at mid-range, and basically becomes a temporary shotgun replacement weapon, and the rocket launcher is basically a direct improvement on that - in theory anyways. In reality, since you can hurt yourself with the splash damage and the enemies will bum-rush you almost constantly, the explosive weapons are more hinderance than help. As can be a problem in many games and not just Strafe, a situation where you kill the enemy and yourself both, is still a situation where you are at a loss. While the grenade launcher can be managed since detonation is usually delayed and the projectile has an arc, I would avoid the rocket launcher unless your idea of a fun time is emulating popular Doom streamer Coincident's favourite face-rocket tactics.

Doomed

The continuum extend into the other three starting weapons as well; Carrying on from the machine gun you have the dartgun: a very-high rate of fire gun that has some spread, the plasma gun: basically the plasma gun from Doom if the sounds were more anemic, and the smart gun: basically a homing assault rifle. Likewise, the railgun continues on with the fusor: which is basically the railgun with penetration (oh my!), the heavy pistol which is a high damage pistol that is not nearly as effective as the wiki makes it out to be, and the pulsar gun which is a bit of a knock off of the BFG 9000, but you at least have a change in that you choosing when you activate the projectile to hit everything else, so I cannot call it a straight rip.

Even the last three exotic weapons keep the theme going, even if the effects are different. If you are getting the “uninspired” or “lazy” from the design here well then, I was hardly the only one then! All the same, continuing on you have the quad tracker: a gun that fires four beams to either side, and even the official Wiki calls largely useless so while I agree I fail to see why it is in here, then you have the airbuster: a slow high damage, theoretically-high accuracy shot - I say theoretically because any enemy that moves faster than a glacier will be able to avoid it; and the inflater which is like the Dobson gimmick weapon, and I will leave that thought as the single explanation of it, because it is worthy of nothing more. Any hopes for the exotic weapons to improve the weapon selection are dashed by all three of them being gimmicks that are pointless in most situations, and even the situations they are useful in will likely have better answers in the other selections you could be making.

There is a little bit of seasoning on this otherwise bland but serviceable weapon buffet: the ammo scarcity and what happens with the special weapons when the ammo is expended. Allow me to expand: your chosen weapon is going to be your workhouse during a “run”: it is the only weapon you will possess for which you are given any ammunition. Any other weapon you pick up is a momentary novelty: you get what's in the gun's magazine, and that's it. This means you cannot, for instance, hoard special ammo to be able to get through a specific difficult encounter such as the end boss, except in the very limited fashion that you could save a single one of each of the guns in such a way. In theory, this might make you be much more discerning about your weapon choices. In practice it means I only ever used them if I was in danger of dying, because the final boss is a big arena slugfest, and you need the guns and ammo to get you through it. This also has the knock-on effect of what they call "dead-man walking" syndrome in adventure gaming circles: you can use too much of the special weapons you have available during normal play, and be unable to complete the final boss encounter at all due to that usage of resources. In that way, this design is more detrimental than helpful to the gameplay.

In short, the gunplay in this shooter feels samey, staid, and unimpactful. I have certainly played worse and to say it's not fit for purpose would be incorrect, but it strives for … average, and achieves ... average. If anything, the ways in which Strafe tries to differentiate itself end up to the game's detriment. There's some fun to be had in the shooting, but not more fun than you could be having in many of its competitors. A running theme we'll explore more below: this is a game that wants to be very fast-paced, “run and gun”, and kinetic, but through its design beats, encourages the player to be conservative, slow, and risk-adverse. The ammunition system is but the first point where that comes out.

Shallow Graves

The enemy variety is about similar, though not all of them are frankly worth going into as much detail with as I did the weapons but we nonetheless will hit the important parts. You have slow-walking melee zombies (that progressively get faster through upgraded versions), fast zombies that cling to the roof and walls whom will leap at you if you are within a certain distance, grenade-lobbing mutant types that serve as suppressive fire of sorts, fireball-shooting droid things and their big brother plasma bolt-lobbing mutants, and jellyfish mutants that serve to bull-rush you. There's a few iterations on most of these, for example a bug thing that's basically the firebolt drone but flying, but with that exception they mostly follow a progression of running faster, hitting harder, being more aggressive, having more health, and detecting you from further.

And bull-rush, like I mentioned with the jellyfish enemies, is indeed the singular strategy these enemies have. The enemy AI leaves a lot to be desired: the mutants, zombies, robots, and aliens all share the same brain-dead tactic of making a bee-line directly towards the player, whether they can see you or not. In contrast, Doom would do line-of-sight checks to see if an enemy could see the player, and if not have them wander randomly and make presence noises. There is no such feedback given in Strafe - indeed, the first sign you'll have that enemies are nearby are when they're gleefully running into a wall their poor pathfinding cannot navigate, trying to get to you so they can chop your nipples off.

Many enemies will bleed absolute buckets when shot, even before they die, and it gets a bit excessive, to the point it gets a bit hilarious. One supposes the gratuitous blood is their replacement for meaningful feedback, but when its so completely gratuitous, it just becomes white noise. Of course, sometimes that noise is red, sometimes its yellow - but take some great caution if it's yellow, because that's an acid blood that will harm you!

Bitter Depths

Indeed, there is a considerable amount of visual clutter in the design. As you fire casings and magazines go everywheres, the gore and limbs from enemies paint the walls, and the blood basically goes everywheres. This is the kind of scenario of decoration overload which makes Brutal Doom look a little tame. While one can certainly get caught up in the spectacle of it, that very fact makes it rather detrimental - it becomes difficult to “read” the game at a glance. There were more than a few deaths I had where one couldn't see hazards through all the red and yellow.

On the topic of intrusive secondary presentation: the default HUD is very chunky, moreso than even Wolfenstein 3D's, I find - if not so then equally as much. Of course, you can reduce it down, but never to the minimal level you can in Doom or Doom 2. If you're wondering why there isn't much eye-candy in this review, it's because all this secondary presentation, as well as the chunky HUD, made it difficult to get a screenshot that would be at all usable in my boxout formats.

The procedural generation of the levels is what give this game a considerable amount of its wings, so to speak. The broad strokes of it are done well-enough: you have some set standard set-pieces that keep the different levels unique and provide landmarks, and the connective tissue through the levels between these points being what's procedurally-generated. This presents a fair bit of replayability, which is good, because for it's price point, a run of Strafe is something you can complete in one sitting if you are particularly-good and don't run afoul of it's tricks and traps.

The procedural generation lays some debris on the track of game development however: for instance, there were stretches of hazard floors where one “room” with a hazard floor merged with another “room” with a hazard floor in such a way that either individual room could be traversible with full health, but the two together could not. This kind of flaw suggests a game that needed a finer attention to detail, or at least a higher degree of quality control. While I know a fair few people are quick to hand-wave away this away as one of the common flaws of proc-gen, it is not a foregone conclusion that you will have these issues. No, this represents a lack of care in designing the procedure for said generation, and that lack of care shows on all the various touch points of the game: a shallow experience that needed more iteration, editing, and attention.

Enter the Complex

We continue on through the levels and start seeing more of that prop up in the actual level design itself: this game actually has quite a variety of different “rooms” it can end up stitching together, but you really wouldn't know it unless you paid careful attention during the runs, because everything starts bleeding together. The levels feel relatively “samey”, with rooms that seem to lack purpose both from the design and diagetic point of view, other than being filler connective tissue between the set-piece rooms. While this hardly is the end of the world, it does make things feel dull and monotonous in a game that desires energy and vibrancy. In retrospect, the large amount of visual clutter is likely attempting to distract from this. It also leads to situations where I was left confused on how to continue, which isn't a place you want your prospective player to be as a game designer, I should think. I mean, by my own admission, I can be “blonde af” at times, but speaking as someone who's completed Eternal Doom (no, not Doom Eternal, I know, it's confusing: I mean the infamous puzzle WAD), I feel somewhat qualified for this kind of thing, and well, I still ended up lost sometimes. Hell, there were a couple times in later runs where I knew what I had to do, but what I did not was where the procgen had placed the stuff I needed to progress. Poor show altogether, there. Of course, that's all luck of the draw so to speak, since it is pseduo-random, but to have dead runs like that with the toss of a coin was aggrivating.

The final point I'll make about levels is more one of personal preference, but nonetheless something I know I'm not the only one who finds this annoying: there is an over-reliance on monster closets. Now, I don't mind them very occasionally as it adds some variety to the gameplay, though I do prefer when they're at least made to look like some locked room or something that was unlocked with baddies inside, which isn't the case here. However, given what we already went over in with the game AI having perfect knowledge of where you are even from half-way across the map - or indeed the other side - this means you can have a monster closet open minutes away from your position and only notice when you get randomly blindsided by baddies some time later. Alone, is it a game-breaker? Naw. But the gripes are certainly piling up once again.

Decadence

One thing that did bother me is the “retro” aesthetic, not the least of reasons why being: the style isn't really retro. In Strafe we have a game that's trying to evoke an old-school shooter feel with game graphics more comparable to Minecraft than Doom. Coupling chonky pixels with a CRT effect that makes things a mess and cannot be disabled, and the feeling I'm left is one of uncreative laziness: the designated “retro” design and shaders have been applied, let's call it a day. There is no demonstrated understanding of the limitations of those bygone days that inspired some creativity. For example, we have a pallette which vast outstrips the number of colours available in those times, while still being very grey-brown. Many early games, especially earlier into the EGA/CGA days, had very pointedly colourful graphics because they couldn't have anything else: you had the very limited palletes available to those cards and you dealt with it. Stripped of that restriction, we have ended up a game that doesn't have that limitation, so instead of being even better, it has become something generic in the most literal sense: its visual style has literally no unique element which might seperate it from its respective genre.

Further confounding matters is the visual style, just on its own merits. These are some chonky pixels - and it makes reading the game difficult, something only made worse by the bog-standard “retro CRT effect”. Bugs only pile on here: with some weird hall-of-mirrors effects in places, monster closests failing to trigger occasionally (not that I was complaining...), and most aggrivatingly, the acid blood some enemies spurt when they die doesn't render on the floors that have transparent pixels, so that led to a few particularly-annoying deaths. Technical bugs of this nature are neither frequent nor rare, and I had several times where I lost progress to crashing to the desktop.

Indeed, this further highlights another problem in Strafe's design: the lack of proper saves. Could I have been saving after sections like, you know, you could in old retro-shooters, even as far back as Wolfenstein 3D, these crashes and bugs would be annoying but not fatal. When they often mean that you have to restart at least sections of the game again and again, it quickly becomes terminal to any enjoyment one may derive from the game. The one time I didn't even get five seconds in before a crash seemed like a bad omen at the time I was first starting, and perhaps it was, but in retrospect I became grateful that not much progress was lost. In many ways this save system felt like it was padding out the length of the game, I feel like a competent player could complete this game in less than an hour if the game didn't crash and they could save properly. But, alas, we're stuck with a system which is basically checkpoints between levels wearing the skin-suit of a save system, and the game is significantly poorer for it as a result. I, for one, would much prefer a short, quality experience over the tortuously drawn-out experience that Strafe represents.

A Fistful of Ident Chips

While recent additions to the game have seen a variety of missions added which are one-off historical scenarios, the meat-and-pototoes of Starsector comes in the main game - the “campaign” mode, as it were. You begin by selecting a portrait and name for your fledgling captain, the age of the system you're in (determining in essence the amount of harsh, mineral-rich worlds versus less harsh, more habitable, but less resource-laden planets), and the size of the sector: either small or large, either of which do exactly what they say on the tin. As a nice side note I wish we saw more of, the seed for the sector is included as well, allowing you to restart in the same generated sector if your existing save crashes and burns - as long as you took care to write it down when you started. The thought occurs to me: we could do one better on this and simply save the seed with the file and offer some sort of “start this sector over” button on the save, or at the failure state, but it's surprising to me at least how few games in this sort of vein of rogue-like offer anything at all to retry the same sandbox.

Having created your captain and the sector she or he is going to be rambling about in, your next choice is your characters “career” up to the start of the game, which essentially is a choice between whether you want a combat ship or merchant/exploration ship, and two “fast start” versions of that; or of course, you can choose an entirely-random start as well, though that is pretty much random, beyond it being serviceable as a starting point, so you can end up with some big deviation across starts with it. Regardless, choose your preferred poison, whether to play on Easy or Normal difficulty, and off you get plonked into the vast cosmos. Or the small cosmos, if that is what you chose.

For those wondering the difference between easy and normal: normal is the baseline, while easy you take less damage, get more salvage, and your sensors detect out to a longer range. That's it - and I find the easy mode is perfectly-fine if you prefer a power fantasy going through the stars rather than a challenge - but even then, the more threatening enemies can still stomp you if you are overconfident, so it's not just a “always win” button either. For my review, I played entirely on the normal mode, but I have since dabbled a bit in the easy mode for kinda brainless whiling away the hours, and it definitely still surprises you if you try to rock up on proper battlefleets, or large enough ships on their own.

For a Few Scrap More

Character creation thus completed, you'll be dropped in the campaign tutorial system and walked through a handful of the basic mechanics. Thus it's in this starting system, Galatia in my play-through though I didn't notice if it changed in subsequent ones or not, that you cut your teeth: going through the motions of the basics so far as the fleet management, logistics, and engagements go. It serves as a good and unchallenging area to get started: a microcosm of the game as a whole presented in an easily-digestable starting zone.

The first order of business the game presents you with when you get into that game proper is the matter of scavenging supplies. Moving around on the map is simple enough, the display is essentially a (detailed) overworld, so you simply click where you want to go. So, you float over to said asteroids and use the skill to Scavenge. It is in doing the Scavenging as it were, that you are presented with the DNA of the tri-mode gameplay that characterises Starsector so well, and draws the comparison to the venerated and venerable Warband: much of the gameplay not done on the overworld, or in conflict, comes with multiple-choice style text prompts, visual-novel style. In the case of Salvage here, it comes in the choice to assess the situation, where it tells you the risks - essentially the numbers affecting the dice roll that follows - and lets you proceed or not. Later on in the game you may have tools to help you can choose to use, or special scenarios in certain wrecks, derelicts, or asteroids. There remains no way to progress the tutorial than to salvage and continue, so on we go.

A Bullet for Galatia

After a quicksave, so the game knows you know how to save and so that if you get your arse handed to you on a silver platter in the next encounter - you get a pirate fleet sent after you. After all, what better a method to see if you know how to fight than to throw you right in that proverbial deep end and see if you sink or swim? It spawns reasonably close to you, so the engagement is inevitable. When it does catch up with you, you get another of those text interactions, and more choices: you stand and fight, you try to talk to them, you try to run, and sometimes you have other, more situational choices, though those are not presented in our simple tutorial encounter.

For the tutorial encounter, you can talk to the rogue miner, but it goes nowhere, so you engage or you run, to have to engage them later to proceed the tutorial. As thus, you're given to the choices that follow engagement: either you delegate command (basically the auto-calculate option), or you assume command of the actual battle.

Auto-calculation follows the usual sort of dynamic with these kinds of things, but it seems fairer than most: it will tend to calculate in your favour if you have a power advantage, and very strongly against you otherwise, even if you possess some technology that would provide a strong tactical advantage when you fight it out. As such, the auto-calc serves the purpose for which it is meant, honestly: to avoid the nuisance fights. Nothing too standout or extraordinary in either directions there.

Should you take control of the battle directly, you are first given a text-box explanation of the logistical costs of fighting: deploying ships in combat reduces their “combat effectiveness” rating, which is functioning to compile the damage, ammo, and other factors of the ship, into a single bar for brevity's sake. As such the tactical battle becomes a question of how many resources you want to commit, since they will all have to resupply, which takes supplies and time. The first element of good tactics becomes committing the ships to the field that will achieve victory, but not so many you deplete your supplies.

The actual tactical combat is essentially an overhead arcade space game, the pace of which will vary depending on the ship your own player captain is piloting. In general, it gets quite hectic, but in a good sense: things are communicated cleanly, there's never an instance I felt the game was unfair with me or I got struck out of nowhere with no warning. While Victory At Sea had essentially simple broadside mechanics with turret arcs to add on to its depth, much like how Warband didn't have simple melee but iterated on that simple mechanical surface with intricacies like the clinch, couched lances and such, Starsector iterates on this with different weapons with varying arcs and ranges, some that are rays, some that are ballistic, some that are guided, and suchforth. While Victory at Sea was criticised by some as shallow, here we have designed out a system with a fair bit of depth that encourages multiple ranges and speeds of engagements, with variety in ship designs, design approaches, and fleet tactics.

Of course, the tutorial fight is a fairly simple affair, and while the AI in a small frigate can be quite aggressive, it isn't likely to prevail. Indeed, it quickly withered and exploded under a hail of (space-)mortar fire. This leads to another salvage opprotunity in the post-combat screen: picking through the wreckage to see if there's anything valuable. And then, another prompt about how supply use will increase, as the fleet repairs and rearms.

Starfighter

Having become the proud veteran of one (1) single engagement, the game advances you a level, mostly to continue the tutorialising through to the player progression. Every time you gain a level you gain a skill point and a story point with which to improve your player captain.

The skill point is used to advance one of four aptitudes: Combat, Leadership, Technology, and Industry. Each aptitudes offer a few special abilities, and could generally be described as: combat is the tactical combat skill, leadership is the strategic combat and fleet logistics skill, technology covers available upgrades and your ability to navigate, and finally industry largely benefits the logistics aspect: you can repair more, salvage more, more easily recover your damaged ships, and so on.

Story points are a little more interesting and unusual an affair: they are in their elemental form what we would call a “plot coupon” - there are a variety of chances you get to do something particularly amazing, cool, or challenging, and they will require a Story Point to undertake. Some will automatically succeed, and are somewhat like the “blue” options in FTL - decidedly better options only available if you have that currency.

3:10 to Ancyra

Since we've now gone over the game elements in isolated and simple forms such that we should have a basic understanding of the game's individual components, it now becomes time to demonstrate the core game loop, so we are presented the first of many missions, or quests if you prefer. We get an urgent hail ushering us to the station of the one inhabited station in the system, telling us to come in person. And so, for lack of any other direction, thusly do we go.

It this moment where the game also starts explaining some of the advanced concepts: starting with Sustained Burns and Interdiction Pulses. These are essentially a measure and countermeasure: Sustained Burns allow you to more quickly traverse space, at the cost of an increase of fuel. In contrast, an Interdiction Pulse is an area of affect ability that disables the engines of ships it hits, so when someone is speeding away from you to try to escape, it would be an Interdiction Pulse one would use to try to catch them.

Either have advantages and disadvantages - at high speed with Sustained Burn, you have the risk of damage, or being knocked of course at least, when you go through debris fields or asteroid belts. Going at speed and then helpfully careening off of Jebediah Kerman's aborted Mun capsule to be catapaulted into deep space and need to take days of travel to get back is not a fun time, so you have to be discerning in when you engage the Sustained Burn ability or otherwise cruise at high speed (some ships later on are quite fast even without it). Likewise, the Interdiction Pulse you have to disable engines for a brief moment to do, so if you do it too early, you only hamstring your own pursuit, for no gain, as they happily blaze away to safety.

So happily you jet along to the inhabited station, trying to avoid bounding off the asteroid belt along your path which it uses to demonstrate that concept, you soon get the third advanced concept dropped on you: having your Fleet Transponder on or off. This is basically making it easy for other fleets to ID you, whereas having it off means they have to come very close to do so. Most of the major factions will expect you to have it on, and will get quite angry with you if they catch up to you with it off, however, docking with it off is the only method to access the Black Market, for much better buying and selling prices, and it makes it much easier to evade others, whether for innocent purposes or not.

Once you make your way to the planetary station, any potential run-ins with system security over not turning on that transponder may have gotten, you connect with the station commander, whom has the option to give you a bunch of background history dump, but more importantly, that first mission we were so tantalisingly teased with before the game yanked on the packing to tutorialize more: infiltrating a pirate station to meet an informant, testing your ability to dock with the transponder off. Just in case you thought you were getting off without any more tutorializing however, the contact briefing you spends a wordy paragraph on an emergency burn: spending a ton of fuel to get away, if need be, to max out speed.

~ Intermission ~

If you have not yet detected it in my language, humble reader, then let me take a moment to make it clear to you: the tutorial is one of my key negative points about the game experience. “How can that be?” one reasonably asks; since, after all, this is a game that is expounding its tutorial in a logical and very orderly fashion. Well, that is the problem: in its native form outside of the tutorial, Starsector is at its best when it is a big sandbox, with a bunch of toys to play with and a sector full of opprotunities, challenges, and things to find.

The tutorial's problem isn't really pacing, as while I personally strained under the constant yanking at the choke chain it presents things at a decent-enough clip. Rather my problem is more in how linear it was. From very early on in the game you can see the options you have stretching ahead of you, but you can't use them during the tutorial. Let's consider an example: my readers who follow SpiffingBrit, and those that did until he got entirely too heavy into the midroll ads, have likely seen the video he did on Starsector after SsethTzentach covered it, wherein he explained how you could use the Transverse Jump ability, which allows you to warp between systems without using a jump point. Getting the ability early allows one to exploit the tutorial. The idea here is you are not intended to leave that system until you have completed the beginning quest, but if you have that capability, you could hop out and essentially take advantage of the stranded system with a broken gate to sell stuff from elsewhere for amazing prices.

With the current tutorial, you cannot do that. You are on a very narrow, very specific rail, and any attempt to deviate from that course is stymied. Abilities like Transverse Jump get disabled, for no other reason than, you're in the tutorial now and we don't want you doing that. Not only is this limitation frustrating, it ends up in a tutorial whose gameplay is in marked contrast to the actual game - and the further away from the expected actual gameplay a tutorial is, the less useful it actually is going to be as a tutorial.

This is exactly the kind of experience that makes many players skip tutorials, even good, helpful, well-laid out tutorials such as this one: they know this is not the proper “good” gameplay, and they want to get to it. When things become obstructive, slow them down, and feel artifical to the actual gameplay design, especially when they feel as if they are holding the player's hand, many players will balk. Both from a tutorial design point of view and from a gameplay flow point of view, it is best to keep the tutorial as close as possible to what one can expect out of the actual game.

There's other things locked off too - colonization for example - but what burns me so much is that it wasn't always like this. The tutorial itself hasn't changed much, it is the additional restrictions that are extra. Frankly, it feels like the reaction to the exploit that SpiffingBrit pointed out was to fold their arms and decide that the Tutorial Area is a No Fun Allowed zone. And what I and others will no doubt pick up on, is that such an approach represents a largely advesarial approach towards their players. Something to keep a weather eye on as development progresses. Such a change in the tutorial comes in stark contrast to something like Bannerlord, the newest contemporary to Warband, where yeah, there's a very guided tutorial as well, but if you ever lose interest in that, you can entirely sod off somewheres else and do something entirely different that is to your interest. No such option exists in Starsector, as all the additional options get blocked off. This kind of approach to me speaks of a lack of faith in the player, which is somewhat endemic to modern game design: it isn't enough to have these options, the players have to know about them, and they have to interact with them in the method the designer wants. This is, gratefully, the only time it comes up and once you get past the tutorial, you're free. It wasn't always here though, so I would be wary of this approach creeping more and more into the gameplay in the future.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Having now whinged myself inside-out about the tutorial's linearity, let us get on with the mechanics it is walking us through: the mission involves using an Active Sensor Burst to find an object without its transponder on, to retrieve a rudimentary AI core from a stranded probe. So on we bound to find it near one of the planets. Much like the rest of the tutorial, it remains a fairly-elementary task.

The game starts actually opening up now, but a little: if you stop at the Galatia Academy Station on the way, it gives you a short bit of exposition which fills in the background of the tutorial mission arc's scenario. A Hegemony officer gives you the low-down, explaining that a scientist decided they could go Lex Luthor and “improve” the system's jump-travel gate and caused damage to it to the extent that it was rendered inoperable, stranding the system from the universe-at-large. It's a little bit of flavour, and you could be forgiven for passing over it, but these little bits of exposition help explain the how and why of how certain game dynamics are as they are, so it becomes a reward in and of itself to the canny player.

Irrespective of whether you take that little stopover on the way or not, it isn't terribly difficult to find the target probe, but when you do, you're going to have to fight off some automated defenses. It's a fairly trivial engagement: a few small ships versus what is likely to be a proper, but small battlefleet, or a single beefy ship if you didn't get the fast start, but this broadens the horizon a little bit with increasing the numbers. It's also the first time you're likely to salvage weapons. Battle salvage complete, you move on to the normal salvage of the probe those defenses were defending, gaining from it some supplies, fuels, and a Gamma Core AI. The AI in tow, you return to the base, and after some more exposition about how the game regards AI as an evil - merely sometimes a neccesary one - you're set on your penultimate task: assembling a fleet to break past rioting miners whom are blockading the damaged gate.

Assembling this fleet involves going through a bunch of derelicts in a ship graveyard in the outer bounds of the system, and is, essentially, a crash-course in actual, honest-to-Gods salvaging, with the limitations removed, excepting that it has removed most of the randomness - you are going to get certain ships, with perhaps one little exception: there's a frigate that, if you complete normal salvage on, is otherwise going to end up stripped and scrapped, but if you use the Story Points option (in green), you can recover the frigate for your fleet. Definitely a worthwhile investment, if you're not stingy with story points, though the game lacks good signposting as to how often those kinds of options are going to come up at this moment, and as such, I can certainly see people treating them with the "too good to use" syndrome, and ending up with a surplus of them because they end up hoarding. The other ships which are essentially flagged as unsalvageable can also be recovered like this; whether you choose to do so or not, I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Forty Railguns

Assuming that you managed to cobble together a good fleet to your desire, your next order of business is to gear up, refit your ships, and rearm them as neccesary. The station commander at Ancyra will explain refit in very brief when you do - mostly explaining how to use the auto-fit function for now - and open up the stores of weapons so you have some basic selection. With some parting advice not to engage both rebel fleets at once, he leaves you to it.

Starship building in Starsector is deep, like, bring a canary and a lantern levels of deep. Along with things like the difference between energy, projectile, and missile weapons, you have varying hardpoint sizes and ranges, as well as some weapons with spread and others that don't have it, and the list goes on.

I rather lack the space to get into the intricacies of each and every weapon, as going through all of that would be tantamount to doubling the size of and already-lengthy review, but broadly-speaking you have short, medium, and long ranged ballistic weapons, the same for energy weapons, and then some weapons have spread whereas others are focussed. On top of that you have missiles and torpedos, largely differentiated by speed and range, but also by varying guidance methods as well. And then adding to that pile are a variety of modules you can add to the ship, granting things like cargo space, fighter bays, ability to better control damage, and those are merely the most obvious ones which come to mind. Varying ship layouts further complicate this, with all manner of arrangements of hardpoint sizes and abilities, which further broadens the depth of designs you can come up with, so by the by, even before you start looking at mods - of which there are plenty - you have a frankly-excellent variety of things you can come up with.

The depth of customisation available for ship designs in Starsector is one of the things it does right: you can get by perfectly well with stock ships, even get through some particularly-gnarly encounters with them, but if you want to truly push the envelope, than that customisation offers all manner of possibilities, and I'd say when you get down to the brass tacks of the game, being good at ship customisation and fighting in those ships are what are going to seperate the boys from the men and the girls from the women when it comes to who truly excels at that game. Yet, even more importantly, given a simulator to try out your designs without consequence, the game makes it plain fun to exercise your design creativity and see how things go.

This is, more or less, why the game suggests to you that you should rely on using auto-fit for now, and to its credit, it allows you to do this or your own design without restriction, unlike most of the tutorial. The auto-fit function is fairly robust: allowing you to fit the design to a certain standard, of which most but not all ships have many that come pre-built, and you can save your own as you make them as well. Additionally, you can set some parameters, such as whether to strip existing weapons and modules from the ship or only fill in empty ones, whether to use only ordinance on hand or buy it from the market at the planet you're docked at, whether to try purchasing from the black market to source items (and assuming the consequences and thereof), and adding certain usually-beneficial modules automatically. For this first proper scrap, the auto-fit is sufficient, but it is easy, especially with the Simulator safety net, to get lost in creating one's own designs.

True Grit

The inevitable conflict happens at the site of the new jump-point, or the aspiring new jump-point anyways, with two rogue miner fleets circling it, hoping to blockade it to force their demands through. The system authority meanwhile, hopes to force their position: by means of sending you, as heavily-armed as you both can muster, to communicate with them in the 20-inch, 50-inch, and beyond calibres.

This represents the first proper melee and it sets the tone for the rest of the battles ahead, especially if you meet both fleets in an even keel. It becomes a frenzied, violent affair very quickly, with the game striking a good balance between easily-readible graphics, so you can tell what's going on, and busy enough that it still communicates a frenetic-paced, pitched space battle. The sound design lends well to this too, especially with the ballistic weapons, which have a variety of very oomph-sounding hits on the enemy - or yourself, if you're misfortunate enough.

I must confess, this isn't a brand of spaceship fighting game which usually appeals to me. The last overhead-combat style ship in that vein that really appealed to me were the Solar Winds, Masters of Orion 2, and Star Control days. I find such games, or games that have a mode implementing it, are usually fairly arcadey, and I generally I don't find it enjoyable because it's a test of reflexes more than a test of skill, and well with these hands of mine, reflexes aren't something I have in spades. Or even in clubs. The depth of customisation, the ability to properly command ships at a moment's notice, and the fact that everything is properly ballistic - ie a simulation rather than just hitscan nonsense, really help sell it.

Amidst all the ping and bangs of the punchy ballistic weapons, you have a very responsibe control system, and some well-balanced mechanics that help prevent it from getting too broken. One omni-present thing is flux, which basically can be thought of as heat, because that's frankly what it is treated as. You accumulate a little taking damage on shields, shooting yourself, having the shields up passively adds some. So you have to pace yourself in both taking damage and in dealing it, so theres a lot of duck, dodge, and weave to the starship slugging if you're doing it right. The skill floor is relatively low here, but the skill ceiling is pretty high, since you have customisation of ships, the command aspect, commanding your own ship well, and getting through everything while minimizing supply and fuel use.

A source of consternation in later engagements, which, while it's unlikely to come up during the tutorial, it likely will later, is that catching enemy fleets of similar flight capability is grueling - especially since the game's AI, both for allies and enemies, in both the tactical and strategic sense, is pretty competent. Catching a specific fleet can become a very long affair of chasing them across the sector and catching them at a bad angle some time later, so you always have to weigh if it's really worth it to do so or not.

Phobos' Cutoff

The final aspect of the game to really comment on is the colonization aspect. Find a planet you particularly fancy, which isn't already held by a major power, and you can claim it as your own for the low low cost of a shitload of people, machinery, and other resources. Congratulation, you have claimed your not-very-free real estate. You are now a minor power, and can develop your colony as you wish.

Once established on a planet, you can direct the development of a series of addons, and for a system that most people might never interact with, I found it surprisingly-deep. There's all manner of structures you can construct into a limited amount of slots, so you combine the kind of development of the previously-mentioned Masters of Orion, with having to be canny and thoughtful about which improvements you want, rather than just plonking everything down. You also have the ability to appoint a governor to help improve efficiency of the colony - or place an AI core in charge, for great increases, but also risks if you ever try to remove it, to say nothing of how other major powers will harass you if they suspect, let alone discover, that you have an AI core at a colony.

You aren't limited to only one planet of course, you can expand as greatly as your resources allow, and this progression is the cherry on top of the positive Warband comparison to me - you truly do start off as the star captain equivalent of an unwashed peasant, and can push your borders all the way up to having a star empire or whatever that threatens the other established major powers. It actually realizes that often is promised but rarely realized.

It came from cyro-sleep pod number 05...

NEO Scavenger starts as it means to go on: with you being dropped in media res out of a cryo pod and into the not-quite-loving embrace of a “dogman” werewolf creature who thinks you could make a good lunch. Unlike a Dark Souls boss though, this is an entirely survivable encounter, indeed one you're meant to survive, unless you were dumb, and any manner of different skills you chose in the character creation will provides some means of either vanquishing this first foe, or more likely escaping it. This introduces us to a certain choice-based UI, where you are given situations which you can resolve using a variety of skills and attributes you possess, items in your inventory, or sometimes, things in the environment. This first encounter presents the game's bread and butter simple choices to the player in all their glory: both the fairly-good writing which rewards lateral thinking with entertaining events, and the likewise equally fairly-clunky user interface. Depending on what skill you use, you might dive through the window to escape, hack the door shut to keep it out of the room you're in, intimidate it away, or just 'prepare to beat its ass' - which you can actually manage (don't try that on subsequent dogman encounters in the wild unless you're very brave or very confident, though.) This serves as a highlight of how the game will provide you with many different ways to overcome most situations - with a few somewhat annoying exceptions I'll get to - and the flexibility this writing provides.

That's the start of the game, but not where you begin of course: character creation is both less complex and moreso than many would expect. Where many survival sandbox-type games would allow you to customise your player avatar, NEO Scavenger allows no such customisation, instead having a pre-defined protagonist character you play and can learn the history of as the game develops. The actual customisation as in deciding what abilities and drawbacks the player starts with, from a selection including being Strong, being good with Melee, Trapping, Botany, and so forth. Most of these skills are pretty self-explanatory, and they're all pretty useful. Perhaps the one that isn't immediately evident is Trapping - this also includes outdoor survival tasks as well, such as - importantly - starting fires. Absent it, you can start a fire if you have a lighter, but that's about it, whereas with the Trapping skill you can use focussed sunlight, friction from nearby branches, and other such things. The other skills are largely self-explanatory in their branching choices they present. The intricacy of several choices presented by each skill allows a variety of character 'builds' to be successful in play. I have yet to come across any build (short of intentionally taking no skills at all) that doesn't feel viable if you know what you are doing; of course, certain builds are going to be easier for certain playstyles than others - for my part, I simply went melee, strong, and trapping and bludgeoned the beasts of the wilds to submission to ensure my survival, but less impatient gamers are going to find they can sneak about too, hide tracks, hack computers, and so forth. At least in the skills - we'll touch on other stuff below - there's some tangible breadth to the gameplay on offer here.

“Stock or spectator?”

Where the game falls apart is in this respect has less to do with the design, and more to do with the execution: especially as regards the user interface. Lets not mince words here: NEO Scavenger is an old game, but not that old, and while it is designed in the venerable and now obsolete Flash, Flash alone doesn't excuse the awkward and kind of clunky manufacture. Let's back up though: surely you're wondering, well, what's so clunky about it now, then? It has to do with how the back-end of the game is designed, which then translates to the user interface as well: everything in the game is an item. Be it an actual item, a place on the map you can interact with, or the abilities the protagonist possesses - it is all an item. This exacerbates problem that on its own would be trivial, and not worth mentioning: to use anything means clicking and dragging it from the available selections in one of several different screens. On its own it such a drag & drop UI would be a bit ponderous and slow, but would not be egregious; however in combination with a system which means you have to do that for every single thing without exception, you are left with a UI that while not terrible, feels like it needed some smoothing out to make it function and flow more smoothly.

The combat also stumbles through an inelegeant design. In this specific context, however, it isn't the UI, but rather the mechanics of the combat itself. Indeed, the user interface is functional enough: you are given a display with your status, the enemy's status, their distance, the last action either of you took, and buttons for you to choose what actions to take. Now don't get me wrong, it's not going to win any awards for flashy or effective UI design, but it's perfectly functional here. Rather, the problem I can see someone having here is that the combat is very slow and the feedback is minimal. If you had to feed a dog with food equal to the amount of feedback you get about things in combat from NEO Scavenger, well, the SPCA would be taking that dog away from you, let's say that much. I've certainly had worse, however, the problem with having a combat system like this where the feedback is entirely text, and the pacing is very slow, you're going to have people endlessly clicking away to get through the encounter without it taking all day and missing things. In MUD gaming we often call this “getting scanned out” - you're scanning the text for only the essentials to begin with, and because it is such a crawl of very-similar messages it all starts blending together, and you miss out on things. Of course, this can be somewhat resolved by, you know, slowing down as you go through the text, but given you're going to be reading the same 10 or so lines again and again without any considerable variation, well, I for one can forgive one for wanting to plow through. The pace is slow, ponderous, and not in any calculated way which adds to the experience.

“The Glow”

A lot of what saves the game is how the game environments are described, and indeed, the principal component of a good sandbox game is having a sandbox that is enjoyable. The world drenches itself in intrigue amidst the post-apocalyptic bones of a cyberpunk world where an indeterminate something went wrong, and you're mostly left to your own devices to figure that out. Through florid prose and the occasional splash of pixel art, the dsecriptions do an excellent job of building that intrigue, and of making the player ask questions about the game world, its inhabitants, and what lead it to the state its currently in. The writing here isn't front-and-centre, and I will grant that it does stand out a bit more because of the very tepid and utilitarian writing in the other aspects of the experience such as the combat messages, but there is a flair to the prose in how the world is described that makes it captivating. Accompanying many of those descriptions are some truly-gorgeous pixel art pieces, and while they were sparse to come across, they were always welcome when I did find a new one, and it served as at least an early motivation to see more in the game to see more of them. I realize that pixel art is very much a “take it or leave it” thing for many people, but they're quite well-done pieces in my subjective opinion, anyways, and they add to the game.

But May, I can hear readers whom have gotten this far saying already: that's the side stuff, ultimately - what about the scavenging? Well, that's the rub: it is an moderately-engaging portion of the game that manages to scratch the “just one more go” gambling-urge to test the RNG again and again, just to see if you get lucky the next time. The games' skill and item combinations are in aid of that goal quite well, but while I can certainly see some people quite enjoying this mechanic, I also see it wearing thin relatively quickly, and that's due to the game's chief flaw other than the interface: after providing the player with an interesting world and arraying a selection of tools before them with which to interact with it, it then proceeds to do very little with said. In my head I think of this as the Bethesda problem: you have a developer which is more talented in crafting a world than narrative, so you have a world which beckons you to discover the many things hidden in its far-flung nooks and crannies, but very little actually happening in that world. There's maybe a couple handfuls of different sites to try to scavenge from, they have a fixed loot table with given drop percentages, and, therefore, it isn't long before you have a feel for what all is on said table, and it in turn rapidly becomes rather repetitive. There's enough here to appeal for a while, but not long.

And so we finally come to the last topic, really: the narrative. I saved it for last because I feel of all of the components to this thing, it encapsulates the overall quality in one nice little microcosm. The narrative we do have comes across as stilted, somewhat slapdash, and it has several good ideas, that ultimately are let down by patch, half-realized execution. In the first draft of this review I wrote, I went on at a little bit of length with some of the problems with the narrative and I quickly realized that, despite just being one lengthy paragraph, in writing that much, I had in essence spoiled a considerable tract of the game story; more than the majority of it in fact. And, indeed, this is the part I struggled with for an inordinate amount of time, because to speak frankly for a moment, even picking a single example to expound upon here is taking a significant chunk of the game narrative. So, lets just leave it at: there's good ideas here, but there's not nearly enough of it, as with a lot of the game. While I'm often myself quoted as saying that “wanting more of something isn't the worst complaint” - and that is true - there does come a point where there's just not enough there to solidly recommend, and well, we have it here.

Elderborn places you in the sandals of a barbarian warrior - starting with the ability to choose a male or female player character, and at which difficulty you will play - of which there are four: ranging from “Normal” to “Hard AF”. The developers are not winning any points for originality there, but they're also not joking in the name: Elderborn is excessively challenging on the highest setting, being essentially the game's “Nightmare” mode - it isn't even trying to be fair. For the record, my own playthrough was completed on the third option, which still was significantly challenging, and especially with the bosses I got my arse handed to me more than once. "Normal" in comparison is a breeze if you understand the mechanics, so in practical terms, it can be considered the easy mode. Indeed the challenge is well-graduated: each of the levels gives the impression of an appreciable increase over the other. This is not some STALKER silliness where it is actually more advisable to go on the harder setting or anything such as that.

I believe I should note, for those that look for this sort of thing, that “male” or “female” choices are the entire breadth and depth of any character appearance modification. I don't particularly feel that it detracts from the experience, but some people do look for that and want said personalisation, and, well: you won't find it here. Honestly, this is all in first person with the only appearance otherwise of the protagonist being in the concept-art-gallery style of cutscenes, so it would be ill-placed if it was included, in my opinion. Regardless of personal opinions however, that character creation system is not there if you were looking for it. Further customisation of the character takes place entirely through advancing attributes - which we will touch on a little further in.

The Call of Jurmum

You begin at the bottom of tombs underneath the city, tasked with foiling the city's great scheme or whatever - I have to be honest, the dull, droning voice-over of the female protagonist over the cutscenes explaining the premise had me mentally check out very quickly, so I couldn't truthfully claim I followed the plot that was presented in the cutscenes. And while I'll talk about the rest of the sound later, this is an immediate low point - well, more akin to the bottom of a chasm - in it. The voice actress has no emotion, inflection, or even variation in the delivery, resulting in cutscenes that are a monotone, droning narration that even when I was trying to pay attention, I simply didn't retain at all. Writing this now, I couldn't relate to you the intro cutscene without going back to watch it again, for instance. I did manage to pick up the better parts of the story through that storytelling present in the environment - and indeed, that represents probably the better weight of narrative in the game, between that and the boss encounters. In fact, I would go so far as to double-down on that: one would be perfectly-fine with the environmental story-telling alone; which does somewhat beg the question of why they included the cutscenes when the voice-acting is such poor quality. Well, to be flashy and draw people in, of course, but this smacks somewhat of trying to sell the thing when I've already bought it.

On the topic of marketing, a lot of the initial traction this game received was from it being another entry in the ever-growing catalog of “souls-like” games, and that is not a comparison completely without merit, as some of the central advancement mechanics are at the very least “inspired” if they are not lifted from Dark Souls whole-cloth. You start with three healing phials, and using one of a variety of convinently-spaced healing fountains refills them as well as your health, when you use them. Much akin to the bonfires from its predecessor, doing so respawns all the enemies, and refills your vials. Additionally, you can only level up at one of these places. To be precise though, you do not need to use the fountain to level up - just be in the proximity of one; it's usually optimal to do so, though, as you'll gain more experience to push you further in advancement by doing so, however.

To call it a complete lift is not warranted, however: Elderborn differs from Dark Souls in a very specific way that changes that core component of the mechanical critical path. Where Dark Souls only allowed you to refill the Estus Flasks and their various counterparts in the other competitors at the resting-points, Elderborn slowly refills the health gems with each kill, allowing for a markedly more aggressive and fast-paced gameplay style. One of my big personal criticisms of Dark Souls - a series I probably will eventually get to writing retrospective reviews on at some point - is that progress can slow to an absolute crawl if you are under-powered for a given segment and needs slowly grind your way up. Having the healing recovery items slowly be increased as you defeat your opposition, allows the player a much faster general clip of progression, and it mitigates the more difficult sections, in turn making the gameplay much less of a slog. All in all, I find it a solid improvement, and more on point, a considerable difference from the competition it emulates with these designs.

The Blade is Drawn

The other major deviation from Dark Souls in terms of the progression is that of character development: whereas Dark Souls has a class-based and intricate progression which is more item-focussed, the advancement of Elderborn is a simplistic progression of three basic attributes. You have three, and each one translates to simple benefits: Might is the pure damage of attacks and your handful of skills, speed is movement and attack speed, and Resilience is basically your amount of hit points. Each gives you a few active skills and several passive bonuses for progressing them, but other than that, I found them unmemorable. I could not recall what the active skills were without going back into the game to look it up, which is a fact that in its mere existence communicates how impactful anything but the raw increase of damage, speed, and endurance mattered to the overall combat.

The active abilities you do get across the progression aren't too much to write home about, to be honest. The one you'll actually use a fair bit is a short-ranged dodge or sidestep that let you be much more mobile with your combat even in its lowest level version, and I find a lot of the complaints of unfairness come from those who haven't come to grips with the evasion mechanic. I actually kind of don't get this: I must admit my mobility impairment can make me all thumbs with something such as the finer points of parry of block systems in a lot of these systems, but in Elderborn's case, it is snappy and responsive, so the only real problem is ranging it, but given that the feedback is good and immediate, that's something you can work out with a little practice. In my opinion, I do not think it is on the developers in that case. However, the flip side of this is that the skill ceiling of the ability seems very low as well, so proficiency with this ability becomes very binary: you “get it” or you don't - without much seeming to be possible in the way of optimization for it, other than positioning. This makes something that is usually a big deal sound as if it is not one - and in this case, that would be correct, because it isn't. We'll touch more on the map design later, but it is very twisty-turny passages that only occasionally give you enough room that positioning becomes a huge factor. The potential to fall to your death tends to limit one's willingness to experiment, after all! As to the other abilities, I used them so rarely I honestly couldn't recall now as I'm writing, which should tell you how much of a factor they became in my gameplay.

That's not to say what is there is bad: the combat, at least at first, appears very stylish, fluid, and it possesses a momentum that only grinds down in the later game. The combat mechanics themselves, in my opinion, are the best I have seen at the time of writing, at least in the first-person perspective: the weapon hits are very visceral and impactful; the distances at which weapons connect with targets or yourself feel true and correct, so you are not wiffing things that you think should have hit, or dodging things and getting hit anyways, as can often happen; and the short dash/dodge you do have in the abilities list is intuitive enough that you have a lot of mobility in the combat. Mechanically, you have a system that if it was any tighter, one would be in danger of suffocation, and it manages to have a low skill floor and high skill ceiling, which is to say in less pretentious terms: it truly is “easy to learn, hard to master.” That's not to say it is perfect: there are a few clipping issues I had with things not quite colliding as they should, and there were a few infrequent bugs like that. In one particularly egregious instance I tried to jump over an enemy with a lunge attack and ended up bouncing off them at such a trajectory and angle I was projected out of the world, at probably world-record-breaking speeds; which, unsurprisingly, killed me. Those bugs never detracted from the game enough for me to stop having fun with the combat though, and let me tell you, the kick ability to literally punt critters off ledges never got old. Never.

Vertigo

Where Elderborn falls apart with weapon selection, is in what I call the “chainsaw problem”. What is the chainsaw problem? You have a weapon that changes what is in that binding slot, that is considered to be an upgrade, but more like a sidegrade at best, which, in turn, causes it you to have to constantly switch from the 'default' side-grade weapon to the more desirable original one. I take this terminology from the original Doom and Doom 2, where the chainsaw is actually less desirable than the fists in the higher difficulty modes if you have the Beserk Pack power-up, so if you have a chainsaw, you constantly have to switch to the chainsaw and then to the fists, every time you change over from a gun. In Elderborn, you have a great variety of weapons: a sword, a spear for less damage but greater reach, the hammer which breaks through terrain obstacles and enemy blocks, the sickles which attack very quickly, and the Sword of Janus, which is a big chonkster of a sword which has a wide, sweeping arc meant for crowd control. Most of these weapons have a side-grade replacement - perhaps all of them do and I simply missed some of them. The worst example of the aforementioned issue is in that of the katars, which are meant to be a weapon where you get increasing damage combos if you keep hitting the same enemy in succession. In theory, this makes them ideal for the bosses, or so one would think - quickly one realizes that since there is a “time out” on that effect, and all of the bosses have mechanics which you need to dodge, weave, and evade to resolve, then it quickly becomes apparent that the moderate damage of the quick scythes that the katars replace, is more desirable than a weapon that starts weaker, but becomes more damaging with successive hits. In most cases, your DPS is going to be lower using the katars compared to the sickles, unless you are extremely precise and quick about resolving the mechanics. Even then, in checking other player's footage to gut-check my own experience and observations of the two weapons, most players I watched preferred the scythes over the katars; yet, since the katars are in the slot first, you would basically end up having to switch twice to get the weapon you actually desired. While you can train the muscle memory around this double-switch necessity of the interface, it was a constant annoyance throughout gameplay. There are other less egregious examples: the side-grade spear weapon called the “Golden Spear” changes the block to a less easy-to-use block for the 'benefit' of kills dropping more essence (though it wasn't enough to feel worth it), and the specialized “Golden Cleaver” replacement for the Sword of Janus which is huge damage … but you cannot heal while wielding it, making any use of it require Doom Eternal style fast weapon-switching - and not wanting to give myself carpal-tunnel syndrome, I avoided it. Indeed, in subsequent playthroughs for getting screenshots and double-checking things, I avoided picking up many of the secondary weapons altogether.

There are a variety of enemies to smack with your preferred weapon(s) of choice from the above, which go into a few groups: a variety of undead, “drowners” with leaping attacks, scorpions, Golden Army Soldiers, bandits, and a few other varieties I am doubtless forgetting. Each enemy type breaks down into a few specific sub-classes: for example, the undead have a standard zombie, a skeleton with javelins for ranged attacks, a sword and shield skeleton that more or less acts as a tank for the others, and to obstruct your free movement. Many of the enemy types are inventive and have different silhouettes - which makes them easy to identify in a crowd: the different armaments of the undead, or the Golden Army soldiers, for instance, makes them easily recognizable. There is one notable exception to this rule: the scorpions are mostly distinguished by size and colour - there's a normal red one, a yellow one that has more health, and a bigger red one that, essentially, needs killed twice: it'll come back after a short period. There's enough variety in what the different enemies do to keep it fresh, but not so much that it's overwhelming; I felt that Elderborn found a good balance here. I do have to confess being lukewarm on that point, but we'll come back to that.

Towers of Jarmum

One thing which stood out to me particularly was how each level dynamically opened up as well, through the game play - there was a feeling that progression in each area was not only broadening the level per se, but also having an effect on the game world. For example, in one level you "power up" several towers - lampshaded by the soundtrack title that I grabbed this section's heading from - and this not only opens up the area as you can progress to each tower in turn, but also changes the city, lights emit, more (hostile) people come around, and there's a likewise feeling that to progress, you're basically waking the slumbering giant that is the Golden Army entombed in that city. The traps also help both make the place alive - as they make sense diagetically - and also help flag the areas you've been through if you are backtracking, since most only trigger the once. There's also a considerable amount of environmental cues used well: a great one which comes to mind is the lighting in the area for a key of a certain colour, matching that key's colour. These kinds of things aren't the subtlest way to direct the player around a level, I will confess, but the transversal thereof is not the challenge of the game, and the design here has focussed on the combat; a focus I support and think is the best course here.

To circle back, the opposition that populates these levels feature a very neat flourish of visual design to tell their health without visible health bars or anything like that: the undead, from the standard normal zombies, to the rolly mummies, to the armoured ones, all have “strange glowing maggots” (as the lore entry calls them) that cover them, which, as you damage these creatures, start to fall off in number, until they are dead. Or … more dead, they are skeletons and zombies and such after all. Likewise, the lava scorpions in all their coloured varieties have colourful markings that will dim and diminish until they dinally die, and the magic arms of the Golden Army will become duller as they are further and further pressed. Each enemy has a visible, diagetic way to tell their health, which is an interesting and not-often-seen bit of immersion in such a game.

In essence, there are five types of enemies: undead, corrupted humans, the various scorpions, bandits, and the Golden Army soldiers. Each of them have a few subsets, though to be honest, with the exception of the corrupted humans, they can be typed into standard varieties: a standard melee unit, a hardened melee unit that requires either a parry or block-break (or clever maneouvering), and a ranged unit. Corrupted humans are the enemy type that seems to get away from that, with the leapers that try to drown you in water, and lepers that will try to lunge and flank you requiring much more mobile combat than the positioning dance, since they will aggressively press the action. I'm a bit on the fence on the enemy variety, to be forthright: I would have preferred more mechanical differences between the different ones, but this also is one of the pain points of indie game thrift, and there certainly is enough here.

Point of No Return

There's one thing that really stops me from giving this game an editor's choice stamp, or otherwise give it more glowing praise, and honestly it isn't the voice-acting, terrible as it is, or some lack of diversity in mechanical or enemy design. No, the chink in this games armour is the interface design and controls. That's not to say they are terrible, but they lay a constant low-key sort of pull on the general quality of the game. This wades into territory both myself and my readers are probably familiar with: this is a game obviously designed for console controllers, and it shows. An obvious example exists in the whole “press and hold” thing from console - and with the keyboard and mouse as controllers this feels needless and obtrusive, and often clumsily impedes the game flow. Likewise, the weapon-switching with q uses a wheel clearly meant for an analog stick, and perhaps I'm just rubbing up against my mobility impairment here, but it does not work well on the mouse and keyboard - especially in the heat of combat in a system which really wants you to switch between different weapons to select the ideal one for any given situation. So, in short: if you use a controller, you'll probably be alright, but if you use the PC's native controller: a mouse and keyboard, you're shortchanged by this game.

If you're just here to know if the remaster is worth picking up: no, it is not. I could not recommend the remastered edition over the original. If you're a new player you're buying the inferior version of the game. If you're a fan, you no doubt are going to be as irritated as I was that several of the gameplay modes have severe deficiencies now.

This review is intended to cover only the elements the remaster changed or modified - you can find the full review of the original game on Highland Arrow as well: Saints Row: the Third.

When Good Heists go Bad

With the rash of games which have been getting remasters in the market these days, it has become a topic of much debate whether a game is truly needing a remaster or if it is just a cynical cash grab to get the players to buy the game a second time. I was initially hopeful with Saints Row: the Third - Remastered because when initially teased it was made out that existing owners of Saints Row: the Third would get the remaster for free. That hope was quickly dashed when it actually released and I had to pay full price for it, which rapidly drained any benefit of the doubt I may have given it honestly.

I had ended up buying the game full price, so as for both myself and my partner Trish to play co-operatively in, as we always enjoyed doing so together when we had the chance with the original installment. This turned out to be a mistake, as the cooperative play was one of the things most deeply affected by the changes in the remastered edition. I don't know what they may have done which prompted it, but where before we had the occasional desync maybe once every few days we played, it became, instead, several desyncs and disconnects a session, including an almost constant nagging that the connection was slow. A warning it gives that is underlined rather severely by those drop-outs - but also a warning it gives which, given its constant nature, served as a nigh-omnipresent reminder that the netcode is significantly worse for wear in this outing, which given that one of the given reasons for remastering it was to improve that experience, in turn served to demonstrate how this remaster has failed at its stated, given purpose, or at least one of them.

I'm Free - Free Falling

Problems arose not only with the netcode, but also in the one category I would say the original game could have used technical improvement: the artificial intelligence of both allies and enemies alike. The AI in Saints Row: the Third - Remastered is as intelligent as a brick - and not a particularly sharp one. The original game had sufficient enough combat AI for both parties, but pathfinding in particular was always somewhat sketchy. An anecdote which comes readily to mind: when playing the original game with my partner co-operatively after my review, we had one mission where you have to ride shotgun while the AI drives the car around a pre-determined path. Well, we had one instance where the AI kept getting stuck doing the path: due to the fact that this was a combat mission and you have the whole high-energy explosions and car debris flying around and all that going on, the AI ended up forced off its route due to the destruction and broken cars in particular, and was unable to resume the normal path. Left helpless to do so, it just … randomly drove around in what I presume was the default driving pattern behaviour, no doubt the "fall through" case for the AI. This happened once in the original, in the DLC mission where you are chasing the clone Oleg. In the remastered edition, any case where this could happen, it did, and it became so egregious it basically stopped both any actual progress in its tracks - and any desire to play the game further.

The largest manifestation of this problem are in Guardian Angel missions. For those unfamiliar with the original game, Guardian Angel missions are a deviation of an escort mission: rather than being on the ground having to wander around or drive with a targetted NPC which you must protect, you are either riding behind them, or in an airplane above them, or similar. With the enemy AI being seemingly more suicidal, and the AI in both parts having both more pathfinding problems and, well, just problems in general, it makes these missions especially difficult to complete. I do have to confess, to be fair to the game, that even in the original the Guardian Angel missions were not the high point of the game to me, and even in said original version of the game, I did not particularly enjoy them; that said, however, I was able to complete each and every one of them without restarting even, except for a couple of the more difficult ones, which did take a couple of tries. In comparison, the remastered edition of the game some of these an exercise of frustration, with the AI happy to play right into explosions, other vehicles, road signs, people, and basically just every danger it could find, along with occasionally picking fights with NPCs which weren't even part of the event, but rather were just essentially set-dressing. These experiences quickly became one in frustration, and my partner and I lost patience with them without much time at all; I would go on to complete some in the single-player mode for completion's sake, but I think I have at least a fistful more of hairs which turned from blonde to white in the so doing.

We've Only Just Begin

Even if that was where the technical issues ended, those two points alone would be enough of a turn-off for some people. Let me do my best Billy Mays impression now though when I say: but wait, there's more! While the remaster does sport graphical upgrades, particularly in the lighting and reflections category, those upgrades have come at a dire cost: even on a well-overspecced machine, the framerate of the game tanks considerably, and frequently. To achieve the same framerate as the original game, a game that came out a decade ago I might add, you have to knock down the graphics until it looks like it might as well be the original first Saints Row game on a good day if you squint enough. To say nothing of how demanding it is to run it with the handful of graphical accoutrements that were added to the game as one of the key selling points of the remaster. On a GTX 1070 Ti - the upgrade of the third most prevalent graphics card by market share (with the #1 being the 1050 Ti, and the #2 spot being the 6GB version of the 1060) - the game dips under 30 in complex scenes fairly regularly at max settings, and usually maintains around 50-60 tops. When I knocked it down to "just as good as the original" - I got maybe 60-70 frames per second, for the cost of defeating half the point of getting the remastered edition to begin with.

There are a bevy of much less serious weird glitches or technical flaws as well. Pathfinding in general seems worse, as somewhat touched on above, but also the spawns for enemies seem much closer, and whatever algorithm that spawns random vehicles on the roads has had its random-generation messed up: when I was playing, both solo, and with my partner it was spawning maybe about half the vehicles on the road as cement mixer truck (including much more close to the actual posting of this review when I was double-checking to see if a very late, recent update changed anything in that regard, which - no, it did not.) NPC spawns seem not as obviously effected, however the ramp-up in cop spawns escalated much more quickly in the remaster, and there sure were much fewer mascots this time around. I'm willing to concede this may just be an abherration of the random generation of these items: but regardless it puts a thick underline on how that aspect of the game has been jimmied with.

One odd thing about the whole experience is the things that found the chopping block, too - I suppose because of technical ineptitude when they were re-implementing the engine. Some side features will be missed from the original, in this remastered edition. One that came immediately to the forefront for me, in trying to get some screenshots for the graphics incorporated into this review, is the "selfie" mode in the camera, which allowed you to take screenshots without the UI being present, is notably absent from this version. So, given that it had deigned that a perfectly-stable (without stuttering or rubber-banding) connection from my partner was a "Slow Connection" to which it would constantly overlay an intrusive message in the middle of the screen about, couples shots weren't happening without considerable frustration. "Is that the end of the world?" one might ask, and no, it isn't - but these things add up over time, and a key appeal of the customisation systems in these kinds of games is showing off to your friends and loved ones the things you make in them, in this case your characters and tricked-out vehicles. It isn't the only ommission - the radio tracks got switched around with the usual pains of music licensing, and I would say the replacements are less appealing to my own musical tastes, at least (though I'll happy admit that's a subjective assessment, and some may prefer the newer ones.) Another omission is many of the cheat options and exploits, and while I can understand cleaning up the latter, this is a remaster which seems to have forgotten the chief appeal of its sandbox was doing over-the-top, silly, and most importantly fun things in it. In that light, removing ways some people have fun with the game seems silly and counter-productive to the design goal of this kind of sandbox game. This isn't some high skill-ceiling game where you might introduce a lot of angst and frustration if someone can cheat, but rather a power fantasy sandbox where you character is introduced into an escalating series of ridiculous encounters for the sake of fun. In that light, this seems poorly-thought out at best.

Stillwater Blues

I feel, having now whinged myself inside out about the flaws and ways the remaster detracts from the original, that it is important to emphasise: the same game we loved here is underneath these scars and flaws. Time and what I can only determine is corporate greed have harmed it to some degree, but it is still an excellent game if you can put up with these shortcomings which have been introduced by the remastered edition. "But May," you might interject to ask, "surely then that means it is a game you'd recommend if you're telling us it's still a great game with those flaws?" To that, I can only reiterate my stance above: sure, it's alright, but with the original basically being often available for the price of peanuts in some stores and frequently discounted on sales, I could never recommend something asking full price which is an inferior version, over the original which is cheaper, more technically-competent, and does not bear these flaws introduced to the other game modes.

D.C. Meltdown

Much akin to Dusk which I previously reviewed, Ion Fury begins somewhat in media res. It starts with you in the shoes the protagonist in a bad while the big bad - voiced by Jon St. John - enacts his evil plan, smashing up said bar and sending the player in the role of Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison to enact justice for her spilled drink on the antagonist. I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek with the description there, but so is the game in its premise: it represents a love letter to old action flicks by way of retro-style FPS, built on the EDuke32 source-port of the Build engine.

The design of the first few levels is very dense, with all kinds of little touches and details that belie a degree of care and attention placed on the world-building and atmosphere of the game. Those first handful of levels are absolutely drenched in the dull neon glow of the stereotypical dystopian cyberpunk future, and feature a variety of small interactions with the game world: little rolly-chair sprites drift about and swivel, garbage cans can be blown up for the occasional small reward of minor health bonuses or ammo, and so forth. While some of it definitely has the ”look what we did with the Build engine“ vibe to it, it is all interesting enough that I mostly excuse that.

Fan Service

Where I don't excuse that density is where it lays impediments across the proverbial tracks of the actual game-play: much of the set dressing becomes obstructive, and it was not terribly long before I was literally tripping over misplaced objects, trying to keep the mobility you need to have to stay alive at higher difficulties. It's here I have to confess, I dropped down from the highest difficulty to the normal difficulty, because when I'm dying because of circumstances that feel based upon luck rather than skill, it rapidly diminishes my admittedly slim-these-days as-is patience. I am not the kind of galaxy big brain genius such as juvenile delinquent and future robotic overlord John Carmack, so unfortunately I am unable to predict the trajectory of some random rolly chair that is going to jauntily launch itself to be in my way. I'm sure that's more of a “me” problem than the game though, I say with absolutely no sarcasm whatsoever at all. And you know: while that was a (genuinely) hilarious a way to die the first time, the charm had worn off by the fifth. It's a minor gripe, certainly, and by itself, I would have just given it a pass, but as you'll likely surmise going through this review, by the time we're done we'll have enough petty complaints we can sew them together into an awful Christmas sweater, just in time to make its way through our COVID19-addled courier systems in time to disappoint our loved ones for Christmas.

Those of you in my audience familiar with the Build engine underlying EDuke32 that this game runs on already know one of the things that I am going to complain about here: Build engine is notorious for its weirdly-lethal doors. To developer's credit, they definitely have tried to minimize this, but you will absolutely have some door-related accidents in this game, doubly so if you're not paying attention to the doors and trying to move rapidly through the levels, as the game more or less demands at the higher difficulty. Given they only swing one way usually, if you're opening it from the wrong side too close, you're just going to die. Death by door is annoying enough, but while they tried to minimize the usual Build engine door faff, if not eliminate it entirely, there's some new weirdness to complain about with Ion Fury. I don't know if it's an EDuke32 oddity or another confusing intentional choice of the developer, but there were instances where just running into closed doors killed me, and while I may give a chuckle at the normal Build-doors issue, that definitely was not very humorous to me. Indeed, it started with laughing at dying to silly things in the overly-populated levels, but it quickly turned into getting annoyed. I can definitely see less patient people pitching a fit over some of it. I never got to that point, but I could feel the frustration.

Hazard Disposal

In those first levels, I was more than willing to forgive the level design having those intrusive bits and bobs, because they were still interesting, and at least some of that difficulty was me acclimatizing to the movement. I don't remember having as much problems with the original Duke Nukem, and maybe it's some artifact of the particular source port used, but the movement felt imprecise and “lurchy”. Jumping is perhaps the most obvious example - it moves you in an arc up, but then down also somewhat before restoring you to the neutral height. It was as if Shelly was doing jumping squats, and felt weird. I did eventually get used to it, but I never quite liked it. Replaying OG Duke to see if that's just something I never remembered, I went jumping around for a good amount of time in Hollywood Holocaust while doing my best to not get shot, and what I immediately noticed is that the jump there is more where it has a little bounce after - still a bit weird, but not the lurching monstrosity Ion Fury has. On its own merits, however, it isn't something that detracts from the game, but it does feel strange, and took that getting used to. Talking to one of the developers on Twitter when I brought it up and they interjected, this is a deliberate change. And to that I have just one question: why? Having the movement feel so start-and-stop absolutely wrecks any feeling of fluidity and precision to the movement, and it ends up feeling more akin to SiN than Duke. Which, as I may get to further unpacking in the future with a review of said, is hardly a good word said.

The problem with the set dressing becomes much more than the moving objects, however, but also one of map direction. Good maps utilize a variety of factors that generate a natural push and pull that guides a player around the correct path through the level, and when you have all these secondary presentation elements placed without a thought given to that, or consideration to how it may direct or, more accurately, redirect the player, you have the mapping equivalent of spinning the player around a dozen times and expecting them to walk straight afterwards. That, coupled with the game's tenancy to spawning enemies in behind you, you have some of the maps - especially in the latter half of the game where they have less natural landmarks - are made very confusing to navigate. Now I do confess to being blonde as fuck, but I also tend to be the one in my group of friends who can generally bumble her way through these sorts of environments okay, so there's several others that are probably going to have it rougher than I, which is not a good prospect in this instance. In the end, the presentation wows, at least while the effort lasts, but that eventually tapers off, and when it does what you are left with is a confused map design that ends up disorienting to the player. It looks good, but it plays poorly.

Haskell's House of Horrors

A related issue is how those complex and complicated environments make discerning what is happening at a glance difficult, which is important if you want play with a high skill ceiling to be tenable. Let's directly compare to Doom, since it really is the grand-pappy of the genre. If you look at most of their line-up, each of them with perhaps the arguable exception of the zombieman and the shotgunner have a very clear and distinctive outline that you can use without even taking a moment to process the rest of what's going on to be able to know what kind of enemy you are dealing with. The rank and file of Doom's enemies are the zombiemen, imps, demons/spectres, and cacodemons - each of them quite different from shape from the others. The zombieman has a plain human shape, the imp has a bunch of horn protrusions, the demons are hunchbacked dump trucks, and the cacodemons are big, angry raspberries. Contrast this to Ion Fury where, while you do have a variety of enemies, the rank and file, as in Blood, consists of a bunch of guys in different-coloured robes, and as such enemies in this game are considerably more difficult to distinguish from one another. This is exacerbated by the fact that the red-robed dudes can pretty much insta-kill you with their shot from a distance, even on the easiest difficulty, and this skews things into the unfair end of not-well-designed. This does actually clear up the further in you go - the less dense maps make distinguishing them apart easier, but that's coming at a cost of the maps being less and less inspired the further from the starting maps you wade. Throw a horde of enemies in that appear to be hit scans into that mix, and well, I was just done with trying to get through it on the hard difficulty. The challenge didn't feel fair, and the game was not pulling me in enough to want to put up with an unfair difficulty for the sake of saying I beat it on the hardest setting.

To try to help ameliorate this, Ion Fury gives you a great selection of different weapons: a revolver, an electrified stun baton, “bowling bombs”, a chain gun, an SMG you can dual wield if you grab two, and a crossbow which is basically the sniper weapon. Each of these has a tongue-in-cheek name, such as the revolver being named “Loverboy”, and while its a bit over the top, that is entirely expected for a game of this sort, and they only add to the theming. Each of them feels and handles well, with different attacks and mechanics that give a great deal of variety and cater well to several different FPS play-styles, and the secondary attacks add even more options to the player. An example of this is how the secondary-fire mode of the revolver allows you to track enemies for a guaranteed hit - at the cost of some time. Each of them does have those costs and benefits and that's some genuine good design - there isn't one weapon that is leaned on more because it's more powerful, or “OP” as the vernacular goes, but rather if you do end up leaning on one weapon and using something less, it will be because you gel better with those choices. The game does very well with this, and it represents one of the pain points that made me as frustrated with the game as I am no doubt conveying in this review - as I have unfortunately had to say a few times in the past as well as now: I wanted to like this game considerably more than I actually did end doing. And the weapon variety is one of the key factors that contributed towards the positive end of that. Even that isn't without problems though: the projectiles don't often line up with the sights, the most egregious example probably being the “Penetrator” (hue hue hue) SMGs, which fires above and to the right of the crosshair, and the reverse is true of the opposite weapon if it is dual-wielded. Not a huge problem sure, but it does show a certain lack of attention to detail, and I can say with some certainty that someone with the sort of training and general Badassery™ that Shelly is supposed to have would understand how to zero a firearm's sight.

The All-Seeing Eye

The reason for which I bang on so thoroughly about how the maps present issues to the gameplay is they truly are a set of caltrops thrown across all the other mechanics, and even something I quite took to - the weapon variety - is affected by it. There's a variety of ways they manage to: mis-aligned crosshairs are common and annoying enough; but when the secondary fire of the revolver fails to track enemies because of map clutter, or across gaps, you start to see how the environment design and the game-play design were designed seperately and without careful consideration of one another. Another example of this is present in how the electric baton hitting environment objects can charge them - something they use a couple of times, and then promptly forget about. I think we can blame that one on the levels themselves become more “filler-like” and less inspired as they went on.

There's more, but I feel as if it repeats that same core problem, and these are all sympthoms of that core, underlying cause. And I don't want it to feel like I'm entirely down on Ion Fury - while I certainly have gone on at some length, harshly I have no doubt, some will say, I am being quite genuine in saying that I wanted to be fonder of this the game a lot more than I actually was. It's a game with a female protagonist, which to admit personal bias I prefer, set in a cyberpunk setting I am absolutely a mark for, with an attention to environmental design that I usually love, as someone who used to do a lot of hobbyist maps herself. It's always neat to see that kind of attention, even when it doesn't quite gel with the gameplay.

Corporate Chaos

Another point worth mention is the voice acting: Jon St. John of Duke Nukem fame absolutely hams it up as the game's villain and it was clear to me this was a role he had a lot of fun with doing - the energy he conveys in the acting is amazing and genuine, and his performance along with Valarie Arem emphatically help carry the game a lot. It has a lot of personality that it conveys in a sparse handful of voice lines and there's a pretty good example of indie game thrift on display there. They do as much as they can with either of them despite it not having a lot, and the interactions are easily a high point in the game, even when the game itself was well beyond the point of annoying me. At the end of the day, I'm harsh on this game because it was so close to being my favourite amidst this trend of modern “retro” shooters - but the design just gave up halfway through in so many ways, and well, now I can relate when some guy I know complains about being blue-balled over something, because I imagine it feels something like this.

I am struggling a bit to wrap up here, so lets leave on the natural endpoint of the game and the last factor I haven't touched on yet in some way: the boss fights in the game. In many ways, the boss encounters are emblematic of the game as a whole: a spectacular presentation that fails to really gel with the actual gameplay design. The first boss gets dropped in a big smashed up road area, heralded by the Build engine's classical explosions and all manner of sound and thunder. An impressive entrance - for the least-impressive boss fight I have ever played in one of these games. It's just a big hitscanner with a ton of HP and a secondary attack that makes the Cyberdemon's rockets look more as if they are water balloons than explosives, even on the normal difficulty setting. Following afterwards is basically a big glowing red weak point on wings - which is basically entirely invulnerable otherwise. Both of these first two bosses feel more akin to battles of attrition with a high degree of luck involved, than any test of skill, and with the second, given that it's a degree more of a damage sponge, it was not a particularly enjoyable fight. The first mech boss at least dazzled with the presentation, even if the mechanics were subpar. I won't spoil the final boss, but while the gimmick is actually interesting that time around, it stays around far past the point of it being fun, much as the game itself.

Cero Miedo

Dusk starts as it means to go on: with little establishing context we find ourselves suspended from meat hooks we break free from and having to quickly melee two chain-saw wielding farmers wearing what appear to be paper bags on their heads. It could be said this is a microcosm of the whole experience: the game does give some little tidbits of story here and there - largely through the seemingly-lost art of environmental storytelling. A picture of someone on the wall here, a message or a note there. I'm not going to get too into it for fear of the kind of spoilers that people get very shouty on the internet about, but I will say that what's there may not be Thief-level heights of this art, it's definitely pulled off well, and it leaves the story there to be explored by those whom want to have it, rather than forced in your face, like every bloody FPS after Half-Life appeared to feel obligated to do. As someone who as she ages has been finding her patience with the industry trend of cutscening us to unconsciousness running thin, I definitely appreciated that much. What's here is good, but it is not intrusive.

The hardest difficulty in the game, that very heading - "Cero Miedo" - translates to "no fear". I find it apt, and kind of emblematic of the approach the game has to things in general. This isn't a game that is looking to pants you, or use artificial difficulty to hamper you. It "just" asks you to move decisively, quickly, and to make no mistakes. To play with utmost skill to the best of your ability. This is something I suppose it's easy for me to wax poetic about these days, as I find as I age, artificial difficulty is something I chafe more and more about, but it is a refreshing approach, and I wanted to bookend the start of the meat and bones of talking about mechanics by elaborating on that overarching theme. It is a certain je ne sais quois that permeates each and every of these mechanics and while there isn't some sort of mathematical formula that I can put forward to definitively and objectively declare, "this game respects its player." Yet, I can say nonetheless, that is the impression I had while playing Dusk, and it's a lot of why I return to it, even years later now, when this review is nowhere near timely or really relevant to most. It has its failings, but they seem to be genuine mis-steps or limited resources, and a lot of what this game does right, seems to come from a place of genuinely wanting to make a good FPS. There's a lot to be said for that in today's cynical, cash-grab world.

Mine Control

To be able to demand such an exacting display of skill from the player and not end up being an exercise in frustrating face-rolling, a game has to have very tight controls, responsive and effective weapons, and good performance. In all three of those I had some initial misgivings with when I was playing Dusk, but as I acclimated to the game, said turned out to be rather unfounded, and I'm all the more glad for it. The game is not without flaws, and I do have a complaint with the weapons that we will get to in a moment, but for the most part it flows well, and that results in what is a high skill ceiling for Dusk, especially compared to many of its contemporaries. Let's go over each of the three in turn.

I have to admit: it took me a while to acclimate to the movement of Dusk, but I think that's more "it's not you, it's me" - and I'm not saying that to soften the blow to a jilted lover. To unpack: when I think of retro shooters, I'm from an earlier era than the various Quakes and Unreal. That time of my life was spent mostly playing RPGs if I'm honest. No, when I think of retro shooters the one that comes immediately to mind is Doom, with the Build engine games such as Shadow Warrior and Duke Nukem not that far behind. While Duke Nukem and Doom are on very different engines, the movement was more similar than it was different and very linear. Something similar to Quake - which one can tell even with a mere glance at the screenshots on its various store pages is Dusk's more direct inspiration - has a much more kinetic movement style. When I say this, I would describe it as "lurchier". This is best described with the way the guns move in Dusk, which is a little different, they adjust the angle and the camera rolls and yaws a bit with the movement. At first for me this was kind of disorienting I must admit, but it is a very crisp and precise movement (again, much as its inspiration Quake) so once I acclimated to the change, it was quick, responsive, and most importantly, mobile.

Handgun Harmony

The firearms themselves are a varied lot without being too esoteric and out there. None of them are particularly breaking the mold or super-creative, but each of them are implemented well enough: each has clear and crisp sound, the projectiles are clear to see, and hit feedback enemies is instantaneous and unambiguous. For melee weapons, you have a pair of scythes, and then the firearms include a pistol (which you can get a second of to dual wield), and then a shotgun and super shotgun (both with familiar function to Doom veterans like yours truly), an assault rifle for an automatic weapon, a hunting rifle for a slow and highly accurate weapon, a crossbow to which the gimmick is the projectile overpenetrates and can hit enemies through walls and other enemies and so forth, a mortar thats basically the pipe bomb launcher from TeamFortress with another name, and the 'riveter' which is basically a rocket launcher that had it's Wheaties for breakfast. It's a standard but solid lineup, but there are also a few other esoteric additions I had not named (indeed, I'm sure a Dusk fan reading this is going: that's not everything!) There is also a sword that is a high damage melee weapon usually stashed away in secrets, the cigar which is kind of a non-weapon but you start with it and it allows you to slowly regenerate health (all while staring at one of those "S" shapes everyone of a certain age was drawing in middle school because memes or something), and finally the one, the only, the most legendary weapon in Dusk:

The soap.

Subject of many memes, derisive and joking both, is Dusk's essential joke "weapon" - the soap. It is not a weapon in the true sense - but rather an environmental object. Each and every environmental object in the game have values for damage they give an enemy when picked up with the (rather wonky) physics engine and thrown at an enemy - it (not-actually-)coicidentially so happens that the value assigned to the soap for this, is 1e+09, or 1,000,000,000 damage. Each level has one soap item, that you can carry with you. It is far too clumsy in the physics engine to be throwing around more than once or twice, but it does become a bit of a panic button if you find it and drag it with you. Generally, I ended up where I used it once or twice after I found it, and then left it. It became too awkward to try to take it with me. It was, nonetheless, a sensible chuckle to defeat a boss enemy with one - if a bit of a joke that runs on much longer than the humour lasts.

Beautiful Blasphemy

Controls are a subject I really wish I didn't have to consistently bring up in reviews, if I'm honest. People often tell me that doing so is unneccesary and that they are of the opinion that I spend overlong talking about them. I certainly agree I shouldn't have to spend as much time talking about them - in a world where we have DirectInput well codified and even someone's 108-button aircraft control panel thing complete with yoke and pedals is "plug and play" we shouldn't have to keep dealing with applications that do them poorly. Yet, at least until game developers decide to stop giving the PC hot garbage ports which are half-functioning at best, we are resigned to keep having to dredge up the topic, as input delay, multiple actions on the same key or button, and similar issues continue to plague us until present, at least time of writing. I shall merely have to hope for some halcyon future where this is the case no longer.

All the same, those readers whom think I spend too much time having to delve into port control issue are quids in today with this review, saving perhaps that qualifying statement, because the final part of that trinity I spoke of before with the difficulty is those controls, and there isn't much to speak of here: everything just works. The mouse control is good and responsive without being overly so, inputs are crisp and definite without any noticeable delay, and the keyboard controls the same. Everything is rebindable, everything is on its own key, and it's simply, really, the way things should be. I shouldn't have to be this happy things are done competently, but perhaps that's a good indictment of the industry as a whole right now that this is the juncture we're at.

Departure to Destruction

Having gotten past the core mechanics, here's about where we start to find thornier roses: the level has some peaks and troughs but it's generally decent - except the first act. I know I've lost some people the moment that they read those words, but bear with me here. The later acts have very great levels which marry inventive set piece ideas with great enemy placement and challenging fights which contain an equal bit of hallway fighting and arenas, rather than favourting one over the other. The first act however - I will happily grant its a very neat series of horror movie pastiche scenes. You see some great scenes with the scarecrow enemies on the farm fields for example and whatnot. The problem is ... they are levels designed to be impressive and pretty first, and levels in a video game second. The enemy place is erratic, and several of them don't flow in an easy to follow way. Duke Nukem 3D is a particular period example: the old games retro shooters pattern after were very good about starting out very linear, and opening up as you explore them, while still making it obvious where you have been and haven't been. It makes them appear to be part of a larger world while still having a clear start and endpoint. The first Act of Dusk is very "marketable" set pieces that make very pretty screenshots and wow with some of the gimmick encounters ... but once you get past that, they are the weakest levels after the very first one, in the whole set. Enemy placement is haphazard, the signposting is weak, and they largely lack the environmental storytelling that largely stands out later on in the game.

While this is mere speculation, it is easy to understand how the first act came to be the weakest: when the game was first placed in early access, it was this first act which was out there. It had to be flashy and draw people in so they could continue development, and I cannot call it unsuccessful in that much. However, it feels to me that, while a lot of the game grew, developed, and really became something more: a highly-refined retro shooter the likes of which even I myself have come to use as a benchmark to which I compare many others, these first steps in contrast, outside of that very first level, never got that treatment, and I am of the opinion that it shows in the rougher placement, easier bound breaks, and other signs that something isn't quite right; the later acts comparable to the hurrah of a flagship product made by companies with far greater resources than the developer in this case is ever likely to have, and they punch well above their weight, so to speak, in that respect - the first, in contrast, feels more akin to the kind of mid-tier stuff you were akin to find on PlanetQuake back in the day - kind of mid-tier competently made stuff that other than the occasional standout encounter feels neither memorable nor a waste of time. Popcorn levels. I kind of feel the same towards the first act here: I played it the once, it wasn't bad, but unlike some later levels, I never felt the need or desire to go back and replay them for enjoyment. The first act would have greatly benefitted from a second pass in my judgment, but so far as I can remember from early access, the only changes were to that very first level, and that makes it easy to understand why that one is the better of an otherwise kind of sterile act.

Occultivated

Of course, there is a brand of irony in the reason why a simply "pretty decent" first act comes across as weak as part of the complete experience being that the rest of the game is, to my reckoning, that much better that it stands out. One thing I really enjoyed with the game is it does a really good job of ambiance and environment. The soundtrack, composed by industry workhorse Andrew Hulshult, is Andrew at his best and most comfortable: an understated, very big sound stage that creates this feeling of what I can only call energetic dread, a soundtrack evocative of the feeling that one is facing the unknown and all that comes with it, but still driven forward to explore and combat it, which I daresay is a very natural and appropriate theme for Dusk. Coupled with an evocative palette of colours, inventive level designs in the later act, and everything placed together with a coherent and cohesive construction, everything just comes together well for Dusk; I suppose that is a sentiment I am repeating here, but it is indeed the underlying assessment of the game: it has its rough points, and might have benefitted from a little more TLC. What's here is still good other than those edges, other than those edges, though, like a minature model that was brilliantly moulded but needed the sprue from the creation process weeded and sanded down a little more than it got before it was hucked in the package.

Missteps do exist here: when the game leans heavier on the horror elements, it tends to be to the game's detriment. In particular, there is one enemy called the wendigo. It's basically one of the spectres from Blood - but it is fully invisible sometimes, not translucent. Okay, you may be thinking as you read this, that sounds derivative, but that in and of itself is not all that bad. Indeed I'd agree, some of the best things are send-ups to the things we loved in the past, this whole retro-shooter genre we examine an example of now being a brilliant and pertinent example. But there is something else, and it was such a bee in my bonnet: an annoying scare chord that plays every time, and let me regale you with my suffering: I was gaming using my Samson headphones and at even at whatever the normal, default volume was for the game, that was like a every single possible decibel of high mid and low trebles smash straight into my ear-hole; something probably not helped by the DAC it was plugged into, but this isn't a huge problem in most other games because they don't decide it is a good idea to have sudden loud noises of that nature. After a while you get used to it, but it wasn't scary, it wasn't funny, it was just actively annoying. It made me not want to play those levels, and I get it this is me being persnickety about things that drive me up the wall and many people won't find it that bad, but I did find it that annoying, so here we are. That was the big one for me, but there's one other thing like that I know would drive some of my subscribers nuts. This is a game with a flashlight. Okay, kind of generally annoying, no one likes low field-of-view, especially when that vision is further constrained in a very small circle like we're some fish-eye camera on a first-generation iPhone rather than an actual human being with eyes in our skull, but the game hasn't rubbed the salt it had prepared in the wound: it has several points where the flashlight "breaks" - taking it away from you. This is meant to be all scary and make it tense, but again, this ends up being more annoying than anything, especially since muzzle flashes haven't stopped lighting up your surroundings. So I hope you enjoy navigating by the light of your firearms discharging and enemy fireballs lighting things up. No? Yeah, me either.