A great game which lacks Polish
Game has its own charm. It is refreshing to see tactical, hard ARPG Such games are almost unique and non existent. I was excited to try out this game. Sadly, while game is unique and I recommend playing it, it has many shortcomings which ultimately makes it flawed gem which needed a lot more time in the oven to reach its full potential.
Game has more bugs than your typical dormitory
Major issue in this game is abundance of bugs. In my playthrough, my dwarfs would randomly die on a bridge. They would get stuck in swimming animation after leaving water. Mobs would get permanently alerted to hell knows what and start looking for you. Characters will die somewhere where your heroes can’t raise him resulting in mission failure. There are plenty of bugs which stick their ugly head out through every playthrough and I’m both puzzled and amazed at how developers never thought to make bug squashing as their primary focus when providing post launch support. As it stands now, it is a buggy game and it can greatly frustrate you when you complete the mission only for it to bug out and force you to repeat it.
In game gimmicks are just annoying and pointless
Swamps. Swamps. Those bloody swamps. They are everywhere and heavily restricts your movement. Worse, you are supposed to go through them. However, your dwarfs randomly die in them. There is distinction of safe swamps marked by yellow colour while dark swamps are going to murder your dwarfs. The issue is that this timer is unforgiving. Even when you go through designated areas, your one dwarf will pass fine and the other one will die forcing you to restart the whole mission. It puzzles me how developers thought it was a good in-game mechanic as previously lifespan of your dwarf in a deep swamp was even lower. There is no timer, no indicator of how long your dwarf can be in that swamp. It just randomly dies in there, but game asks you to go through them. This results in very annoying gameplay when you are forced by a mission design to risk death by environment. While they hide optional fragments to boost your dwarfs, it is usually not worth the effort in finding them.
Camera
Camera. It is bloody atrocious when you have to target enemies on higher elevations. There was a mission where enemies were firing on me and I could not see them. In addition, often you will struggle to see ahead and plan your moves. Even if this is by design, it also prevents from seeing all enemies who can be alerted by your actions. This often results in being seen off screen and often being shot off screen.
Combat
Combat aspect. It is poorly made. Your dwarfs will not do anything. In combat they just sit there and await player input for even most basic commands. It is bloody frustrating that developers did not thought to make a decent combat system for this game. Enemies, fighting are all good, but since you can’t trust your dwarfs to do anything without micromanaging, it becomes a chore and you usually just use 1 dwarf to do all the fighting.
Stealth
Stealth. It is good system, but game cannot decide what it wants to be. Sometimes mission is designed solely for stealth. Other times there is simply no real way to use your stealth. Game constantly switches between stealth/combat/platforming, never being able to decide what it wants to be or either allows you to choose how you want to play it. It is made up of linear levels which are poorly designed for in game systems. Each level is designed to be beaten in one way specifically and it is rare to find a level which allows flexibility in how you decide to play. Also, make no mistake, while you can just fight, there is just too many enemies and game’s difficulty encourages you to stealth every mission at least to some extent. You can’t pull just a squad of enemies, if you go guns blazing, you essentially are going to fight an entire level worth of enemies. While others strictly forbids you to go guns blazing with out of place shamans or sometimes game arbitrarily says that you will fail this mission if you get detected.
Game balance
Game balance is also problematic. Enemies can dodge your skill shots by default. There is no counterplay to that outside of cheesing their AI by going around the corner. It is not “smart” dodge either. If you try to bombard them, enemies will do extreme dodging maneuvers which feel just cheap. Like a lot of enemies. For example, spear throwers have a constant pushback on their spears. This creates a situation where berserker gets permanently stunned by most mundane mobs.
Upgrades are either just uninteresting or flat out too powerful. Shadow is a good example. From a balanced stealth character, he can become a murdering machine which can solo entire levels by himself. He has upgrades which makes game mechanics pointless. Why bother about leaving bodies when you can get a skill which just removes them? Why bother distracting enemies if you can get a skill which teleports you anywhere you want and kills every enemy there you teleport to? Why bother about tactical play if marksman gets upgrades which removes all friendly fire? Etc. etc. Game is designed to play as dark soul-like, stealth game, but it does everything in its power to remove all the challenge and all in game interaction out of itself. I never had that much trouble and difficulty in beating levels than in tutorial when you do not have overpowered abilities. Game later on becomes easy. Even Shadow’s arrow ability (R button) is designed to one shot mobs, but is not balanced around bosses. It takes several shots from this low cooldown ability to kill a boss from across the map. I just put my dwarfs near the healing stone and sniped last boss from the shadows. Is this balanced?
On an entirely different spectrum, berserker is so useless on hard that I just leave him in rear to provide “moral support” for my other two characters. He just dies and achieves very little, especially at the end. Developers seem not bothered balancing him on hard difficulty themselves.
Story
Story was interesting at first. An unknown place. Three dwarfs exploring it. Figuring out what the hell happened. However, quickly story devolves from encountering mysterious fauna and bizarre aliens into helping them. At first it makes some sense, but soon it is mindless. We are here to fix our ship. We destroyed anomaly which prevented us from flying out. Then for some reason we have to help out native aliens which we suddenly understand and can communicate with. Alright, we help them, they tell the way out. However later we are doing nothing, but fighting pirates and helping local merchants when we are not even asked to help or have anything to gain. Story quickly loses its charm and we are reduced to doing random tasks from map to map.
Conclusion
In the end, game is fun. It is stealthy, dark soul like ARPG. It has tactical gameplay, it is hard, unforgiving. However it is not polished enough. It is full of bugs, full of poor design decision. Abilities and upgrades are not interesting. Berserker is too complex and weak. Range and stealth character are interesting, but for all characters, upgrades are boring or too powerful. Game lacks polish in every area. Its levels needs more flexibility. Mob locations needs flexibility. Game balance needs to be addressed. It is great proof of concept, an experimental game, but it just can’t stand as a full game on its own. If developers would ever make a sequel, merely addressing problems written here would make for a very highly rated and liked game.