Recent reviews by AxisKronos™

This and node buster are shining examples of the direction that incremental games should be going in to stand apart from idle games, absolutely outstanding dopamine factory.

Goes INCREDIBLY hard

Heavy Spoilers

Story seems to be a big thing this game gets praised for so i'll start with that.
Characters don't act stupid for plot reasons and actually know how to communicate effectively, also hearing the inner dialogue between what jesse thinks and what she says is a nice touch. Beyond that though, the story really didn't grab me or do anything interesting and i think there's 1 pivotal issue that makes me feel that way. The game jumps the shark in the first 5 minutes. A random woman walks into a federal building, picks up a gun the big boss of the whole place just shot himself with, and is instantly, unquestionably in charge of a bunch of agents as the new director? Maybe i missed something in the 3rd act that explains this but it seems like a script rewrite kinda fix rather than a natural story progression. You could just as easily say "oh you found the magic gun and got in here to help us! well since you're here, help us kill the demons and maybe we can help you with your brother". Gets the story to where it needs to be just as well as the "you touched the maguffin, congratulations Ms. President!" approach. Where the story really fell on its face for me was Dylan, i don't know what i was expecting..... but his whole character, introduction, and role was so so so bland. I wouldn't even say predictable, because nothing he did was ever a surprise to even the characters themselves. Let me try to walk through this in a way that makes sense "I'm here to find my brother" "My brother might be corrupted" "My brother is corrupted, and a really powerful person to be corrupted" "I won but my brother is in a coma" Every one of these plot beats is said to the player ahead of when it even happens by other NPCs. You never fight Dylan, dylan never shakes up the story, he never does anything out of character, he's just another mcguffin. Hell the writers didn't even have the courage to kill him off for dramatic effect, gotta use that coma cop-out lmao. Polaris/Hedron was cool, was honestly the main thing that kept me pushing to find an answer. Other than that the story felt like the standard "oooooo is it all in your head? is EVERYTHING all in our heads???" corny ahh narrative.

The Progression systems were very promising but went fully the wrong direction IMO.
The alerts and bounties feel like afterthought filler and sidequests were so missable i didn't know the existed until i finished the game. I personally despise games that force you to sift through an inventory of "+X% Gun #4 fire rate while jumping" mods to make room to pick up more, because you have to or the FOMO will eat you alive. The ability tree WOULD have been fine IMO and not required the additional weapon/character mods IF the abilities that you got had actually felt good and not required a dozen ability points to catch up to the stage of the game that you were in when you got them. I genuinely think the game would have been a much more focused and potent experience with 0 Meta progression and abilities that played rock paper scissors against the enemies, rather than me only upgrading launch and then spamming it to 1 shot every enemy.

Gameplay
The moment to moment movement, shooting and power use feels good, very very good. Problem is as soon as your bullet or attack hits an enemy you realize you are doing very little damage, and are being chunked for 75% of your health per hit. The healing system forces you to push into enemies to get the healing nodes, which WOULD be fine, if the game gave you enough health to do this without instantly dying. This forces you to raise your shield and slowly creep up to grab some nodes, this can be mitigated with the shield dash, but i don't believe optional upgrades excuse flaws with the core combat system. The game is stuck in this tug of war between being a fast paced power fantasy, and a cover shooter where you get your head blown off for looking over a filing cabinet. I played it fast a loose the whole way through, but certainly had to pump the breaks when an enemy got a lucky shot on me while puppy guarding all the healing nodes. Powers wise, only launch felt like it was worth using, which was unfortunate as its the first power you get and really makes you feel like the game is going to keep escalating. Lastly, My GOD the enemies got tanky by the end of the game, even with most of my ability points dumped into launch, every non standard enemy was taking multiple rocks to the face to die. I didn't use the assist mode, but by the end i started to wonder if it's inclusion was to fix the balancing issues rather than enable more players to see the story.

Overall this is the kinda game a community patch would turn into a 9/10, but as it stands its a odd mashup of a cover shooter, power fantasy, lore reading tab, YT video essay bait, inventory manager, and ARPG. It's good if you don't have high expectations of quality in any specific part of your games, 6-7/10 across the board, everything serviceable, nothing remarkable.

Solid experience overall, though the middle of the game does drag a bit. The addition of co op doesn't add much to your actual progression but certainly livens up the sense of exploration and discovery to be able to do it with a friend.

A few critiques:
I was not a huge fan of the game play loop of teleportation up every 5 minutes and then spending almost a full minute falling back down to a depth that warrants progression. Last gripe, upgrading to the next mech felt like an odd setback until you leveled it up nearly a dozen times, this usually led to me having to revert back to the previous mech, or save up 2x the price of the new one before buying it and the levels needed to bring it up to speed. Maybe this was the intention but it definitely felt strange that you could buy a downgrade and only with double its sell price could you make it useful.

Short, punchy incremental games is a fun but niche genre of games that seems to be on the rise. Looking forward to what this dev does in the future

At least add Peer to Peer before you abandon the game for time in memorium, even D3 has better longevity support than this

Fix your game Valve #FixTF2

Launched with a bug that prevents you from progressing. I personally played 8 missions and only received credit for 1. Fun game but until it has a substantial degree more polish, more than just this bug being fixed, I'm "doing my part" and bringing the rating down to something more representative of the quality on offer.

EDIT: Progression bug was thankfully patched, but to much shugrin i'm just finding more and more reasons to dislike this game. every feature they add brings with it more frustrations and developer oversights. if you aim right and fire a missile in a mech, it will collide with the mech itself and instakill you, the new flying bugs will 1 shot you after you kill them due to their falling corpses having collision and crushing you with physics, patrols regularly spawn that magically know your position and path to you relentlessly even before being alerted.

That and the roleplay in this games community being even more painful than it's peers (DRG)
God forbid you complain about any element of the game, you'll be met with nothing but "we have an automaton spy over here!" or "joel is trying to pit us against each other! don't listen!" just agonizingly cringe fluff blocking any sort of real discussion. retch

Also you have to make a PSN account now lmao

Risk of rain players be like: "hm better bring my umbrella"

The best way i can describe this game is a rat-like.

Like imagine a rat with a custom lil rat sized controller made by scientists or something.
Imagine a rat barely processing whats going on but gradually learning which way to lean to get further.
Imagine the joy a rat would feel whenever hes owning at the game by just slappin his lil grabbers on the keys.

I AM that rat
And i really, really like this game :)