reviews: 17

This data as json

id	game_id	external_id	review_text	added	posted	allowed
17	636320	45110119	Like many, I was drawn by the description of the game as a marriage of FTL and XCom, both highly enjoyable games. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to join the chorus of negative reviews: Depth of Extinction is simply too repetitive. I made it far enough to unlock two new areas (of 5), unlock a new class, complete the first story mission, and hunt down a new weapon. So I feel qualified to state: When you've played the first mission, you've played every mission. Actually, it's even worse than that. When you've opened ONE room, you've opened them all. That is how small the game's core loop is. You put your soldiers in good cover outside of a door and turn on overwatch. You open the door. You patiently murder enemies. Then you do the next door. A single 'encounter' is made up of 3-6+ rooms/doors. A map node is made up of 2-5+ encounters. A mission is made up of 2-5+ map nodes. So a single mission - of which I can estimate you'll need 30-40 to reasonably beat the game and unlock most stuff - consists of 60 rooms. So to beat the game, you'll need to defeat 2500+ rooms. And very little changes between them. But it's worth noting, what does change? The game does scratch that nice RPG itch of unlocking new items and abilities. You'll get new armor (which increases HP & provides defense against the 4-5 status effects in the game); new weapons (which fall into the categories of heavy, launcher, rifle, sniper, SMG, shotgun, and spear); new usable items (like medkits & grenades); and new passive items (like ammo types that add status effects). In addition to that, there's 6-9 classes, whose abilities are rather standard fare when it comes to the genre. I swear some of them are even named the same as the identical abilities found in X-Com. Furthermore, you'll encounter an admittedly slow escalation of new enemy types, who use different weapons and have different abilities. That said, none of this really changes your tactics. At best, the occasional open world map provides a slight variance. But for the most part, the core game loop and the best tactic to deal with that loop remains the same: You park behind cover, you turn on overwatch, and you shoot them until dead. Then you reveal the next room. Even this small core loop has its issues. Overwatch gets janky if multiple people fire on a single movement. The result is, for example, one of my wreckers ended up blowing up all my own guys because he waited to shoot until after the enemy had ran PAST him and into the midst of my soldiers. Or suppose you paralyze an enemy during an overwatch. He'll still get to shoot. Huh? And the UI needs a bit of work - I found myself continually annoyed by the lack of an easy way to look at my soldier's stats outside of the level up screen. Perhaps it's there - but I never found it. While this simplicity and rough edges are not unexpected from an indie game, the lack of narrative elements is less excusable. There is a wall of text to start the game and one cut-scene. But beside that I have encountered nothing. No lore. No character development. When I completed the first story mission, there was literally no dialogue to note it. A new area unlocked and that was it. Again, I understand it's indie - but really? Writing is cheap and easy to do, compared to engine design or audio-visual content creation. I made it 15 hours in the game, but I knew it was time to throw in the towel when I started skipping every fight I could. I felt I'd seen all there was to see, mechanically speaking. Anything else would be, I knew, a tired variation on a theme, a theme that is itself, a poor copy of better games.	2021-03-14T05:51:54.754716	1	1