I really wanted to like this game. Tower defence, FPS shooter with evil robots and cyborgs, yes please! But to put it bluntly, it's a boring game!

The exploration phases where you go around and kill the mobs on the map are dull, repetitive, VERY repetitive. The only fun missions are when you are on a traced path and events happens as you progress. At least you feel like you are doing something that is impacting the game.

Then comes the insurance. As soon as you start to get some half decent loot, you need to pay insurance every mission in case you die so you don't lose your loot. While the idea of it is good and forces you to be more cautious in your exploration and missions, if you can't pay for it and die, you basically cannot perform in missions anymore and have to go back and repeat easier missions to get some equipment back if you are not rich.

I really hope that things will get better with time, but for now I will be shelving this game and maybe come back to it in a few updates.

This is definitely my top game of the year for 2024.

As someone who has been playing video games for 30 years, I can say this is a true breath of fresh air in a pretty stale gaming industry where not many things can surprise me anymore.

Is it perfect? NO! The game story, unfortunately, is not finished and the main mode can be really grindy for sure.

But there is nothing like this game on the market, and if you enjoy (Tower) Defense games, roguelikes, amazing sense of progression this game won't disappoint.

There is something so satisfying about looking at your base growing from a small weakling to an overpowered, self-sufficient behemoth!

I don't usually write reviews, but this game really got me hooked, so here it goes.

The main gameplay loop goes like this: You have a mobile outpost that you can customize at your base, and you use it to make "tours". These involve multiple exploration days, and one final recovery day.

During exploration days, all you do is run around the map looting items, collecting resources, and killing a few enemies that pose very little threat. You usually can't take all the loot, so you have to manage your inventory efficiently.

Then in recovery day, you have to defend your outpost from waves of enemies. Here you'll spend most of your time loading ammo into your turrets, building a few extra defenses, and looting. You can fight, but it's not strictly necessary, as your chances of success depend mostly on your base, and how well you balance the main 3 resources: materials, energy and ammo.

If your base gets destroyed at any point in the tour, you lose ALL your collected loot, and you have to survive for a few minutes until the emergency evac ship arrives. If you die at any point, you lose everything, including the equipment you brought to the tour. This can be quite frustrating, but there are ways to avoid it.

The difficulty in this game is a bit weird. It's not a hard game, and succeeding in a recovery day depends almost entirely on your outpost. The issue is that there's no reliable way to tell if your outpost is good enough for the next zone and difficulty, and the cost of failing a tour is too high. There's a power score, but it doesn't help much, as winning requires more than just having enough turrets. If your outpost is well equipped for the tour, then the recovery day will be extremely easy, requiring very little intervention on your part. Now if your outpost is not good enough for the tour, then you'll most likely lose, as "skill" in combat makes very little difference.

Besides the main tour/story mode, there are a couple more modes.

The Infinity Siege mode is just an endless mode. You fight an infinite amount of waves that get increasingly harder. However, before having access to the challenging waves, you have to go through the easier waves, which can be quite boring. Luckily, after reaching specific waves, you can start your next match from that wave, so you get to the action faster.

Then there's the Return to Dawn Base mode, and I think this is the most fun mode in the game. It's a series of challenges where you use premade outposts and random operators, like a roguelite. You have to loot items between waves, so it's a combination of exploration and recovery days in a single mission. The difficulty in these challenges is just right, hard enough to keep you entertained, but fair. You know that the outpost they give you is enough to pass the challenge, so succeeding depends on what you do during the match. You can also use your own base with some restrictions, but in my experience, the premade bases are usually better. There's also a free mode that allows you to build your own challenge by adding cards with bonuses and risks, but I haven't been able to create a "fair" challenge, while also keeping the loot quality decently high.

The story is nothing to write home about. It's decent, but simple, predictable, and a bit cliche. Many people seem to criticize the voice acting, but I don't think it is that bad. For the most part, it's pretty decent, although some specific characters sound awful.
The main problem is not the voice acting, but the script. The dialogues are incredibly bad, very cringeworthy. Some scenes made me feel uncomfortable of how bad they were. Which is a shame, because the game intro is very cinematic, and kinda sets the bar high for the rest of the game. But then it gets very disappointing. Characters don't have proper lip-syncing, so watching them talk looks awkward. Most dialogues are thrown at you from your first person perspective instead of playing a cool cinematic to add more emotion to the scene. It all leads to a very underwhelming experience.

As I said above, if you die during a tour, you lose everything. This is similar to extraction shooter games like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt. However, those games have short matches, where dying is not that big of a deal. Here, dying can make you waste an hour of playtime, and some rare gear, which can be very frustrating. I don't think the extraction shooter mechanics work well here.

Luckily, there are alternatives, if you don't mind cheating. If you ALT+F4 during an exploration or recovery day, the game will close immediately and when you get back you'll be right before starting your last day. You can do this right after dying or losing your base.

And even if you forget to do that, the game keeps a lot of backup saves of previous days, so you can go back in time freely just by moving and renaming some files. It's a bit tedious, but at least you can skip what I think it's the worst part of the game.

I think it's a pretty fun game, and very addictive. I'm constantly thinking how I can improve my base, and I get that feeling of "one more tour" to get those rare materials I need to craft a new cool turret. It's not for everyone tho. If you're expecting a tower defense game packed with action, this is not it. The defending part of the game is pretty "passive". You spend most of your time doing mundane tasks instead of fighting. And that's only like 20% of a tour, the rest is spent looting. But I think the gameplay mechanics are kinda unique and very well made, and the graphics and sound effects are very good.