Reseñas recientes de Bottle of Acid

Leaving a negative review for now first, because the game is really not at the state where its worth it, but there is definitely lots of potential here.

JOE is an interesting game. The presentation, first of all, is GREAT. The maps are pretty well detailed. Lighting is pretty. Models are detailed enough. The density of objects make the visuals stand out more, and the zombies have interesting fungal like designs. Sound is great. Guns feel really awesome due to the sound and popping of zombie heads. Audio is pretty good.

Now, we aren't going to talk much about the bugs and performance, because, well, Alpha. Hope they will fix things up, but there is some noticeable improvement at least.

The gameplay, however, while the looting, questing and combat is okay, the game needs to rely less on stacking survival bars and waiting timers. I remember asking the devs back then when there was only Health, Stamina, food, water, Wellness bar if they plan to make the survival systems too convoluted with extra survival bars to top off, and they said no, yet now we have additional bars such as social isolation, infection, hygiene.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a survival game. But survival games don't automatically become better just by overloading more and more survival bars on the player to fill up. There is an addiction to waiting timers in this game. Every action requires you to sit still and stare at a circle to fill up. Yes, you need to wash your clothes. Yes, its done by looking at a circle fill up for 30 seconds. Yes, you have to stare at another circle just to bathe. Yes. Looting is also staring at timers. Yes, Quest actions involve staring at timers.

Timers, timers, timers. I am not kidding when I say it feels like 40% of the game is staring afk at a timer.

It feels like this game was made by people who thought that the best parts of a survival game are the waiting timers and sustenance bars, so why not lets add even MORE bars to fill!

Combat wise it is quite straightforward. Zombies remain at unalerted state until you wake them up by noise or being too close. You can parkour over fences and walls (thankfully although with bugs) to run from them. Close range is really bad, because zombies deal a lot of damage and shooting is too finnicky to work at close range. Serviceable combat.

As for development priorities it might serve better if the devs focused on polishing existing systems first, before adding more mechanics and complications. Great potential. Keep an eye out.

Will update to a positive when the game is at the right stage.

Putting a Negative review for now only because Steam has no sideways thumbs.

There is definitely potential here, but the potential of this game is being barred by a very concerning lack of design and polish that will require further time in the cooking pot before they can get addressed. This is by no means a negative against the devs. They are supposedly a two-person team working hard to develop this game to achieve the goals they want. I just cannot recommend this title at this stage, but I would say that the potential and the interaction the devs have been making with the community might be justified enough for you to put some money in to fund the development.

So what about the game?

Currently, the game feels very much like an improved student showcase project done in game school utilizing store assets to create something. Its better than the countless effortless asset flips on steam at least, but there still requires a LOT Of improvements and features for this game to be worth 15 bucks. This might sound harsh, and admittedly I have not played enough of the game to know it very well indepth, but I have spent enough time in game to get a gist of what is going on. The game as it is, exists as two seperate experiences - VR and Desktop.

While it is no doubt VR was the target focus of Alien Dawn, the current iteration of VR has very un-intuitive controls. Backpacks and Vests are two seperate item containers, and trying to manage them requires you to fumble with both of them trying to slot your items into pinpoint precise circles, failing which to do so will drop the item and require you to bend over to pick them up. There is an auto pick up and store option, which often fails and there is no cue or understanding as to why. Did I just out of the slots that hold that type of item? How do I tell?

Meanwhile, playing on desktop mode (pancake) is a very different set of issues. You can easily tell that this game is made for VR because playing on pancake a lot of things don't work as they should in a traditional game setup. There is a hotbar now and assigned keys, and mouse1 automatically uses items, which is always good, but the game still tries to implement the fiddling of bagpack which was already a problem in VR, and now made even worse in desktop mode. There are a few solutions but I won't discuss them here as this is an impressions review not a feedback thread.

As for the general gameplay, its a mixed bag. The concept, the overall high concept, is really good. We don't have enough open world games on VR, much less so coop games with replayability built in mind. The thematics are unique enough. Sure, its still zombies, but when you see the UFO and Grey Martian looking dudes come out at night, it is interesting at least. The sounds and ambience are pretty great actually. At night there is a general sense of fear when you hear the alien sounds and the darkness is so foreboding.

However, the world design is quite a letdown. First off, there are no unique landmarks that are important in open world games for pathfinding. In Half Life 2, we see the Citadel as a towering landmark that acts as a compass and a orientation guide. In other games, mountain ranges, unique cliffs, cities often provide visual landmarks that let you know where you are even without using the map given enough knowledge. None of that exists here. Everything is designed on a flat axis plane and sometimes you get a slight depression with structures below, or a river, or a small abode. The entire map is a span of vast empty nothing, just rolling green fields and trees, and then the occasional farmhouse that is recycled throughout the map. You don't know what loot is inside them, because everything is so random nothing is ever a tactical decision. A house can have no food, just machineguns laying around. You might find a grenade launcher, but near it are rifle magazines. And this is because there is really not much variation of structure. Almost every loot spot is a repeat of the same farmhouse/whitehouse or military area you just visited minutes ago.

There are fast travel points, and these aren't even attached to any unique feature or structure. Why is a random grass patch beside the road a fast travel point?? Every spot on the map looks exactly the same, except with a slight variation in how things are arranged. Buildings are singular models and many of them cannot even entered, you can even look at the missing windows and see the insides of the building (Unrendered walls). To get around the map, you require vehicles, which are randomly scattered. There is just so much empty space, and repeating patterns, that there is not much reason to choose to explore one area over another. More interesting POIs and better wayfinding would go a long way if a rework is ever possible. Maps need to have more flair, more character. Have distinct areas of the map that offer different playstyles and objectives. Increase height variation and let the player notice these peaks from far away to aid in navigation.

Guns feel floaty and too much like toys. Enemies are just unpolished generally. Their attacks are too fast without the animation to match, and melee is quite redundant because you take so much damage just trying to melee in desktop mode. There needs to be more guidance on what to do in game.

Now, all this said, its not exactly a bad game. I don't think the devs are trying to make a low effort scam. But as it is, there still needs a lot of work. If anything, the third person desktop mode and the VR mode itself are great areas of potential to work on, and with a redesign of the map, more objectives, better loot distribution and polishing, this game would be pretty decent. I wish the two devs all the best. This review sounds really critical, but they are things a normal player would definitely notice if they are not from the game industry and understanding of development troubles.

Buy to support development, but not to play a game yet as it is still very WIP. There is a LOT of potential here, and with enough work, it will be a good VR game.

Good open world zombie coop game.

Its a survival game at heart, but it has a little bit of other genres within. This game is best played coop, you can either play like a traditional survival gamer and stay around your base and build/craft/cook/farm, or if you're like me and less of a survival gamer you can spend your days going out into the wastelands to explore points of interests, looting, killing zombies and doing trader quests for money to buy stuff. There is a playstyle for different groups of players so in coop you get the benefit of everyone being able to play as they like.

The graphics aren't really great, but they are serviceable. There is a very good level of destruction due to voxel world, and every block follows a stability rule so you can get falling floors, destructible paths and stuff. If you can't get into a room traditionally you can break your way through the weaker wood wall beside.

The game's main title and mechanic is that every 7th night a massive horde will descend on you for a non stop slaughter until 4 AM the next morning, where the horde eases off and the game returns to normal. To survive this slaughter you build defences, traps, stock up guns and meds and just spend the whole night killing.

There are different builds to play with as there is a skill system where you can level your character to be good at different kinds of things, like a speedy rifleman focused on blades and snipers with little armor, or a tank with stun-heavy hammers.

The vanilla game caps off its draw at around 80 hours or so depending on how fast you run through the progression tiers, generally there is a point where you have so much of everything and your gear and skills are capped at the max that the 7th night hordes are easy to deal with and there is not much reason to loot or explore. This is when you move into modding, and there are a few popular overhaul mods, one being Darkness Falls which is a user overhual compilation of mods that expand the game largely with many new locations to explore, new questing systems, more endgame weapon grades as well as demonic enemy types that require special ammo to fight and bosses.

Moving into this modded version will net you even more hours, which can add into the hundreds easily.

Hilarious game to play coop.

You're a bunch of amateur ghost investigators that have to buy your own gear again every job. When you go on site you spend a lot of time walking around randomly talking to walls and placing down electronic equipment until you find a vengeful ghost that will kill you because your friends all locked you out of the closet.

Gameplay is pretty straightforward, you try random equipment until enough of them return concrete evidence of the ghost type, and you write down your answer and get out. The danger is that the ghost gets more aggressive as you play, and other players are often too serious to have fun. Do this, do that, do that, why are you teabagging the floor, don't waste our gear...

Bonus points if you can try it in VR and use the hands to hold the door shut on your teammate.

Barely enough content to justify that price tag and they are already selling paid weapon skin DLCs.

Only 2 maps are available, and there are 3 more with "Coming soon" tag, since well... forever.

For ten bucks its not too shabby though. Get on sale.

There is something innate in all of us, perhaps beyond the reptilian brain functions. Cleaning away decades of grime and dirt through a high powered water blaster is something that triggers that sense of catharsis, realigning our seven inner chakras. If Leonardo Da Vinci had a powerwasher the Mona Lisa would not have been a painting, but rather well cleaned and shiny wall.

The gameplay is simple. Point and click, spray the dirt off with several different nozzles that control the water pressure.

The transcendental benefits? Lifelong.

Back 4 Blood is a pretty weird game. Is it good? Kinda, its decent. Half of it is great, it is one of the more engaging horde shooter experiences. The other half is a janky game with weird design choices that really hamper the enjoyment of this title.

+Very good gunplay. The guns are snappy and sound great, headshots pop zombies quick and it feels satisfying to snipe. Shotguns feel powerful as is, and generally all guns are pretty decent at their role. You can modify the guns to behave slightly differently and with the cards system it changes more as well.
-Weapon attachments cannot be pulled out of guns, and the game uses a RPG style colored loot tier that does not gel very well imo.

+The card system is pretty good. I like building different decks which completely change up your playstyle. You can build a sniper deck which focuses on damage, crits, and get cards that reload your rifle while you switch to your sidearm. You can build a melee deck / shotgun hybrid with good move speed and healing effects. Quite a fair bit of choices, with some meta cards on higher difficulties.
-Because cards are all locked behind a progression tier called supply lines, you have to grind out unlocking these cards by advancing the tiers. They are like battle passes, and you cannot selectively choose what you want in each "pass". At the start of the game, your cards are pretty bad, so if you want to play on higher difficulties, you have to grind quite a bit. This is good for some looking for farming experience to prolong shelf life though.

+Map atmosphere and sound design, visuals are great. Very atmospheric. Distant gunfire, screams, growls, the world feels very alive and you feel like you are part of the war. The voice acting is decent, and the characters have some interaction with each other. I do like the whole angle of how you are part of the 'remaining military' carrying out operations and strikes against the zombies vs the usual survivors merely living theme. Levels are pretty well done, with set pieces that are fun to navigate and look at.
-The entire game is set in one general region, with a lot of reused areas. The same map can be reused 3 times, once each campaign, except with some changes in pathing and the time of day. This isn't that big of an issue, but it does feel a little stale after a while of grinding.

+-Basic mobs are great to fight, and specials, while pretty engaging to tackle, do have a big issue of spawning in massive amounts. The game likes to do the l4d equivalent of spawning 4 spitters, 4 boomers, 3 chargers, 1 witch and a tank all at the same time, from spawn points literally a few meters from your team. The result is a coin toss where some runs are very easy due to far spawns and sometimes you just wipe because the game thinks its funny to spawn 3 of the smasher types around a small bend and then 2 exploding specials behind you so you have nowhere to retreat to, all the while having another 2 specials that can range grab you. You end up with a wide range from smooth easy runs on higher difficulties when everything falls into place nicely or some badly spawned combinations just wipe your team.

For content value Im not sure i can recommend it at this price. It feels like a 45$ game, and this sentiment I had before and now, 28 hours after launch early access, I share the same view. More free content needs to happen, but looking at Evolve my hopes aren't high. The game can feel a little stale unless you're okay with grinding for supply points to unlock cards in the same environment for hours on end. A recommend, but take caution.

So far its a pretty decent survival game. The graphics are decent and the audio design is pretty high quality. The characters are voice acted and there are campaign missions to follow along for the story.

The progression tiers are similar to other games where your crafting is limited by your current tier, starting from the usual basic equipment like pickaxe, shovel, and armor made with material from the starting biomes, then later on you start unlocking and building more structures and gear.

The game is much more fast paced than usual survival games though, whereas in most survival games you are more considerate and deliberate when deciding to move out to scavenge/hunt/whatever, there is almost no time to dawdle here. Your oxygen and food meter are constantly depleting, and topping them up requires you to find oxy bubbles which each refill a small bar on the meter. Food is quite RNG-dependent. The most sustainable source of food is cooked meat and bars, and the animals don't always drop meat. This means you can kill 3 critters and still not get meat when you're hungry, As such you generally spend your time always moving and looking at the map to find the next food and air source, while also doing your normal scavenging tasks.

This fast pace will get easier to manage later on when you craft better gear, but at the start, they feel quite pressing and the game's lack of proper sorting can be frustrating to work with. Your entire inventory is on a bar at the bottom of your screen, and using items involve either right clicking the item to equip or use, or dragging it into an object in the case of cooking meat. The game is smart enough to automatically equip a pickaxe when mining at least, but some actions such as cooking meat can be cumbersome if you're not used to this system.

As of now, the start of the game seems to make you move a lot to find stuff, you eventually have to build a base, and the absolute spam of random materials need to be placed in a chest, yet the base seems anti to the game's focus on keeping on the move. The nomadic lifestyle you are forced into at the start might not work well with the base builder mentality, but it might get better later on, this is a first impression.

Combat is serviceable, but not great. It involves you running up the enemy, and clicking on them which triggers an animation where your character snaps to the target and hits them. There is no smooth hitbox based combat here. Its harder to kite and you can't block, so combat involves a lot of pure stat exchange between the participants. Hunting is inconsistent, since you can use a net to catch and kill the basic critter but the hostile critter of the same size can be caught but not killed when in your bag, why is this so? I don't know.

I think there are quite a lot of decent ideas and the game does try a little to be unique. There are some mechanics I definitely feel do add to the experience, and the questing feels decent so far. I did notice there is no keybindings option in the ingame pause menu, but I might have to check the main menu again for that option. The ingame minimap is actually pretty good, you can zoom in to see more details and the map will show you where to find creatures and resources in real time.

A minor gripe I have is that because everything you pick up is some similar looking or random organic blob of color, its not very readable whats on your hotbar. The inventory bar makes no distinguishing sort between items you can use and items that are purely materials, and in some cases multiple items that dont even look similar function the same way. The game involves you constantly managing temperature, food and oxygen, so you have to keep clicking on the related consumables to top them up, yet often they are mixed in with everything else on the bar. A little HUD cleanup and having the hotbar purely for usables, and have an inventory bar for materials would go a long way.

As a summation I feel like the game is quite well polished yet there is always that little bit of "Why did they make it so cumbersome to do this" slapped on the cake. The controls are very intuitive for 1st level interactions like picking stuff up and using an item (Everything is either left click to use or pick, right click to scan) and then cumbersome to do anything slightly more advanced than the basic interaction.

Still though, at this price the game is pretty decent so far, and I have not played far enough to get a proper feel of the endgame, but the start feels quite promising.

8/10 Decent BR game

+Mechas are obviously the main draw here. Your mecha is a weapon of mass destruction when used right, or a coffin if you don't. In squads there are countless mecha trio combinations you can play with your team that offer a lot of options. Mechas are pretty much like Overwatch characters, they have a dodge skill, a combat skill, primary attack, support ability. All the mechas seem to be pretty well balanced. There are mechas for a wide range of playstyles, from melee based, to flying laser mechas, machinegun DVA style mechas etc. Mechas have high skill ceiling so you can practice a lot with them to get very good at the mecha. There are a lot of tricks you can do with each mecha that you won't know from the start.

+Pilot form is fun as well, when you are not in a mech you are a human with heavy weaponry, snipers and shotguns. You have hoverboards and a mini mecha car used for mobility, and if you play it smart you can do a lot even in pilot form. Pilot form and mecha form are two different playstyles that you must learn to complement and switch between in order to win.

+The general playstyle to win matches in this game requires a lot more of tact and planning. All your weapons and mechas are just tools to reach the end, and what matter is planning where you need to be and where you should be. You can't just run head first at people all the time as you do in other BRs and expect to fight your way to victory. Getting caught in a bad situation is far more punishing in this game.

-+Originally a mobile game, so there are some jank involved. The jank however, is used to definite this game. You will learn to exploit the jank. Things like opening crates through walls etc. Once you know them they arent an issue but they become an asset.

+There is crash recovery.

-Aim isnt so smooth and sometimes characters lag. Its an issue but it isn't so severe imo but should be mentioned. Sniping needs getting used to because of the slight input lag. I have gotten stuck once under the map, though it is rare.

-Gacha system for skins. The best skins require gacha rolls. Though on the upside these are just cosmetics.

-Somewhat small ish playerbase. Still sustainable, and match queues are mostly instant, but in a match of 100 about 60-70 of them are likely to be bots, which means maybe 10 squads of players that will converge at the end to fight.


Well its free, just give it a try.