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*sigh* I still have several copies of the Alpha in my inventory as steam gifts, because I was interested in this way back when. I played it again on this free weekend, and god I'm annoyed. There's so much good stuff in this! The aesthetic is cool, the guns feel great, the monsters are freaky (the scouts with the head tendrils are loving great), the whole tone is really good. The terminals are neat, the experience of navigating the levels and checking doors... There's a load of really good game here! ... and yet. There's a perfect storm of bad choices which make it fundamentally ill-conceived. It's very hard. The sessions are very long. The bots aren't capable enough to substitute for human players. The game doesn't scale in difficulty for less than four players. There's no in-game server browser; you've got a choice between random matchmaking or a hacky discord-based group matching system. It's just utterly obstructive to actually having a good experience! I had one really great session over the weekend, where I got in a group with three reasonably competent people from the discord server, and it was really fun! But I can't regularly spend 20+ minutes sitting around in discord waiting for some people to show up so I can make an attempt at a level which would take upwards of an hour if we didn't wipe at any point, and I don't have three friends who would all be interested in a hardcore co-op horror FPS who can reliably make time as a group to play this. It needs to be more accessible, not as in easier necessarily (though a bit of that wouldn't hurt) but literally as in more practical to actually play. And that goes triple because they're asking £35 for it, which is not a pricepoint where I'm gonna buy it on the offchance I can get a fun afternoon once in a while! It's such a shame, because I would throw my money at them for a version of this game that worked in single-player, or which was just a bit less punishing and had a proper server browser so I might stand a chance of getting a decent game with strangers.
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Jun 20, 2022 00:44
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 13:12 |
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