From Space Review (Dune Tiger)
I don't know if this game is carrying DNA from a previous outing or what, but while it looks and sounds great, it plays pretty archaically. I love me a good top-down shooter, but this one is slow and it has a very cumbersome inventory system at play. It's cool to plop down devices and chuck a multitude of different grenades, but god forbid you want to pick up something else that you haven't seen before because your inventory is full of all the barb wire and stamina boost crap the game has given you so far; go into the pause menu, drop every item of a stack individually and THEN you can pick up that one thing... only to find out it kinda sucks.
If it wasn't for my early-adopter buddy, I probably would have passed this one by and while I admit that it's fun to go through it with your pals, the best the game has offered so far is that it doesn't outright stink. It's capable. It's even a good time if your friends are into it, but that's the "shiny and new" factor talking more than anything that suggests "I can play this for months/years". True, I haven't put a lot of time into it yet and we certainly aren't walking away from it yet, but I know that this doesn't have the legs.
On the upside, the presentation is great and the overall theme is fun. I don't really need high realistic fidelity or grimdark in everything I play so yeah, shooting hordes of neon pink... what are they? Some kind of space fruit? They all have stems... whatever they are, shooting them is fun. With the right gun.
There's just weirdness abound here that makes it feel not so great aside from the speed. New guns aren't better. They feel worse. All of the energy weapons we've discovered so far don't do anything when compared to a standard bullet storm or shotgun blast. When the game wants to show you a tutorial message, it pops right up in the middle of the screen, doesn't pause the game, AND it wants you to hold down a button to dismiss the message. The first couple of hours is entirely escort missions - you know, everyone's favorite kind of mission (to be fair, your escorts are largely ignored by the mobs, but they are still prone to stupid environment traps). I spent a lot of the time just asking myself "why did they do this?"
Ultimately, it's not a bad game. I don't want anyone to think that's where I stand because if you can get your buddies to play it with you, there's a good time to be had here. It just feels old despite being released at the end of 2022 and yeah, if this is a revisit of something from the past, I can totally understand why it's designed the way it is. If not... yeah, I don't get it.
TL;DR - only play this with friends and it's not so bad.
Edit: I've decided to not continue and requested a refund. Again, not because the game is bad, but more that it's ultimately just not rubbing me right. My buddy who had spent the time playing with me had to start all over from the beginning in his own game that I could also join with zero progress. This either means you play exclusively with one host or you just suck it up and start over every time someone wants you to join them or you want to roll solo. It'd make sense in a couch co-op, but seems like a weird choice for this title.