Recent reviews by Chainsaws

I went into this game knowing nothing about it other than it had been recommended and a few snippets online and I think that was the best way to experience it. I'd describe it as more a spooky/creepy game than horror but what it does so very, very well is keep the tension and confusion without overwhelming you with cheap scares or unavoidable deaths. This is how a scary game should work. Some of the "fear" disappears later on as you unravel the story and learn what's going on and the ending I would rate as just good enough but the game remains challenging yet fun throughout.

I can definitely recommend this one, I thoroughly enjoyed it from start to finish.

I didn't expect this to be a game that I'd play for a long time but I was hoping for more than a couple of hours. It's a simple premise and it sounds like it's going to be fun but when you scratch the surface away it's not for lots of reasons:

Visibility is awful. I don't mean the facilities are dark, that's to be expected but everything is foggy, mushy and washed out. You can't read text on the screens unless you press your face into them, half the time your torch just reflects off the fog in front of you and makes it harder to see down a dark corridor. It just feels like I'm running around with grease in my eyes constantly.

The interface is very clumsy. I get the point that doors should take time to open so monsters can grab you etc. but having four hotbar/carry slots and not being able to select items with a key, the only way being to use the mouse wheel which you can't invert and for me it cycles the wrong way (won't bother everyone). Add in the visibility issue which affects the UI as well and swapping to your utility items is really frustrating. Not in a challenging way but in a way that feels like it was done as a cheap way to add challenge.

Nothing is explained. Again, maybe that's supposed to be part of the charm but it just feels cheap/lazy. How do we use the terminal to open doors? How do we sell items? I could go on but almost nothing is explained and it doesn't feel fun to discover it just frustrating that it's not explained and not intuitive.

Communication is a problem. We played "fair" and didn't use Discord while in mission but after finally working out that you can buy walkie talkies and the ship doesn't have a built in communicator you won't have enough cash to buy one for everyone and people not holding one can't hear voices from them very well. Having someone talk three rooms away drowns out the voice from the teammate monitoring you from the ship who is probably telling you something important. It's really hard to tell where sounds are coming from or how close things are.

Four of us played this and we're used to communicating on games but this just felt hard work in a tedious way. I'm sure you can learn the monster patterns and ways to counter them but we just avoided them with help from the poor sod who had to stay on the ship and practise his typing skills instead of having fun. The increasing quotas again feels like a cheap way to force you to up the difficulty and ultimately die. The monsters are good for a jump scare but there doesn't feel like any challenge, if you're not careful they surprise you and you die and if you are they never get close. If it looked a little cleaner and played smoother we'd maybe forgive some of its faults and give it more of a chance but unfortunately I feel like we wouldn't have our minds changed that it is ultimately a very shallow experience.

Update:
Despite really frustrating issues at launch the response from the devs has been good and a lot of issues are improving. It would be nice for some of the nastier bugs to get squashed a bit faster but there's a sense that a good amount of effort is being put in to resolve the problems and if the game continues this way I see myself getting a lot of hours out of it.

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Unable to even launch the game because "servers are at capacity". Can't even edit my controls let alone at least play a solo mission. No queue system just pot luck if you make it online and when I have managed to get on the game is full of glitches like falling through the map, missions not giving out rewards or being unable to buy upgrades. Will be refunding if this doesn't improve and I can't recommend anyone buy the game in this state.

There's a lot to like when you first get into the game and do your first few missions but it runs dry very quickly. It shows a lot of promise but it's very rough around the edges and badly needs some quality of life improvements but the devs seem to spend all their time on marketing on none on actually developing the game. I haven't seen even a minor update since I bought the game months ago and no talk of any actual upcoming features. At this point feels like the team lost their talented devs and are trying to hide the fact or it's just a scam. If you can put up with the old graphics classic Raven Shield coop gives the same gameplay with more consitency, shame.

Bought on a 90% discount.

The premise of Lemmings that eat brains was enough to interest me at such a low price and, well, that's exactly what you get. Some of the levels (and particularly the optional challenges) feel a little rigid. It's more of a thinking puzzle game than a sit back and watch your zombie hordes eat everyone sim. That's not bad just not what I was expecting and to be fair it's very true to it's Lemmings origins. I'm being a bit picky but personally I feel it would have been a nice touch to have zombie reinforcements walk on the start of the level every so often so if you mess up a level you can still complete it just much slower instead of restarting altogether, not so much from a gameplay aspect but it just feels wrong running out of zombies in a zombie apocalypse although that would ruin the challenge of some of the puzzles.

Surprising little gem that I bought on a whim and wasn't disappointed.

For the first few hours this game is great, maybe a little light on the things you can build but as you progress those options appear to expand. The point where it's fallen on its face is after you begin to need metal for your crafting. Ores can't be teleported and they're ridiculously heavy which means you have to spend so much time walking from one end of the map to the other over and over again to get enough to craft your new items. Spending hours finding and digging them out isn't enough apparently. Then you realise there's a wooden cart you can build to move heavy items faster but it turns out the heavier it gets the harder it is to move uphill and there is very little flat ground.

That's not so bad you think, I'm enjoying the atmosphere and I'm just here to relax. The problem is the stamina. On your 30th repeat of the same journey or when trying to get the cart to go over a dandelion you're going to need to run and this saps your stamina, walking or standing still lets it go up again but at a much lower rate. Now there are various things you can do to increase the rate it recovers but all of them are very short lived and time consuming to craft so there's little net benefit.

I finally had enough today when trying to get a cart of ores back home only to see a wave of basic enemies charge at me. I didn't see them as a fight or a challenge to overcome but as something that would leave me with less stamina. More time standing around not playing the game so that I can "play" a few more seconds (if you call moving items playing) and then stand around waiting again. Even if I put the difficulty up the enemies wouldn't be more fun they'd just take more of my precious, precious stamina.

Beyond this grind of collecting items and the odd boss fight there isn't really anything to the game except the building and again that becomes tedious because you're constantly hitting trees with an axe or digging rocks to get the resources to build the next little bit. Again limited by how much you can carry adding needless repetition. One point in the games favour here I should add is that when you remove your buildings you get all the resources back which is a really nice thing to see and allows you to be creative without worrying about perfection first time.

I'm really disappointed. This game has a lot going for it, it's doing a lot of new things and I see a great deal of potential but unfortunately, in my experience, when a game is lacking in real gameplay this badly it almost never recovers. I'd like to be wrong but at the moment if you took away the grind you'd have maybe a handful of hours of entertainment and then you'd be done.

I really enjoyed this game, in fact I didn't play anything else for the week or two after I first loaded it up. It's balanced very well and there are lot of choices in how to approach different situations. Limited resources constantly force you to adapt and find new solutions to problems and you're constantly weighing up risks against rewards.

Sadly I didn't feel any need to replay the game once I'd completed it. I'm not sure why, there's certainly the opportunity to play again with different play styles or approaches I just wasn't feeling it and I'm sure the majority of players who enjoyed the game would do. Despite the short amount of time (compared to some games in my library) I've spent with this it was thoroughly worth it. This game does a lot right and you can feel the effort that was put into it in every aspect, I'd recommend this to anyone who thinks it looks like their sort of game.

Ehhhh if you loved the other Borderlands games I'm sure you'll love this. Walking backwards and forwards through the maps to complete fetch quests and spending most of the game staring at the floor or opening containers and mashing E to pick up health and ammo is just not fun gameplay for me though.

Even better than the original! Such a simple concept but so much fun!

Fun, simple and addictive in that "just one more go" kind of way. It plays well and the controls feel responsive.

VR support is well implemented and has plenty of control options and adds something nice to the game but isn't necessary.