Recent reviews by The Chemist

After 1.500 hours and very little content for the game it's definitely not worth playing. Quite literally a major problem with this game is the lack of loot, therefore lack of purpose in your raids. Even if you have a blowtorch, which is needed to open the vault (the main source of loot), there is an approximately 25% chance that each container in there will be completely empty. So you have to overcome a 1/4 chance to get absolutely nothing, and then MAYBE you get something that is halfway decent.

So you can literally 1v4 and maybe you get absolutely nothing out of it. Which is actually pretty common until around the 3rd month into wipe. I'm not sure why the terribly incompetent developers thought it necessary to lock loot behind mainly RNG, instead of skill. Of course there is always going to be RNG involved in extraction shooters, but when you kill 5 people with incredible headshot placement and then are rewarded with absolutely nothing, it kills the experience.

On top of this, the developers are so incredibly bad at their jobs that it takes them around 2.37 eons to introduce new content, and said new content has been pretty poor the last 2 updates. The most recent update is solid, but it fixed virtually none of the bugs that needed to be fixed.

In almost every raid you load into, it takes 10-15 seconds to either be able to move, or to look around. That bug has been in the game for almost a year or more. Sometimes when you load into a raid it completely blackscreens, forcing you to task manager the game. Sometimes when you have a completely full bag of loot (which takes a while to get because of the aformentioned awful RNG mechanics) and you attempt to leave the map, the game will blackscreen and you will lose everything.

The game currently features 4 bosses in the game. ALL of the bosses are locked behind insanely extensive RNG mechanics. The Warden is one of the bosses and to fight him for his gear you need to obtain P.S. Keys, which spawn on around 4-5 fixed dead bodies on the Penal Colony map. Unfortunately it's a 3% chance to obtain them each time. Why?

The new SAS Major boss is also locked behind RNG. There is a fuse that needs to be found and inserted into the fusebox on Navy Outpost, but it's a 5% chance to be obtained.

By far the biggest problem with this game is that the developers cannot stop making questionable decisions. It seems like everything they do is insanely incompetent. Everytime they introduce something interesting they kill it by hiding it behind mindnumbing RNG. Generally, RNG is introduced in extraction shooters to ensure that the economy isn't completely ruined and that everyone doesn't already have the best gear in a very short period of time. What doesn't make sense is combining that with a NO WIPE SYSTEM??? To be fair this is not currently implemented, but the devs have stated multiple times that this is their plan.

If you examine the decisions of the developers I swear to you that it will leave you banging your head against the wall due to the sheer lack of logic in almost everything they do.

3/10. Extremely boring. Worth $5 at most, maybe free to play.

Excellent concept on paper, pretty horrible execution. You can tell that the developers didn't extensively play the game themselves considering how much annoying ♥♥♥♥ is in this game. The M.U.L.E takes 15.2 eons to travel to literally any location, and the programming AI is some of the worst I've ever seen. It doesn't follow you like it's supposed to, and then when you start to travel back to dump your minerals, THEN it starts to follow you making you unable to to deposit whatever resources you may have. You can counteract this by placing the beacon right on top of it, but the fact that the AI feels like it's delayed in whatever action it's supposed to be doing by about a decade is incredibly annoying.

Needing to mine Nitra to get a resupply is also incredibly frustrating, as sometimes you genuinely just cannot find any. A much better and simpler concept for resupplies would be to just have a set amount of them. You could have up to 2 resupplies and then after that, you're out of ammo. This would reward players for being smart with their ammo and punish players for taking too long, instead of you having virtually endless ammo as long as you take the immense amount of time it takes to hunt it down.

The missions are also insanely tedious. Instead of putting an emphasis on the combat, the devs for whatever reason decided it was an excellent idea to create the most insanely boring missions of all time. Deep Scan missions take 2 millennia to complete and are incredibly annoying because you have to follow a scanner that works similarly to a metal detector, with it telling you how far you are away from the crystals. You have to do this THREE times and THEN complete the main part of the quest, which is the Drillevator. The only missions that are actually fun and not insanely boring are the Elimination missions, in which you have to hunt down 2-3 Dreadnought eggs, those are incredibly fun. But unfortunately those missions are the only fun ones in the game.

I also personally hate industrial sabotage missions because I use the Cryo Cannon on Driller and for some reason the machine enemies on those missions TAKE 2.3 CENTURIES TO FREEZE. WHY???

Overall it has a lot of potential but needs a massive makeover, I'm genuinely confused on how 96% of people can recommend this game with all of its incredibly annoying flaws.

Now gonna retract what I said. I previously mentioned how bad the balancing was and that they were taking an extended period of time to fix some things. Newest patch has not solved everything, but it was a massive step in the right direction and an a extremely applaudable effort by Embark. I can see why it did take around a month, even though that's actually decently fast for balancing of this scale.

Very respectable effort so far by Embark, hope it continues well into the future. If it does, this game could be massive.

I strongly recommend buying this game, especially because it's only $10. There is so much to do in this game, As of now I haven't even experienced most of what the game has to offer. I'd say there are 3 main gameplay phases you'll encounter throughout playing this game if you invest any decent amount of time into it.

The first one being the "incredibly scared" stage in which you don't know what you're doing and are just playing to be terrified by unknown monsters sprinting at you. The 2nd stage is the intermediate stage, where you start learning the game and actually realize that you're not helpless against the monsters you'll encounter on the inside and outside of the facility, you'll start to realize that you can actually fend off most monsters with some well-timed shovel bashes to the face. The 3rd stage is when you really start understanding advanced things about the game, like using the Zap Gun in conjunction with Shovels or having 1 person stay on the ship and teleport themselves in with an Inverse Teleporter later.

My point is that this isn't just a horror game where you're helpless and you just play for a few hours to get scared and move on. This is a game you could honestly play for hundreds of hours because there is a level of skill to be learned with the game and it's not just a throwaway horror game. Getting better coordination with a designmated squad is insanely fun and you can also always just hop into a random game to carry some randoms or get carried as the random.

Extremely fun game, would HIGHLY suggest buying it, even if the developer doesn't add any more content.

This game was fantastic. Extremely unique and interesting with an insane amount of things to do and explore. Unfortunately the massive cheater problem was never really solved, and it killed the game. It had other problems like buggy AI and questionable developer decisions, but they were never really that annoying. I still think to this day that Scratticus, one of the community managers, was the main reason for this game's downfall.

He constantly ♥♥♥♥ on content creation for the game, which led the reduced attention and money flowing into the game. If not for that guy and better decisions in regards to handling cheaters, this game probably would have been massive.

Fantastic game. So many different things to do and complete. I love achievement hunting in Left 4 Dead and playing versus is incredibly fun. Although I like the Left 4 Dead 1 campaigns more I still enjoy the campaigns in this game and the L4D1 campaigns have been added to this game anyway. Although versus can be super toxic it's still a fun experience and has a huge skill ceiling which means you can always improve in virtually any way. Highly recommend this game especially for it's price.

Amazing game with a plethora of roles to play as. You can mess around or take it seriously and try to survive. It has an insanely high skill cap which means you can almost always get better at the game no matter how long you've played.

It has amazing gun mechanics and playing as the SCPs is incredibly fun also. Highly recommend it althought it is very complex and can be hard to learn how to play. Still a gem.

(6/10/2023) Most of what I said in this review has been brought down by questionable balance decisions. The game felt extremely good to play prior to the Mimicry update, but after that update dropped it feels terrible to play for longer than an hour or two. It mostly just feels like playing a random Garry's Mod.

You can basically do anything you want in this game. I do really enjoy the game and I've personally been mostly playing DarkRP.
Two big problems with this game however, and the bigger one is somewhat hard to fix. When you first buy the game you'll probably see a lot of missing textures, which is only fixable by following a lengthy YouTube tutorial or buying CS:Source for 10$. It's very annoying at first and can make you not want to play the game.

The other problem is that a lot of these servers have rules and restrictions that are really hard to understand and play by. This is easily fixable with experience but it's annoying af in the beginning.

Still really enjoy the game and highly recommend it.

Incredibly well designed. The way you make new components and upgrade your Space Elevator to unlock new and better materials is amazing. This game takes a lot of patience though, and there are a lot of portions in the game where you have to manage your resources well or otherwise risk slowing progress down. This is a good thing in my opinion though, because it rewards players that are aware of what needs to be refilled and what needs to be created at the same time. I love this game, and will continue playing it as long as the developers continue to update it.

I feel like the game has come out of it's recession and is somewhat back on it's feet, but it's community still kind of died. There are a fair amount of players and a high enough amount to queue for, but usually no more than 300 according to SteamCharts. I would still give it a shot and see if you enjoy the experience yourself.

Edit as of 7/21/2021: Community has fortunately heavily recovered and I am now able to play the game normally now. A recent update has fixed almost all the problems aside from some small bugs. This game is great, and I definitely recommend it.