Quasimorph is like having an unfriendly relationship with your boss; every small victory matters, and the small victories will be suddenly and forcibly taken away from you by corporate-approved termination. Small story; I went on the wiki because I was in the early game and felt afraid I'd seen every gun, progression was already over, etc. It turns out that there were a LOT of guns, and enemies, I hadn't seen yet - great news! And I found this little gun, something called the Enigma Supreme, in the wiki. Big damage, long range, doesn't consume ammo, baller color scheme. And no joke at all, I found this gun in a random supply crate two hours later as a drop, like finding a fully intact Gundam at an antique sale, and I had a very very good time with it. And then an unarmored communist coal miner with a small automatic saw used for clipping the branches off of very weak trees, such as willow trees, carved through my entire body with two critical hits and sent me from 145 HP to what I assume to be ego death, as I then deleted that save. This is the big hurdle people will find with Quasimorph; the gear loop is often somewhat oppressive, and enemies can occasionally OHKO you under what feel like completely random circumstances. One hour before that, probably the event preceding my spiritual meltdown, three Taskmasters still hidden by Fog Of War simultaneously unloaded on me with full auto during the same turn and I watched my best clone literally just disappear under a hail of about 20 soul-powered plasma slugs that completely occluded his sprite and took me by such surprise that I just stared at the screen for about 30 seconds afterward. This is also one of the game's strengths. You see, most of those situations technically were avoidable on my end; if I'd been Sneaking, I'd have known that Che Guevara, hiding one tile away, had mistaken me for a femboy and decided to turn my ribcage into modern art. If I'd been around the corner of a long hallway instead of laughing as Quasimorphs ran into my fire tiles and picking them off to preserve my ammo, it would have been completely impossible by the game's mechanics for a perfect doom stack of Mayan heavy gunners to turn the flying chunks of my body into Hungry Man frozen TV dinners. Positioning is HUGE in Quasimorph, and you don't notice that until you're punished for it. It's easy to turn your brain off and let Jeffhammer solve all of your problems, especially during extended play sessions, and it was always during those extended play sessions that I underestimated the game and opened myself up to sudden and vicious punishment from people who in all fairness, outnumbered me, and who I had planned on killing down to the last man in order to collect shreds of plastic to manufacture more vegan Whoppers for my starbase. Quasimorph is a game where every level, every single level, places you against bad odds. Let me repeat this - in every level, you are against bad odds. Off the bat, this is actually fantastic, as total difficulty death is also the death of engagement, and I'm not advocating for this to be changed, but rather to be embraced by other players as well. The worst possible outcomes are mitigated by simply not forgetting that, and not shutting your brain off. Watch for sightlines, remember every AutoDoc you see and where it was, build small piles of munitions and supplies that you can't carry right now near the Elevator, so if you need to escape a doom stack, you can go right upstairs and heal yourself completely. The game drowns you in resources and is generally very forgiving with Hunger and HP (Chop up corpses for food, cook them by dropping the meat near exploding barrels, Disassemble enemy armor for Rags to stabilize wounds, you'll find you have more Food and HP recovery available than you can technically even use), because again, the real threat is not attrition, it is sudden death, and you have an AP advantage against every enemy in the game. You have better armor than most of them; you have better guns and ammo than most of them. You are disadvantaged against the level, but most individual enemy encounters leave you firmly with several practical advantages, and you're free to bust through walls like the Kool-Aid Man for an alpha strike or set an entire room on fire from within and lock the doors so no one can leave without meeting your automatic shotgun at a very intimate distance. If you remember to use the level instead of just traversing it, and you remember to keep an eye out for resources to fill your boy back up while exploring, you have an enormous number of leveraging tools to keep even the doomstacks that I emphasize, you WILL eventually run into with a geared-out character, from ruining your day. The game isn't 100% fair, and that's intentional; you're literally a corporate assassin killing people for 90MM Nail ammo and beheading Paramedics because they might have Medical Glue for that bleeding hole where your head also used to be. The world of the game is a brutal experience for everyone, and tilting the unfairness inherent to the missions towards your advantage is how you prove your worth as a Diamond Dog and truly establish peace; by making the bad guys from RahXephon into the undead Aztec senators of the human race. 8/10 and trending upward, we'll see how tomorrow's big update sways the numbers. Always bring a Jeffhammer, and remember that 9MM Bursting Ammo can be fired at the wall to generate rapidly-spreading fire tiles. The game was rigged from the start, and if it feels unfairly rigged against YOU, just think about what it's like to be everyone you meet.
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