Recent reviews by Bucketsmith

TL,DR; If you like boomershooters, and you prefer 'gameplay-first development', then this is for you!
If you've played and enjoyed Hedon: Bloodrite, you will also very much enjoy this!
At the time of writing, Selaco is not out of EA yet. But already, I don't know if Hedon or Selaco is my new #1 best boomershooter.
The level design is just so good!
I feel like this one has everything in the right spot, just like Hedon did for me.

I positively think that the level design will blow you away!
The level design is how I imagined boomershooters to evolve. The maps are made to feel like plausible environments, definitely not lame 'arena shooter' designs so many other copies tend to bog down in to.
A lot of mechanics are key to the GZDoom engine being used, things like the gunplay and how you interact with the world.
I don't think it is entirely fair to judge an individual game on those things, within this specific subgenre, boomershooter.
I like the gunplay and movement, but perhaps these games can be hard to get in to if you didn't grow up with DooM and its clones. Or Duke3D and the other Build engine games, for that matter.

I got this in EA and it has just stalled in to being generic since then.
It offers nothing over any of the other similar titles, just like the vast majority of those titles.
Things are incredibly grindy and tedious at times.
There's not really any unique mechanic to this title.
There is zero replayability.

If you've never played a survival crafter, go ahead.
If you have, I don't feel like this one is offering anything that will keep you entertained.

I couldn't refund and I had mistakingly thought it was going to add stuff to make it interesting and keep me going.
I've finished it now. I can't get myself to 100% all the skills.
The post-end-boss is tedious as hell - you need to mine out a whole lot of the map in order to fight this guy and it's the hardest rock. Then, get a bunch of movement gear and potions,
Not to mention potions do not stack! Any potion with the strongest percentage in a sepcific thing is the one that you will have, and then you override it with another potion if it's giving the same buff.

Sorry but I just can't recommend this to anyone who has played survival crafters before.

At time of writing, three episodes were released.

In general, the gameplay is pretty nice, but there is no jumping and no crouching. I personally prefer boomer-shooter Doom-clones to have these improvements and not limit themselves so vulgarly in level design.
I want *more* freedom, not less!

The weapons are okay, but not very special.
I played pretty much the entire game with the double-barreled shotgun and only swapped to other guns when I had to face bosses or congregations of a lot of strong opponents.
The sentries that you can place are awesome! They are super powerful, but also run out of ammo quickly.I
I wish there was a way to deploy more of them with less ammo, rather than being able to carry 3 and only deploy 1 or 2 because they want to grab the max ammo they can have and leave you with empty sentries.

The level design is rather good! With the hard exception that it does not take crouching and jumping in to account, which I find a sad disappointment. :(
Secrets are sometimes in ridiculous smash-any-wall places, some secrets are in proper placement and reward you with exploration.
You can freely use the 'secret' command in the console without cheating, to give you some hints to where the secrets are.
I find these to be a bit too spoilery at times, and a few are just downright useless hints. Some are at a nice level of not being too spoilery, but also not too vague or downright impossible to follow.

Most levels are not super linear, but there's also not a ton of backtracking, so I think that's at a good sweetspot.
The levels look great and immersive, it doesn't look like there's just corridors, rooms and arenas for gameplay sake - everything looks like it is legit the facility that you are visiting.

The soundtrack is superb! I really like it!

I know this is a hot/sensitive topic for a lot of people but I want to voice my opinion on this part despite how some people might receive it. (Hence I disabled comments, though.)
There's some annoying agenda-pushing in the story, but the story is only optional to follow.
You have some mandatory terminals that have you read through some pages of text, and there are optional terminals.
But you can skip through all of it, and none of it gives you any 'mission critical' information.
At about halfway through Episode 2, I lost interest in the story. I don't think it was written particularly well. It didn't manage to grab me and it seemed quite disconnected from the gameplay. You can freely explore the game and figure out what to do without the terminals, though!
Though the incidental agenda-fueled lines take even more away from the story being immersive and qualitative, it is not overbearing and you can still read through it to enjoy the story if you would like to.
As usual, there is absolutely no problem with characters being non-standard, we've had that for ages. But if you feel you need to explicitly point it out in in-game dialogue with very obvious meta-writing, it always comes out so forced and immersion breaking.
I would have preferred the bad-assedry to be evident through gameplay, not by writing trying to enforce it. The game doesn't need it.
You don't even notice anything about the character outside of the terminals, so what is the point, anyway?
Don't take the amount of words for it being such a big problem - it's only a minor gripe I think could have been handled better and I don't think that even when you're strongly opposed or sensitive to these topics/things, it will ruin your game experience.

All in all I think it is worth its €15,- pricetag. I got 22 hours out of it in the current state. At least one more episode is planned, going by the endscreen in episode 3.
I am looking forward to it!

The game has quite some flexibility between arcadey and extreme hardcore simulation.
The base vanilla game has quite a lot of options to finetune this. Some are binary on/off switches, some have 3 levels.
There are also mods that either play in to the more relaxed fun, as well as the more hardcore simulation aspects.
In my opinion, this gives you quite a lot of leeway in which elements or mechanics you want a more hardcore approach on and which you want to not have to care about.

The 1.0 version is very playable! I've played since early versions and a lot of the instability and jank has been removed and polished.
But I also honestly have to say that some remain.
The time compression at the two highest settings may not be usable for your average system.
Even my top-of-the-line rig does not play well with 15.000x compression. (7950X3D + 7900XTX)
The engine (Unity) just cannot seem to handle time compression and 3D assets so well.
When simply travelling, 1800x should be your max if your system allows.
When having ships and ports nearby, use 140x max.

There's a decent progression system to play through a playthrough.
A playthrough can take quite a long while to finish. The game has replayability but at some point you will 'recognize the patterns.'
You will want to take note of the end date on in-game campaigns, as some are very time limited and before you know it, you will feel frustrated you were left out on completing some - and thus the special skills that only unlock through these missions!
Thus, you might want to make sure you maximize getting all content in a single playthrough and then there just isn't much new in the next one.

All in all I would definitely recommend getting the game at €30 or below if these games are your cup of tea, and €20 or below if you don't like hardcore simulation, because this game still has plenty to offer to you.

Side-note; I just wish we had a game like this that foregoes realism in areas like real historic dates of the war, and gave us a randomized map with an optional longer war, just so we can play more!
Perhaps with different eras of technology as well. Hmm, maybe I should write this down and start coding.

Other critical reviews have stated this correctly, but this game is incredibly shallow.
There's a whole lot of filler that does not actually equate to being a puzzle.
There's quite a lot of purposely designed frustrations, like the charged jump having charges. You have to wait a long time for it to recharge.
Lo and behold, a lot of places require you to jump higher than your regular jump.
This means the gameplay time is inflated, because you're stuck doing a ton of nonsense.

Half of what they call puzzles, are fun puzzles. But there's only so few types, you will get bored quick.

There's absolutely no point to the multiplayer aspect. You will see players move around, there is no way to communicate, interact or coop anything.

The american voiceovers with "jokes" aimed at that audience are going to annoy you immensely.
Sometimes, the physics are far too punishing. Where a box will have to go over a conveyor, but the RNG of the physics engine makes it turn and shift position, and then it bumps in to something to the side, that you have no control over.
This is something that should have easily been avoided.
I'm about halfway through now, and these things are starting to be more and more of a problem, so far.

Other than that, it's a Portal-like puzzler and it is okay.
Those downsides are a huge deal in a puzzler like this, though, so I can't say I can recommend anyone else getting it.

What the hell happened to the pricing scheme?
IIRC the DLC I bought were like 1,34 a piece.
Now it's 8, some 15 euros a piece?
The game plays like a browser game, and that's fine, but it was appropriately priced in the past.

The puzzles are not very 'puzzly'. They're very linear, straight forward, simple and thus easy.
There are a tooooon of unskippable animations and as annoying as that already is, there are even some that reset your perspective and zoom.
It makes it very frustrating.
But the biggest issue I have with this is that it is merely an interactive advertisement for the actual game coming out later this year. Nothing more than that.

If you want a simple Where's Waldo experience and get a good price for the amount of hours you play, this is a solid recommendation.
Short, cheap, good.

No longer works on modern systems.
Tried the beta patch, tried the overhaul mod.
The contents are great, the overhaul makes the game play like a proper Carmageddon game again, but it is really unstable.
There's massive graphical glitches on modern AMD GPUs. There is a fix for that, but that fix also lowers the FPS tremendously, especially with vehicle reflections.
Even with all that, the game still keeps crashing. That beta branch is just incredibly unstable.
Sadly, it will not be fixed by devs so do not buy at this point!