Recent reviews by gsimenas

I can't believe this game is 20 years old!

A throwback to my childhood that's still enjoyable today, although it does have some hiccups due to its age.

A gang of bandits have been raiding trains and no one dares go after them. Bounty hunter John Cooper is only one interested in apprehending the leader of the train robbers and he sets out to assemble a team for the job. Add some misdirection, framing for a murder, robbing the robbers and so on for some cliche drama and you'll have a serviceable plot to hold the game together. The story isn't really anything to write home about and the game doesn't overexert itself with more than just the bare minimum of a couple of so-so cutscenes in-between levels for some plot, but it's enough to have an overarching plot at least. You're probably here for some good ol' western shootouts rather than some groundbreaking-level plot anyway. Honestly, this was one of my favourite childhood games and I didn't even understand what the story was back then, since I was playing a version of the game that was in Russian... not one iota of which I could actually comprehend back then.

Desperados is an isometric real-time tactical game, where you control a team of bounty hunters against a map full of bandidos. The idea is that while you can just shoot everyone you see to get your mission objectives over with, you are by far outnumbered by the baddies and your guns overheat with use, so you have to be smart with how you eliminate the henchmen in-between you and your mission objectives. You can go with a stealthy approach and kill off enemies one-by-one (or in small groups) without alerting the entire map to your presence, but you can just as well go loud if you find a way to limit how many of them can get to you at a time. For example, you could place a snake at the top of a ladder so that the bandidos die from venomous bites each time they clamber up. Or you could draw them to an area with some noise and throw a bottle of sleeping gas at them. Or bait them into climbing to the second floor of a building and knifing/shooting them each time they come through the door. There's plenty of ways to go through each level, both for those who love pure stealth, and those who just want to go on a murder rampage.

Each character is equipped with an arsenal of five weapons/items/actions. The first slot of every character is taken up by a firearm (except for one having a blowpipe) - each different in its ammo count, firing speed, range, damage output and so on - but all the other slots are unique. One character can throw a knife for a silent kill, another can draw attention with her thick thighs and then kick them in the balls when the poor fools get close enough, while a different character can solve a lot of problems with a good ol' rock throw to the face (turns out the humble rock is the sure-fire method to put people out of commission with the biggest range in the game). On the one hand, all of the characters are unique in what they can do; on the other hand, the characters can be horribly overspecialised for certain tasks. Only one specific character can saddle a horse (and he's the only character who can carry bodies for half of the game), only one other character can tie up unconscious NPCs so they don't get up again, you need another character to patch up injuries or unlock doors and so on.

The game is rather clunky, as could be expected from its age. The controls could be more intuitive, and you can't run-and-shoot or do other concurrent actions with the same character. There is a feature that allows setting up actions for multiple characters to carry out at the same time, which is a nice way to set up a team strat for a specific situation, but it does have its hiccups... since closing in on a target and using an item are considered two separate actions, so you have to manually order the character to close in and then use this feature to quickly trigger the character's ability.

There are 25 levels in this game. Most take place at new locations, through a couple of levels reuse the setting of old levels. Some levels take place during the night, some in rainy weather, but weather conditions don't change over time. The levels are all 2D with no camera rotation, which can make it horribly hard to notice enemies hiding behind corners, since most of the levels have tons of buildings scattered about.

The Good
+Holds up well for a 2001 game;
+Most levels allow both stealth and brute force tactics;
+Nostalgia;
+Quite a lot of different levels;
+Cheap

The Neutral
*Enemies are frequently unpredictable
*Soundtrack

The Bad
-A bit clunky;
-No camera rotation;
-Enemies deal far too much damage from long distance compared to you
-A lot of character actions are useless or highly situational;
-Characters are a bit overspecialised for certain actions (e.g. only one character can saddle a horse or tie up a guy)
-Tutorials don't explain some basic features;
-Transitions between levels are lacklustre;
-Final character gets introduced so late into the game that you barely have time to use her;

TL;DR A smooth and beautiful tactical game with very few issues. Definitely worth the purchase.

In Edo period Japan, the Shogun brought peace to Japan by winning the war. However, some conspire against the shogun to plunge the country back into strife and usurp power. In order to thwart this plot, the Shogun's most trusted samurai retainer assembles four other companions to sabotage these rebels and uncover the mastermind hiding in the shadows (literally calling himself "The Shadow" in Japanese) and bring him to justice.

The game's plot is told through in-engine cutscenes between missions and character conversations in the midst of a level. The plot is pretty standard fare, with very predictable plot twists. While the main plot isn't really anything to write home about, the main characters are pretty endearing and fun to hear bantering with each other. The Japanese voiceover is also stellar.

Shadow Tactics is an isometric real time tactics game with 13 missions. You control a team of five characters from a top down perspective against a map full of baddies. Each character comes with a pre-defined set of items/abilities: a melee weapon (or sniper rifle), a unique ability, a distraction option, a handicraft pistol, and a bandage set. Although that doesn't sound like a lot of variety, each character has their nuances with the items available to them. For example, one character may distract enemies by throwing a rock and only getting them to turn away for a few seconds, while a different character might send a trained raccoon dog to make cute noises to get all the enemies preoccupied asking the important question - who's a good boy? Some characters are nimble and can climb vines are grapple to the top of a building with a hookshot, while others require conventional ladders. Some characters can pick up enemy bodies (a certain powerhouse can even carry two for the price of one and just throw them onto other enemies!), while the less brawny characters can only slowly drag them on the ground, and some can't move bodies at all. So you always have to consider which character is best for a specific job in a specific situation.

While you technically can go on a frontal assault, your characters don't have much in the way of ranged options, so you can easily get outnumbered and killed if you don't keep a low profile. Although classified as a stealth game, you'll find that it's more of a puzzle game: figuring out how to take out how to take out Soldier A without being seen by Soldier B or C, who either have direct line of sight on Soldier A, or are supposed to regularly meet up with them and will get suspicious if Soldier A is running late. Oftentimes, figuring out how to get through a segment will result in spamming F5 and F8 until you get it just right, but at least the quickloads are fast. Usually, there's more than one way to get the job done, and even more than one route to take to your goal. Your mileage per level can vary anywhere from 2-4 hours if you're meticulous and take your time, to 1-5 minute speedruns when you figure out the most optimal path. Nearly every level comes with some new gimmick to make things more interesting, and each level comes with 9 bonus challenges (badges) for some extra replay value.

The Good
+Smooth gameplay
+Great aesthetics
+Great Japanese voiceover option for immersion
+Fun characters with individual strengths and weaknesses
+Characters can be given instructions to carry out actions concurrently
+The environment of the level affects gameplay mechanics
+Game allows both pacifist and kill-all runs in most levels
+Multiple ways to go about each level
+Can replay missions in any order once unlocked
+Each level has badges for playing the level with certain handicaps for some extra challenge
+Nice soundtrack
+Runs decently even on a non-gaming laptop
+Demo available
+Save reminders

The Bad
-Poor pathfinding
-Alarms are near-instant
-Save-scumming simulator
-Linear story with on-the-nose plot twists
-Not much variety in gear

TL;DR A great exploration game, though basebuilding and deep areas could be more fleshed out.

In a spacefaring age, your ship crashlands on a nautical alien world and you're the only survivor, so you have to procure food and resources from the local area to survive and find a way back home. The game throws you out into this world with barely any information to get you started; you have to figure out most of the things on your own. That includes the story itself, since there are no missions, objectives, or people to tell you what to do; instead, you uncover story details through exploration and finding data entries in wrecks and certain areas. The game does give you a couple of hints of where you might want to go through radio transmissions at first, but afterwards you have to uncover things on your own by following the clues you find along the way (when in doubt, just go deeper). Although the game does warn you to pack food and water for longer journeys, or when you're entering an area with lots of hostile creatures, it doesn't hold your hand or stop you from going wherever you want, whenever you want; no guides, no people, no time limits. And despite all of that, it still manages to tell a very lore-rich and enjoyable story.

The game is set in a dormant volcanic crater that's supposed to be 2x2 km in size, but it's actually more like 3 or 4 km in diameter, and up to about 1,5 km deep. There's a whole lot of unique and fascinating biomes to explore, each with their unique plants, creatures, and sometimes even unique resources. You'll likely spend hours just admiring the sights, appreciating the views, and just discovering where everything is located. Especially since there is no in-game map to reference, so it'll take time to orient yourself. Withholding the map from the player is a bold move to make, but I honestly appreciate it, since it makes exploration and mapping things out (you can freely place beacons that serve as markers on your HUD to find landmarks or specific biomes more easily) more fun when it's not presented to you on a silver platter. Also, I like that the game really capitalises on the vertical aspect of the game, meaning that the map is actually bigger than it looks on paper. Though, I was honestly disappointed in the lack of things to do in the deepest areas. The surface biomes are both rich in variety and things to explore (wrecks, caves, a couple of landmasses, and so on), as well as rewards for your exploration (be it blueprints, story bits, or resources). The middle areas aren't as rewarding to explore due to more limited content, but you can still find something to keep you busy for a while (some interesting landmarks, story/lore bits, both plot-relevant and irrelevant facilities, a whole lot of resource nodes and so on). On the other hand, the deepest areas only have a couple of plot-relevant buildings and some resource nodes... that's it; no real point to checking every nook and cranny, and the deep areas are pretty small in general.

Subnautica is primarily an exploration - and then survival - game. The game does have several survival elements: you have health, hunger, thirst and oxygen bars and will die if any one of them reaches zero. But there are plenty of fish in the water to meet both needs easily, as long as you're close enough to your base or starter escape pod to use the fabricator to process the fish into consumable form. Survival elements only become a concern if you want to explore further and deeper, where you either won't have immediate access to consumable resources, or a fabricator to process them. But by then, it's all a matter of either packing properly for extended trips, or making more bases along the way. It becomes an even lesser concern when you get yourself some vehicles that either let you travel back to base faster, or carry your base with you. The game even has several modes that allow you to increase or decrease the amount of survival elements in the game to your liking (basic survival mode has all the meters, but no permadeath, hardcore mode has all of that plus permadeath, while the lighter modes disable hunger and thirst, or even the possibility of dying entirely). All in all, Subnautica is not so much of a survival game, as it is an exploration game. The sights are fascinating, while the wrecks you find along the way allow you to unlock new blueprints to gradually improve your exploration capabilities.

The basic gameplay loop is:
1) explore, scan everything in sight to know what's useful and what's not, and stock up on resources;
2) craft new tools, vehicles and modules that allow you to go deeper
3) explore deeper for new resources and story bits
4) repeat

Basebuilding is a thing, but bases mostly serve as glorified battery chargers and storage areas. There aren't a whole lot of things you can build in your base, to be honest. A couple of crafting stations, battery chargers, a food (fish breeding aquarium or a farm) and water sources, and later on a dedicated dock for your vehicles. When I tried building a bigger base later in the game, I quickly realised I didn't actually have any real use for more than like two rooms, plus a dock or two for my vehicles. The lack of things you can actually put into your base (and the variety of crafting recipes in the game in general, actually) is pretty unsatisfying and it's stupidly easy to get power for your base, but very little to actually spend that generated power on. Once you build your Cyclops, you get even less use out of your bases, since you can just move all the crafting station and storage onto your sub and carry them with you. The only things left to use bases for is fish breeding or farms for food production, and a power cell charger to refuel your Cyclops now and then (and even then, you could just equip a module that lets the Cyclops itself generate power from heat).

There are no enemies per se in the game; there are aggressive creatures at certain areas of the game, but most of them can just be easily avoided. The game doesn't really encourage getting into unnecessary fights, since most of your toolset consists of non-lethal options (e.g. freezing enemies, whacking them away, drawing them away with decoys etc.), aside from a knife and a mechsuit's arm swings. Even if you do kill the large predators that can threaten you, there is nothing to be gained from their corpses, other than having one less creature to worry about while exploring. None of the creatures will attack your bases either, so they're just a travelling nuisance at worst, and most of them will leave you alone if you stop annoying them with light or noise (and for the small predators, a simple whack on the head is enough to get them to flee).

While most of the game has been an enjoyable experience, there are quite a few bugs that annoyed me:
-The Cyclops tends to teleport and glitch through the map whenever you have your main menu open, sometimes getting stuck in a wall
-Creatures phasing through walls and the Cyclops, and damaging you in safe zones
-Placing multiple blueprints doesn't always work
-External power sources forgetting that they're connected to a base on game loading.

The Good
+Great atmosphere
+Freedom and great environmental storytelling
+Great biome variety
+Immersive
+Vertically expansive map
+Various transportation methods all have their niche
+Cyclops is cool
+Combat is optional

The Neutral
*No-in game map to keep track of your surroundings, but you can place markers that are tracked on your HUD to help you find what you want
*Solo only

The Bad
-Finicky base building
-Limited base building and crafting recipes
-Cyclops buggy and randomly teleports away
-Deep areas boring
-One save slot, no autosave
-Scanner room underpowered
-Must have resources for crafting on hand
-Torpedoes are mostly useless

It’s a nice game for some mindless mayhem and blowing stuff up.

There’s a story? Oh, right. One-man-army guy specialising in deposing tyrannical dictators and working for a secret US agency comes home to his tropical Mediterranean island-country to depose the local tyrant… by blowing up all the towns and military bases he comes across along the way. There are 25 main story missions, but most of them are easy and forgettable. You’ll be spending far more time sowing chaos and destruction in freeroam to remember the actual story. Unlike the second game, the story doesn’t take itself seriously most of the time here.

After the first mission or two, you’re free to roam around the entirety of the game’s map. You’ll spend most of that time going from location to location and “liberating” it by blowing up all the military installations and items, or just messing around in general. You can carry one main weapon, a twin side arm, a special weapon and grenades + bombs as extras. You can order more gear from your menu to be airdropped to your location when you run out of ammo or want to switch weapons. Or you can order vehicles to travel from one location to another, or help you blow stuff up. While there are a whole lot of places that you can blow up in the game, they all start getting same-y after a while; the locations are just there to have something to blow up, so none of them really stand out or are very memorable.

The game has plenty of side activities (so much so that they feel more like chores) that reward you with various upgrades (e.g. carry more grenades, more tethers, faster vehicles etc.). Side activities include races for all vehicle types, obstacle courses for your wingsuit, base destruction in style with specified weapons, gathering ore with a magnet, and the dreaded crash bombs. The races are okay, but you’re probably going to need to switch to the fastest vehicle you have and unlock all nitrous upgrades to have a chance to get all five “gears” (stars) for the challenge. The wingsuit courses require you to fly through rings to earn points; some of the courses are pretty simple, but some require quite a bit of practice to nail down the sudden turns or steep dives. Base destruction repopulates “liberated” bases with objects to blow up again, but now there’s a timer and combo counter, so you have to be quick with your explosions. The ore challenge requires driving a vehicle with a magnet to bring ore scattered around the base into the furnace… while being attacked by random military goons, but the most difficult part of this challenge will be figuring out how to actually activate the magnet for starters, since it doesn’t actually come with instructions. The crash bombs, however, are the most annoying and pointless challenges in the game: you have to drive a vehicle with a loaded bomb to ram it into a bunch of goons at a marked location – basically, you have to cut corners while maintaining speed and avoiding damage so that the bomb doesn’t explode prematurely. On paper, it doesn’t sound too bad… until you realise that the challenges are horribly buggy and your car often explodes prematurely or without dealing any damage, because there’s some invisible wall between you and your target… and the explosion is so ineffective at dealing damage that you’d be better off getting out of the car to plant your own bombs instead of ramming the car into the enemies and hoping you’ve dealt at least some damage to them with it.

The Good
+Grappling hook + parachute/wingsuit is fun, both for travelling and for blowing stuff up;
+Mindless mayhem, wanton destruction, and explosions all around;
+Sandbox;
+A sizeable map;

The Bad
-Forgettable story and characters;
-Unnecessarily long game launch intro sequence;
-Single player game that’s adamant about being online;
-Occasional game crashes;
-Game forgets to load assets from time to time (e.g. people riding invisible cars);
-Crash Bomb side activity;
-Limited weapon arsenal;
-Locations look very similar to each other

TL;DR Only buy if you like grinding or you want to 100% your achievements. There are a few tidbits of plot and story, unlike the Labyrinth DLC, but it's buried under a ton of reused assets and repetitive grind.

What's included in the DLC:
1. Boring grind - you need to grind your way to reach the DLC area;
2. Tedious grind - "Memory Lanes";
3. Slog-y grind - "Solloseum Slog";
4. Two new fighting styles (Martial Methods);
5. A few tidbits of lore and character development;
6. Rare legendary loot... that you're probably not going to get because you need to slog your way to get a recipe only to then need to grind for unique Solloseum Slog materials that aren't even guaranteed to drop after a 4-20 minute battle spree... only to get gear with significant bad effects and meh-ish good effects;
7. A somewhat unique boss for the final battle.

The DLC starts off with requiring you to visit all the inns in the world (...and each time you have to go through a generic dungeon corridor and fight a mini-boss) before you can even access the DLC area.

The new DLC area offers two types of content: Memory Lanes and the Solliseum Slog. There are six Memory Lanes, each focusing on a specific character. Each Memory Lane is structured the same way: go through a generic dungeon area with some filler characters -> mini-boss or regular monster spam arena battle -> another generic dungeon area with more filler characters -> mini-boss or regular monster spam arena battle -> area-related to the character of the Memory Lane -> final boss battle. After the final boss battle, you get a bit of background or development on the character the Memory Lane is dedicated to (answers some plot holes, I guess). Go through all six Memory Lanes to unlock the boss fight. The boss fight is probably the only part of this equation that actually feels interesting.

The Solloseum Slog, on the other hand, is just as the name implies: a slog. Take the Memory Lanes, remove all "story" elements and the areas in-between battles, and slap on a timer. It's basically a time attack arena mode where you go through 3-5 series of battles in a row against either a horde of re-spawning monsters, or one big boss each. And with a time limit to boot. Beat the battles within the allotted time to get some prizes (S-rank also gives new recipes and manuals to upgrade the Martial Arts introduced in this DLC). Repeat 30 times in total, with each battle getting harder (both because the monsters get higher level, and because you either get more battles in a row, or less time to beat them). Some battles have some special gimmick (such as "melee/magic damage-only" or "must attack with a certain element") but that's about it. I only crafted up to 5 of the items I unlocked through the solloseum, because I would need extra grind just to get the ingots needed to craft the recipes I unlocked... and half of the stuff I unlocked turned out to have negative effects that outweighed the positives.

The two new Martial Methods in this DLC are the "Wizard's Companion" (the character's spells trigger slow-mo QTEs that can boost the power of the spell or shoot extra elemental attacks) and the "Martha's Method" (Higgledy-related abilities). The former is overpowered and practically mandatory to beat the final Solloseum Slog fights on S-rank. The latter doesn't seem as broken... but in turn, I haven't actually seen a decent use for it either, so I largely ignored it.

All in all, this DLC has far more plot than the other paid DLC... but that's not saying much. And all the plot is buried under layers of tedious grind with reused assets all over the place, so it doesn't exactly make you invested in the story. Definitely not worth the 15€ price when the DLC is not on sale.

TL;DR Only buy if you like grinding or you want to 100% your achievements.

What's included in the DLC:
1. The Labyrinth;
2. Two new fighting styles (Martial Methods);
3. One or two side stories with some actual character building.
4. A few quests related to the Labyrinth or needed to unlock the Martial Methods.

The Labyrinth is basically a 100 floor version of the Faraway Forest (end game Dreamer's Door dungeon) from the base game. Each floor is randomly generated from a limited number of room templates that are randomly connected to each other (and on one occasion, the floor generator messed up and made me get stuck in a dead end). Every ten floors you get a mid-boss fight that nets you a random piece of top-grade loot (if you've collected enough orbs along the way). Unlike the base game Dreamer's Doors, there's no Danger Levels, so there's no time pressure to beat the dungeon quickly; instead you get optional objectives for each floor that give extra orbs. Like the base game dungeons, you can't save while inside the Labyrinth, so you lose all your progress if you die inside, but in this particular dungeon, every twenty floors you can unlock a shortcut to start your next run deeper. The dungeon is nice for some quick levelling and some powerful loot (both in terms of stats, and in terms of having far more than two effects per equipement piece) that you'll need for the other DLC... and that's about it. The "story" of the DLC is paper-thin just to give an excuse for the Labyrinth's existance; there's no character development, nor a real engaging plot to be found here.

Martial Methods is the more interesting part of the DLC, as it adds some new spice to the combat system. This DLC has two Martial Methods: Ding Dong Discipline and Gizmo Supremo. Ding Dong Discipline temporarily nulifies damage and creates a slow-motion effect whenever you're about to get damage during a dodge frame, allow you to counterattack without repercussions - makes fights against single powerful foes much easier as you can both nullify damage against your characters and deal massive damage against the enemy yourself. Meanwhile, Gizmo Supremo gives four special equipment slots that you can use to bring special gadgets (drones, healing aura, massive falling ball) into the fight - somewhat useful. Both of the Martial Methods are available to all characters, but only one can be equipped on any particular character. This new mechanic adds some diversity to combat, but it also makes battles far less challenging, to be honest.

The entire DLC is unvoiced and doesn't really have any decent plot or character building. The Labyrinth is basically a regurgitation of reused content with a little bit of new polish that gets old fast (and it takes like an hour or two to get from one save point to the next, unless you're skipping all combat and loot in favour of just speedrunning to the exit). It would be one thing if the DLC was a freebie or nearly-free, but it's definitely not worth the 10€ asking price unless you're specifically looking for some mind-numbing grind.

A hack-and-slash game that can be relaxing on regular difficulties, or challenging enough on Expert. The story is aimed at a younger audience, but the game is still entertaining enough to buy at a discount and it is one of the better JRPGs out there.

The story is linear and simplistic. You take on the role of a 13 y/o cat-human prince in an alternate world, whose father was poisoned by the country’s chancellor and who is then forced to flee the country with a president from a country on Earth who just so happened to be isekai’ed just as a coup broke out. The boy then sets out to found his own country and bring peace to the world. The story starts out relatively strong, but then it devolves into a cheesy formulaic routine: visit new country -> find out what kind of ♥♥♥♥ the local ruler is up to -> confront them and fight their guardian -> find out that it was all the plot of some devious mastermind behind the scenes -> the ruler gets excused for their misdeeds and signs a peace treaty. Repeat for each country. Then even the mastermind himself gets a pass, because he was just trying to get the love of his life back and was influenced by some bigger evil. The plot basically ends up being “cheesy speeches will get everyone to be friends!”. The characters don’t really get much in the way of development and motivations either – they just seem to be along for the ride. There are a lot of side quests, but most of them are just fetch X, or kill Y monster without much in the way of story.

The game has an open world map that you navigate in cutesy diorama fashion until you enter an area, then it changes back to regular exploration. If you touch a monster, you get transferred to a random battlefield to face them. World map navigation is pretty slow, until you unlock the zeppelin through story progress (you also get a boat, but it becomes utterly useless after two chapters when you get the zeppelin).

There are 6 playable characters in the game. You can pick any 3 of them to form your party. My experience with combat is based on the toughest (Expert) difficulty, which was challenging enough and required some grinding to keep up with the bosses. Combat offers melee, ranged, and magic options. Melee is just mindless hack-and-slash, but it’s the main way to get MP. Ranged attacks don’t deal much damage and consume MP (for shorter firing animations), but can be used without MP to avoid dealing with enemies that have AoE attacks up close. Magic and skills deal the best damage, but they need MP to trigger when there’s very few ways to get more MP aside from melee attacks, and there’s a very limited variety of spells and skills for each character. Healing options are also limited. Party member AI is pretty dumb – they’ll often rush towards an enemy when it’s clearly about to use an AoE one-hit kill attack and do other dumb stuff to get themselves killed. And you can't give them commands to ensure that the their tactics synergise with yours. Blocking is usually useless – the combat revolves around abusing invulnerability frames from dodging tough attacks instead.

The game also offers semi-optional kingdom-building (recruit citizens through completing favours and then spend money to upgrade stuff, without any freedom to choose the layout of your kingdom), procedural dungeons, tons of fetch quests, army battles on the world map, tainted monster (jacked-up-boss) fights, some simplistic crafting etc..

The Good
+Nice art and soundtrack
+Plenty of activities
+Expert difficulty offers a decent challenge

The Bad
-Childish story
-Few voiced lines
-Unskippable cutscenes
-Underdeveloped characters
-Tedious side quests
-Simplistic kingdom-building
-A lot of English names/terms don't match up with Japanese version
-No Japanese subs
-Boring procedurally generated dungeons
-Armour doesn’t actually change character appearance. Instead you have "outfits" that change appearance, but there's only a few outfits per character available
-Melee-centric gameplay
-Blocking useless
-Dumb party member AI
-No party commands
-Limited in-battle healing options
-Very limited in-battle MP restoration options
-Boss rushes
-Defaults on windowed mode

TL;DR Nice X-COM style game with Cold War spy aesthetics. Underdeveloped, but worth the 4€ on sale.
Alternative timeline Cold War, year 1983. An organization is trying to exert influence over all the major powers and you lead a rogue outfit of ragtag spies to stop them. That’s about it for the plot. It was pretty boring and hard to follow.
There’s three campaigns, but they’re only different in the very first story arc, then it’s all the same for all three of them. There’s also an “extended” version, but it’s basically “same game from the very beginning but with a couple of extra cutscenes, one level plays out differently, and there’s a bonus minor epilogue level” that doesn’t add much in the way of satisfaction of “wrapping things up”.

During the home base portion, you spread your agents around the map to find enemy activity to start a field mission while trying to avoid having your own base discovered. In the meantime, you can upgrade your agents and base. The home base portion of the game is pretty underwhelming: upgrading your base is basically just “unlock upgrades through story missions, then spend money to gain benefits” without any actual base planning; world map is just “find enemies and launch a mission”, since all other ways to react to enemy activity are pretty useless (e.g. interrupting an op only buys you a couple of hours before that same agent just repeats the same activity elsewhere), aside from recon to reveal the map before battle. A whole lot of things you can do at your base seem utterly useless: Why spend 24 h “seeking” an enemy agent, when they show up on the map within a few hours anyway? Why spend 2 days infiltrating a base with 2 agents to get 1 single intel reward, when you can just assign 1 agent to comms for a few hours? Why “convert” enemies, when I can just add a “control phrase” to them and take over them during the next mission to both remove an enemy agent from the next battlefield, and score an extra agent on my side during the mission with automatic disguise to boot… and use this as an exploit to surpass your agent limit while I’m at it? Why strap bombs onto an enemy agent and set them loose to blow up their base, when they always ignore the actually troublesome bases and instead just blow up the minor nuisances? A lot of agent “talents” are also pretty useless, since they only slightly decrease monetary costs or give a negligible XP boost for performing the action, rather than making the agent faster or more adept at something.

While the base portions of the game are horribly underwhelming, tactical missions are where the game shines. During these tactical missions, you set out with a group of 2-6 agents to complete objectives on the field. Tactical missions play out in turn-based style on a grid system; each character on the map has a set amount of action points and fire points per turn that can be used to either move your characters and interact with objects, use skills, or attack enemies. Once you use up all the points you want, the enemies and civilians get to make their moves. Most tactical missions start in “Infiltration” mode, where you are free to do your things without retribution, until you break stealth by either getting spotted (or letting a dead body be discovered), or opening loud combat. Although most missions can be completed entirely in stealth, certain missions (a lot of story missions and a certain random mission type) force you into combat either upon completing a certain objective, or after X turns.

During the combat phase, enemies start retaliating during their turns and get reinforcements or air support every few turns. What I like about the combat system is that there’s no random chance to hit. Instead, all armed characters (allies and foes alike) have a resource called “awareness” that’s used for certain skills and actions, as well as to dodge. As long as the character has enough awareness and is more than one tile away from their opponent, they’ll always dodge, consuming awareness. Weapons have a set amount of max/min damage; if a character dodges, they suffer min damage, else max. Damage is affected by factors like cover (50% reduction on half-cover and 75% reduction on full cover), distance to target, mode of fire used and so on. If the damage output after all the reductions is too low, the character can come out unscathed, but will lose awareness. In short, outcomes are predictable: you can see whether a specific character has enough awareness to dodge, so you know whether you’re going to deal lethal damage or not, and plan accordingly. When you see that you won’t kill the enemy outright, you can plan to have one of your agents with lower damage attack first to tire out the enemy, so that your higher damage agent would dish out their max. Similarly, if your own agents are at low awareness and are at risk of suffering high damage, you can have those agents retreat and recover their awareness before returning to the firefight. Tactical retreat is bolstered by the fact that characters on overwatch can shoot at multiple opponents (the exact number depends on the type of weapon used) that move within their overwatch zone per turn. Because of how the combat system works, you’re encouraged make tactical decisions in combat, rather than plunging straight into enemy lines.

There are some issues with tactical missions, though. You’ve got “support” that’s basically useless 90% of the time, because some wall is blocking their sight. You can’t designate a specific route to take for the character, so you often end up with stupid paths: when agents have limited movement, they tend to take shortcuts over obstacles; when they’ve got more moves per turn, they tend to take unnecessary detours to reach their destination (because heaven forbid they have to actually climb over an obstacle…)… which is especially funny when you use a skill that adds more movement per action point, only to find out that your agent decided to take a detour so now you need MORE action points to reach the same destination. Later on I found a setting hidden in the menu to force agents to take the shortest route possible, which made pathfinding far more bearable… like, why couldn’t you tell me sooner? The AI is also pretty dumb: civilians will run into deadly smoke clouds and right into a shootout or no reason, enemies have very narrow patrol zones and most (excluding enemy agents proper) don’t react to their colleagues disappearing whatsoever.

Variety for non-story missions is pretty lackluster. There are like three reskins of most levels, some random levels are just reskins of story mission levels. You’ll end up seeing the same level layout over and over again quite a lot. Mission type variety isn’t much better: kill enemy agent, kill enemy agent and touch computer, kill enemy agent oh and the alarm will blow up in three turns for no reason (force majeure), touch 1 or 3 safes, touch (plant or defuse) three bombs, or eliminate all enemies on map. Since the number of agents you get per mission depends on mission type, not the objective or actual size of the map, the last objective type to kill everyone can be especially annoying when you’re only given two agents on a rather large map, both because it’s hard to find the random stragglers, and because any reinforcements get added to the number of people you need to kill.

The Good
+Cheap
+Aesthetics
+Nice combat system, no RNG
+Can stealth through the entire level

The Bad
-Rudimentary “base building”
-A whole lot of features seem useless or underdeveloped
-Most agent “talents” are utterly useless
-Underwhelming “extended” story mode
-The three campaigns only differ in their first story chapter
-Pathfinding issues
-Poor level balancing
-Dumb AI
-Lack of map and mission variety
-Force majeure
-Can’t skip animations
-Support tends to be useless
-Enemies sometimes shoot through walls

TL;DL Basically, an arcade mode for Prey. Same mechanics but in rogue-lite form. If you're interested in trying Prey's mechanics in a different game mode, this is for you. If you're here for in-depth story and exploring every nook and cranny, it might not be your cup of tea per se.

You play as a hacker, who's been ordered to go through an extrapolated simulation of events on the Pytheas moonbase, where another Typhon outbreak took place just as the Typhon broke containment on Talos I, as part of industrial espionage by a rival company. The story isn't much developed, to be honest. You get to experience one story quest per character for 5 characters that depict what they went through on the base when the Typhon broke loose, but that's about it. Some of these quests bring some closure to a character, others reveal some major plot points, and some serve as foreshadowing, I guess?

The game takes the form of a simulation. You're given control of one out of five characters to explore the moonbase (you start off with one and unlock the others by finding their corpses or completing specific tasks). Your goal is to escape with as many of these characters as possible. The catch is that the map doesn't reset between playthroughs of different characters. So, if you've scavenged the area clear with one character, the second character won't have any loot to scavenge in that area. On the other hand, you can use one character to unlock an area or escape route for another character. You can also transfer items between one character and antoher through an operator, or by leaving your stuff in some container for another character to pick up. If your character dies, they're disabled for the rest of the run (and come back to life in the form of a phantom, unless you have a specific chipset on them). Once all characters escape/die, the entire simulation is reset and you start over from scratch (but Neuromod upgrades and unlocked chipsets and recipes are maintained for future runs).

This DLC offers four areas: three indoor areas and one hub area outdoors in a domed area of the moon. Since this is a simulation of the events from incomplete data, each area has differences between playthroughs. An area my have broken doors on one run, fire hazards on another, no oxygen on another, a power outage and flooding/electric hazards on another
and so on.

There is also a very specific mechanic in this DLC that can be considered very contentious: Corruption. Basically, the longer you spend in the simulation without resetting it to zero, the tougher the enemies get, the more obstacles you encounter, and enemies repopulate all areas each time the Corruption level goes up. If Corruption reached Level 5, the simulation gets forcefully reset before you finish your objectives. On the one hand, it adds a timer to your game, so it adds some tension for you to hurry things up... on the other hand, you'll eventually find a recipe for an item that can delay the Corruption from reaching the next level... and at that point, you can just indefinitely keep Corruption at level 1 if you want to. I wasn't really rushing through the game and still managed to explore all areas thoroughly without letting Corruption level up just by crafting this item. It does use up resources, but there's more than enough of them to go around, to be honest. You can still take things slow and explore every nook and cranny thoroughly, if you want to. On the other hand, permadeath-for-the-run forces you to be far more careful with how you engage the Typhon, since one wrong move and you'll have to either start over from scratch, or abandon that specific character. This DLC forced me to actually use my medkits, for a change! However, some of my deaths were very WTF moments, which can be very annoying (one time, I somehow suffocated by suffering some minor damage, even though I had replenished my oxygen reserves beforehand, so I should have had plenty of time to fix my damaged armour...).

Each of the five characters has different base stats and potential skills to unlock with Neuromods. One character doesn't have much of any useful-in-its-own-right human abilities, but is loaded with different Typhon powers. Another character primarily focuses on the Engineering tree from the base game, with a few machine/electricity-focused Typhon powers. One character doesn't have any Typhon powers at all, but can be beefed up to superman levels through Security tree upgrades. And so on. So, each character has their own playstyle; strengths and weaknesses. Also, only certain characters can repair stuff and hack terminals. And there's one escape route that requires more than one character to interact with it before the escape route becomes actually viable.

Each of the five characters has a story quest that is unlocked by escaping the moonbase with them through a specific method with them. The game is completed when you finish off a checklist of things to do. The checklist includes all story quests and escaping with all the characters in one single run without dying; other tasks on the lsit are basically achieved while trying to complete these two goals.

Also, unlike the base game, you no longer upgrade your weapons. Instead, all weapons come in different rarities. The rarer the weapon, the more upgrades it will have built in. Some Typhon units also function differently from the base game. For example, Weavers no longer have their shields; Poltergeists can rob weapons from you; Telepaths are shielded and stay out of battle until you deal with their minions and so on.

Aside from keeping your neuromod upgrades between runs, you also earn a "sim point" currency through completing objectives and killing Typhon in the simulation. This currency is used to purchase gear and upgrades in any sequential run, even after you reset the simulation to point zero. Combined with the neuromod upgrades, midway through the game you'll have no trouble blazing through each area... assuming you don't go into battle with little to no HP because you're conserving your medkits.

Honestly, I'm a bit torn on whether to recommend this DLC or not. It basically takes Prey's mechanics and makes a totally different game mode with it. On the hand, it's a fresh experience and fun in its own right... and made me appreciate some elements of the game I never used before (medkits, for starters), on the other hand, it feels like an entirely different game, so if you've come looking for more Prey in the same way but in a different place, it might leave you disappointed. I had enough fun to tilt my review in more recommended than not, but I don't see myself replaying this DLC, unlike the main game.

What the game offers:
*A new way of playing the game
*The ability to repair doors, for a change
*1 new melee weapon with a ranged attack, 1 new grenade type
*2 new alien types
*1 new operator type that serves an entirely different function in the game
*Elemental damage for weapons
*Typhon gates that block access to certain areas to anything that looks more alien than human (unless you whack it with electricity)
*Some aliens have different mechanics from the base game
*Pack mule operator companion