I stopped playing sometime over the summer. It was more of a "lets go cold turkey" situation mostly because while I was having fun with the game, I was starting to get a bit tired and needed an excuse to be able to play other things.
The real excuse is actually "anger motivated" - I was playing on a not-so-great connection and ended up losing a few matches while playing in the special mode (whose name escapes me as I type this) where you're supposed to get a certain number of wins in a row to get the next level ticket...So, you pay a silver ticket and then play X matches to get a gold one..and so on. I never made it past the 3rd type I think, with the first ticket being free (win two matches?), the next one three and so on. I'd even spent gold bars or whatever to get a ticket in order to skip the free round. That was annoying enough that I felt sort of vindicated in quitting. So that's that.
I might download again at some point, and I hope it's kept all my stuff, but we'll see...
Wow, this game is hard! It's supposed to feel bad in the sense that you keep getting weaker and victories are hard to come by - at least the feeling of making forward progress. It's a tough balance since the game tries to be historically accurate to the desperation of the local populace and what was happening. They ultimately lost. So, how does that feel to play? Well, not like a happy moment.
The game's combat system is interesting - and also feels like you're constantly losing, it's really hard (impossible?) to avoid taking any kind of damage, and so the attrition is real since the characters don't heal full up at the end of a fight or anything like that. BUT, the lane system is interesting and the timing is fun to get into, once you figure out how to make the most of your turn and your character's abilities. The status effects seem particularly important.
All of this being said, it's still a hard game and although I did make good progress on at least one run, I don't think I'd be able to get to the end - you don't have to win, you just need to survive that long.
The game's overmap was interesting as well - you move about the city trying to avoid patrols as you head to your mission objectives. It can pay to be "sneaky" (avoid going through direct routes) and is very different from what I initially expected (I was thinking that in general you want more encounters, because you win and get resources). It turns out that focusing on the mission at hand is probably the right choice, but still - how can you ignore the terrible things happening around the city? I guess that's a real question.
Would I recommend? Yes, the mechanics and systems are interesting purely from a game design perspective, but the added story/history elevates it for sure even as it makes it LESS enjoyable to play.
So far I've cleared two levels (chapters?) from the campaign. I don't recall how many there are - but there is a map and it seems like it's 8 or so? Then I played horde mode solo - and that was ok. And then I played horde mode online and it was more fun, BUT...it looks like things tap out pretty early in terms of upgrades. When I joined the upgrades for weapons were gone and I could only spend money unlocking regular weapons or new ones (temporary) from crates. Which was fine, but I did feel like I was underpowered a lot (compared to my teammates)
The game is a 3rd person shooter. There are few weapons, four characters to choose from, and supposedly a nice tree of things to unlock (and upgrades to slot on to weapons). So far I've only found 3 upgrade gems (they're not gems, but whatever) and I've used them all - but you can't swap out and re-spec, which makes me wonder, how do you play around with all this later? Or are you stuck with your choices (it seems like a real waste to lose a gem, since they're so rare).
I've been enjoying the level design and layout - lots of paths, secrets to find and unlock (often via puzzles) and the combat has a nice pace to it that I'm enjoying. It's not super twitchy, my aim sucks, so I have to focus on crowd control AND make use of traps in the environment (that are there for you to activate and take out monsters). It has a good feel to it, though the melee attack is helpful but hard to direct and the timing is hard for me to pull off. BUT, putting your boot on a fallen enemy is nice - they die with a satisfying crunch.
Enemies tend to come in waves and you need to worry about looking behind you and such, but you can kite them around, throw grenades (that respawn).
It all works, and the vide/story is very much pulp-action with weird science and stuff. Good stuff so far!
It's very cute and very sweet and seems very attuned to Australian culture. I was curious if it was actually developed by an Australian indie studio or not - and I'm not sure. The developer's website (Stonewheat & Sons) didn't load (down temporarily?) and their social media hasn't seen activity since 202. The info I found points to it being made by a US team so, they either really did their homework and/or I'm really falling for stereotypes (which is on me)...or?
The game's publisher also seems to have disappeared - again, social media isn't recent and it also seems to have veered away from game publishing? (with only 41 followers, it seems more like a personal account).
Hmmm..
Anyways, it's a light-hearted fun and simple co-op game - I enjoyed playing it with my daughter. We bounced around, figured out what we were supposed to do, had fun - and then felt like we'd gotten what we wanted from the experience (a good thing), even if we didn't want to play much more.
I'm not sure why - but, it might have to do with some of the inherent wonkyness in the controls and how things aren't super-precise meant that as the difficulty ramped up we started to feel like we were losing "unfairly"? Or, perhaps it has to do with the fact that for the most part we're playing in a few small/simple areas - and there's only so much variation before things started to feel a bit tired. For my part, I did have a somewhat harder time identifying my kiwi bird than I would have liked - but I did enjoy the levels and how cute everything was. Since you're little birds. And things look big. And you're doing these helpful tasks. But you're still a little bird.
Now that I think about it some more, perhaps it's that for a game with frantic gameplay (or the intention of that...) when the game level is crowded enough that you can easily get stuck/lose yourself, etc. it might get in the way of the flow of that experience? I died more than once from jumping into a place I thought I could only to realize that..no..that was out of bounds.
It was fun to discover hidden secrets though - some behind multi-step objectives (that I sometimes did "by mistake" assuming they were main/real objectives.
