Idun: Frontline Survival Review (Laceon)
I want to like it, but there are so many new player traps. The game design seems built around you knowing what to plan for in the future but the game doesnt provide any information and there are no guard rails.
Had I seen the voice acting was AI, i would not have bought the game. I dont want to support this.
There is a lot to be said for the gameplay, but i will simply say its mostly luck, your loadout as far as ive played has zero relevance. You wind up relyng the the RNG gods and favor stupid tactics over valid critical ones.
You can build up your space station but each thing takes up slots on a grid, so you need to upgrade your station to fit more. However you need power cells to do this. You need to place a facility to produce powercells, but if you placed one of the other structures in the wrong place your fucked till a mission gives you more powercells to upgrade your spacestation to produce powercells, after the game asking you to place things down before the powercells.... this is so dumb.... Oh, but i accidently spent them on something else, well fuck you. Also you cant move the facility because fuck you. So you have to hope a mission will provide enough cells... This isnt the only thing that likes this, every upgrade ive made so far has felt like a mistake. Only thing that has seemed to matter at all is upgrading the very basic stuff thats free. Each mission you can choose from a list of crap, some items are unlimited and once upgraded have a greater impact than any thing else ive seen so far, the other weapons are cool but have not been of any value so far. BECAUSE i cant even afford them, as i cant produce the resources to make them or upgrade things that the game is expecting. Ive got the building to produce powercells, but cant lay it down, this is the practically the beginning of the game....
The game itself runs fine and the graphics are ok.
It has this cutesy look and feel to the game but feels off. It has this edge where its hardcore but then has this weird candy glaze over everything. I will try to explain, it just seems weird. Like, theres this lady you meet at the intro of the game who works for what sounds basically like the Imperium of Man. Shes talking about ritualistic implants and basically becoming a psyker or what ever. IDK. Then your fighting off massive endless waves of bugs and it gets pretty tense, but all the characters are in a good mood and happy about life. It just feels confusing.
The difficulty kind of felt all over the place, i was running hard missions that seemed easier than medium and vice versa. The hardest part was getting my units to do what theyre told or accidentally moving them around. The interaction with units needs more work, it has been a pretty annoying issue.
I stopped playing just now cause i asked my self, do i want to start a new game or spend the next couple missions losing out on what is effectively the tutorial with tons of resources and time wasted. Then burden myself with the question if there is even proper balance in the game to make up for this. Not only that but how many more times will i run into similar issues.
Over all i like the idea, but i have some pretty harsh feelings about some core design choices. It would not take much work to address these issues i would think. But they have really just ruined the experience for me.