izigame.me

I really wish Steam had a "mixed" option, but generally I feel I have more negative things to say than positive, so I'll mark it as such.
The Anacrusis is yet-another co-op horde shooter, as copying Valve's iconic Left-4-Dead seems to be a growing trend all of a sudden. Set in a retro-futuristic 1970's themed spaceship, the crew appears to have been overtaken by facehugger-like alien parasites (or is it a viral/bacterial infection, and their heads are just mutated to look alien? It's not clear, which is a running problem here.) You fight your way through hordes of these afflicted crewmembers with laser-based weaponry, and make your way to safety.
You have your usual tropes you'd expect; 4 "characters" (more on this later), linear maps that end in a saferoom, you have your "special" enemies like a slime-based enemy that can encase survivors in a slime or create puddles that slow you down, a ranged grabber enemy that's sorta like the Smoker from L4D, and naturally the brute-like tank that soaks up damage and is designed to break up the pace and require the team work together to focus fire on it and take it down. There's a few new ideas, such as these "perk" stations that let you upgrade your character (much, much, much better executed than B4B's card system).
Gunplay is "serviceable"; guns feel okay to shoot, but it pales in comparison to L4D2's incredible gore and destruction. Enemies splatter with this glowing orange blood, which does almost feel like a "censored" option, or something like the "cartoon gore" option in Serious Sam games. (This blood also doesn't seem to appear on the enemy's model or on the environment, but I may be misremembering.) Upon death, they don't have the incredible variety of mo-cap death animations that seamlessly blend into a ragdoll that L4D has; they just kinda "flop over dead" into ragdoll instantly which feels a bit silly and lacks impact or weight. Overall it's not exactly a super high-budget game, and it does kinda show in the basic gunplay.
However, the single biggest issue with this game, is unfortunately the lack of immersion or detailing.
The characters are very basic; they seem to just have basic reactions like "Oh look an enemy!" or "Oh look a shop I used to go to!" without any real commentary or personal input. The characters all feel like the same cardboard cutout; compare this to the diverse cast of it's inspiration, L4D. You have Bill, the grisled Vietnam veteran who's living on borrowed time, and serves as an almost jaded father-figure to the group with a heart of gold. Louis, the optimistic office worker who always tries to keep the group in high spirits. Francis, the meatheaded biker who jokingly hates everything and has a weird and entertaining sense of humor. And finally Zoey, the college student who has a bit of a perky attitude and keeps her team in check, mostly. L4D2 goes even further! You have Coach, the wholesome small-town PE coach who has a similar role to Bill but with a lot more optimism and lightheartedness. Ellis, the lovingly immature gun-toting redneck who's always telling tall-tales about his friend we never meet. Nick, the somewhat self-absorbed conman who at first hates his team (particularly Ellis) but over time learns to get along and even enjoy their company. And finally you have Rochelle, who is...uh...well the one "non-character" I think Valve has ever made. She just kinda has very basic reactions to everything, and doesn't really have anything personal or unique to interject ontop of it.
The Anacrusis characters all feel like clones of Rochelle. That's about all you need to know about them tbh.
The environments are visually very interesting in terms of artstyle, but there doesn't seem to be nearly as much character as the ironically more mundane settings of it's inspiration. It's kinda just a ship, with maybe a few cool ideas (such as that large garden-like atrium full of fake plants with a massive screen overhead simulating a fake sky, with some damaged/glitching panels exposing the illusion) but overall it's mostly just "hallways and rooms". L4D did a lot with selling the feeling of a viral/bacterial outbreak, and how survivors and the military response might've played out, with plenty of environmental storytelling, bodybags and quarantine posters all around, and all sorts of small details that help the world feel varied and lived-in. In the Anacrusis; for example, weapons just kinda appear in this kind of weird "default pose" in the middle of a hallway or room without much rhyme or reason. (Even just putting a body, a trail of blood, some dead aliens nearby, and positioning the gun to look like it fell out of their arms as they died would go miles to improve this.) You don't really feel like an outbreak happened here beyond the random bits of damage to the ship (why is this room utterly destroyed? what happened here? No explanation seems to be implied or given; it just is. Meanwhile in L4D campaigns, you'd have at least some dead bodies or items nearby to imply that maybe survivors tried blowing their way through a wall in a tough spot but it backfired, if not directly seeing the cause yourself, such as the insanely memorable plane crash sequence in the Dead Air campaign.)
And finally, the little details. The soundtrack and sound design, is, forgettable honestly. L4D had amazing tracks that sold the tension and atmosphere, and tons of little music cues for when ambient zombies were still around, when the player was at high stress, low stress, when special zombies spawned or were attacking you, etc. The guns firing, the various special zombie screams, the sound of a crying witch somewhere in the area, it all came together and made an unforgettable sound experience. The Anacrusis has a selection of combat tracks that play during specific events in a campaign, and that seems to be just about it. And of those very few tracks, they're all so honestly generic and forgettable I'm struggling to remember a time I was fighting back zombies and just having a blast with the music, like I would have all the time in L4D.
Overall, as another negative review puts it, "The Anacrusis is L4D but without the stuff that made L4D memorable."
Going from L4D to The Anacrusis, it's like getting a delicious steak at a restaurant. You want to have it again at home, so you buy the same exact cut of steak at the store. You expect it to have the same flavor and taste because hey it's the same cut; it has all the core features of that delicious steak, right? But with that first bite, you're saddened to find out it misses the magic; it wasn't cooked the same way, it didn't have the same seasonings and care for small details, and you're eating it in your studio apartment instead of the carefully crafted fine-dining atmosphere of the restaurant you were just at. It ticks all the big boxes, but brushes aside all the little ones that make an otherwise "average" game great.
It's really, really rough around the edges, but there's still a good strong backbone there. They just need to build the rest of the animal around it.