There's a million reviews for this game, and a massive number of them are complains about the core gameplay not being what they want. Which is fine, but I think a lot of these could have been avoided if there was a review that actually explained what this game...is. So I'll make one. This game is PRIMARILY Escape From Tarkov. At your home base, you set your gear loadout - armor, weapons, attachments, inventory items like grenades and medkits. Then, you leave on what is called a "Tour," which is a series of sequential excursions into procedurally-generated maps for the purpose of getting new gear, crafting materials, and recipes. These missions are what I would call "Fine." They're fine. Most enemies at the point of the game I'm at pose absolutely zero threat and only exist to be instakilled. There's a finite and somewhat small number of map options that you will encounter, and you're going to start seeing repeats immediately. In the snow area, there's one small house model, but with two minor variations, AKA one has a locked door in the back and the other one doesn't. Sometimes you'll see both houses in the same map directly next to each other. There's a large supermarket static map where that is always 90% the same, but with a small pool of Points of Interest that can be chosen, like a watchtower to climb or something. Like I said, you'll see the same locations over and over, and while the loot is randomized, the distribution locations aren't. So, the more you see each site, the faster you'll get at looting them. Obviously it's not great that the solution to repetitive maps is "just play the game faster" but, hey, the game's good but it's not perfect. So, after you finish like, five or ten or fifteen little maps, the end of your tour means it's time for Extraction Day, which is the tower defense portion of the game. Back at the base, in addition to your gear loadouts, you also set up your mobile base that goes with you to each map. There's a ton to consider here, and I think this is what people kind of wanted the entire game to be. You need to load up enough guns to fend off the enemy, but each gun requires ammo. You can make ammo dispensers, but each one has a 60s cooldown, so you need multiple. But, each ammo box also costs 100 "Material" - you get material for killing enemies (1 per kill), but your base also passively collects materials from resource nodes nearby. If they're out of reach, you can extend you're bases Zone by using pylons, which can also enhance your bases overall Power. Power also boosts the damage of all your guns, so you want to make as many pylons as you can. You can also build Small Generators to buff your Power, but these are base-mounted objects, so you need space to place them. You have a finite amount of space in your base on which to mount things - you could maximize that by making a million walls, but those will also block the line of sight of your turrets. Like I said, a ton to consider. The difficulty of the extraction and tower defense segment depend on how much loot you're trying to leave with - higher value of loot, the longer the waves go, though there is a cap. There's also various modifiers you're given the option of taking throughout a Tour that can increase the difficulty in exchange for better rewards. Most of them are something along the lines of "gain double gold, enemies have 30% more attack," things like that. The primary reason for going out and doing these tours is to improve your mobile base. You farm recipes for new turrets, get materials to craft upgades - 90% of the metaprogression in this game is tied to the base. It should be noted that, because this is a Tarkov-like, there is a permadeath component to it. If you die on any of the extraction missions, or if you lose on the tower defense, you lose 99% of the loot. You keep...SOME items but I cannot find any consistency. If your base is destroyed, you just lose the gear, but the player can still emergency extract to keep your equipment and inventory. If you die, it's all gone. There's a main character who cannot die, but then you can also recruit additional units who can die. You might wonder why you would want to use one of these guys at all if you risk killing them, and...yeah. There's a practical reason to do it - these characters are all objectively stronger than ther MC because they have more skills and passives, but again, the risk makes it a REALLY tough sell. You can ensure equipment to make sure you don't lose it, and there's a chance they wont permanently die, but I can imagine losing a maxed out really strong character would be really tough. This permanent loss mechanic seems to be the second main thing people complain about. Its deceiving because for the first five or so hours, the game is pathetically easy. But, because of that, it's hard to know if your base is sufficiently geared up to win the next difficulty level up that you're unfamiliar with. I lost a two-hour Tour because the final base defense had three lanes of enemy attacks - up until that point, there was only one lane. So, three times harder than anything I'd experienced, and so obviously I was underprepared based on how easy the game had been thus far. I lost an hour-long base defense in the final ten seconds and lose most of my loot, and there's just no getting around the fact that it feels bad. I also want to briefly mention the story, which is basically nothing. AI have taken over the world (Terminator-style AI, not "we made a chatbot that draws anime tits"-style AI) and you're trying to fight back. This is a Chinese game, and so the dialogue is a little stilted, but the voice acting is SO fucking funny. They got like...two native English-speakers for the VA, so most of the voices have weird intonations that are totally normal for ESL speakers. But, then you have certain voice actors with Chinese accents who then also are doing impressions of other accents. There's a Chinese voice actor who is performing a VERY strereotypical African American voice and he can't keep it consistent, he keeps wandering into Chinese Louisiana, or Chinese Jamaican, its so insanely funny. There's also Chinese Australian woman, there's a Chinese Russian woman, lots of great stuff here. Anyways, this is a really unique game that pulls a little bit from a million different genres of game. I think that, if you're interested in the Tarkov looting gameplay, that will be a much better indicator of whether or not you enjoy the game than if you're looking for a raw tower defense experience. There are other game modes the devs have included that significantly cut down on the Tour Mode Tarkov components, but they're not the core gameplay loop. If you're willing to put up with the amount of jank that comes from a Chinese dev team that heavily utilizes the Unreal Engine Asset Store, there's a cool gameplay experience here. This game reminds me of Metal Gear Survive, another very poorly-reviewed game that I really liked, partially because it only cost like seven dollars. Fourteen dollars for this game is just right, and if you're interested in the experience I described here, you'll probably like it. Also it has multiplayer!
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