Recent reviews by Kamuel

Game is solid for that price with a good artstyle.

Around 5h for all current achievement and clearing all levels and unlocking stuff.

The most negative thing of current build is that stupid drone noise, which resulted in that i was muting all sounds completly, otherwise nothing bad, but nothing super special. Maybe the game is little too slow, but thats more likely a personal taste from playing a lot of games of this genre.

A fantastic RPG, with lovely artstyle and a lot of things to discover, paired with a nice gameplay, music and sounddesign.

Pro:
- Wonderful pixelart artstyle with so many little details everywhere
- Large open world with many hidden paths, secrets and so many things to explore.
- Good playtime amount. Took me around 45 hours to finish game with mostly all quests and secrets and never had the feeling that the content was stretched. More the opposite of it: i am sad that its over.
- Great progression system where you can choose how hard you want it. You can go anywhere from the start and do challenging stuff or come back later for a normal experience and most things are optional.
- Varied Quests, which doesnt felt like work or repetitive. Main Story contains heavy twists, which maybe not everyone like, but this keeps it interesting(played femeton
- Music is lovely and sounddesign is fitting
- Writing is not bad, which is a rare nowadays for indie size developers and even some larger ones.
- Fluid Combat mechanics. Weapons feel and play differently. Skilltree supports the weapon playstyle. But most additional stuff for a build comes from rings/amulets.
- Nice Performance. Otherwise nearly to none bugs at all. i dont even know what was the last game, which was in such a great state and this is a release state too.
- no inventory limit, you can loot everything without problems

Neutral:
- achievements if you want 100%: they require backup saves or two playthroughs and maybe some research, because some are missable.

PS:
i really hope this will get more attention and dont become a hidden gem. the devs deserve it, because you can feel the time and passion they spend in creating, polishing and playtesting this game. And i really hope there will be a sequel/dlc, because i want to discover the other parts of the world they created :D

Great graphics, gameplay and stuff. but the progression feels so damn terrible. never seen such a bad unintiutive game design. so i cant recommend this game for people who are having a problem or dont want to look stuff up on the internet.

the game does not respect your lifetime you invest in this, not in the slightest.

Or the longer version:

The game is really bad in explaining stuff, most stuff is locked behind other later stuff at different locations/events in a combination with season bound stuff for "main story quests" so if you miss it, because you dont know it, because its not explained anywhere (example are the "secret unlocks" which comes from goddess if you unlock x amount of sets and even the description of one full set bonus is wrong, because you get it from something else).
and you cant know it, if you dont look at external resources, and then you miss it and then you can wait another year, feels like progress lock for main story line. the need to look at a wiki/reddit or other sources feels more and more requiered the later the games goes on. there are no hints, npc hints or whatever that would help for many things on how to get xy, because there are no tooltips/etc for what unlocks what or where.

and there are wrong tooltips on top. one example for one item without spoiler: tooltip says "use it at the location x" a) there is no such location in the game and b) you can use the item from everywhere

And its even worse. stuff like marriage where you have to "watch all cutscenes from that person" without any hints where to see the next cutscene, at what number of cutscene you are or how many are there. you max out the hearts you buy the ring and games says only "no i dont want marriage" no hints on why. and then the trigger points are time bound, place bound and sometimes weather bound too. this goes for way too many things. so many events are work in that way. even main quests, without any word on where you have to go next or why the next quests is not triggered and on top the trigger points are sometimes way off. as example: "go to the entrance off" the cutscene trigger is not in the front of the entrance, its a longer distance away from the door on the street and on top buggy sometimes, so it triggers only if you run over it from a specific direction. had this where it only worked if i ran from right to the left over that spot, no other direction (and no it wasnt bound to time).

there are times where i didnt had any quest in my log for many hours, had to look in the wiki if i am done with the story or not, because nothing happened or triggered.. its so damn bad game design for that part of the game. and i dont understand why there isnt a filler quest like "wait for new events" which is a tiny indicator that there are more quests or whatever.. and this is the case for mainstory and sidestories.

beside some other bugs, like performance which gets more worse the longer you play. on top from small freezes/stutters if the game loads areas. longer and longer loading screens. more short freezes when normal running later in the game even if only on farm (at the beginng every 30sec, the time where i stopped every 3-4secs). had a bug where i used my skillpoint and the skill didnt unlock but the point was gone. had to restart the day. with larger/more fields and more animals, every morning i have a big slowdown for around 20secs and if the auto harvest is runnings its a freeze.. with gtx3090&amd5900x. and if this is not enough, there is a memory leak so i have to restart my game every x amount of ingame days.

and the worst for the progression:
the requirement to fully finish the museum with all items to see the full story is a really bad decisions.. museums should be optional for achievement/extra unlocks whatever. and here you need super random stuff where you need to grind mining and stuff and hope that you get lucky to get the stuff in a okayish time span, because of opening geodes and stuff with random outcome and no drop buff for missing items. its so damn bad design decision. and later on there are gacha machines with treasure maps you maybe want (super expensive, only 5 pulls per day, multi item pools, duplicates common) and then as reward for a map you get a seed as example, which you can buy in the shop at the beginning (dont know if there are other rewards, but this stopped me from getting the other one) this and other things feeling like baking a super expensive cake in real life which take the whole day and getting a glas water as the reward.

this is on a whole other level of pain, i would call it mental torture and i played most grindy farming/factory/idle/clicker/incremental games. it was hard to give up on this after the already spend amount of time, but it got worse and worse the further i got near the end.

there was no sign of light. the rewards for the grinds became ridiculous after 80-90% done with the game, like getting items you can pick up from the ground in large quantities as a reward for a grind you spent hours on. and this goes for nearly all grinds and not only a single exception.

Overall pretty nice game with very enjoyable gameplay.

But I would call it more of an "Action-Adventure FPS game, with light souls-like aspects in terms of difficulty and enemy design" rather than a metroidvania, because level design is so narrow and progression is super linear, like in an old school shooter. It's not a bad thing, because it is fitting for this type of game.

Pro:
- Enemy-Design: Many unique bosses, good variety of enemies and no reusing bosses as normal enemies. Enough Boss-/Enemy-Patterns related to the life pool, so that I would call it the right spot of not to less and not bullet sponge on normal (classic) difficulty.(except optional challenge soups/boss rush mode)
- Gameplay: Great fluid mix of jumping, dashing and shooting with weapon rotations, feels a little bit as playing games like doom. And having markers for directions of enemies is a nice quality of life.
- Art style: Nice and detailed enough for being a voxelart-style with rather large voxelsize. Animations and Atmosphere are okay.
- Hit boxes: Would not call them extremely precise, but never had the feeling of inaccurate or unfair.
- World building: Areas are varied and not that big that they get boring, but they could be a little bit less linear.
- Sounds: Directional unique sounds, which helps in combat.
- Difficulty: Feels fair. Not a walk in the park, but move sets have good telegraphing and visibility, except some rare cases where you have to "feel" your position between some "things" and some weird charge attacks with a maybe too short of a cooldown (but you can equip stuff to counter it). But overall it's not completely unforgiving and with a somewhat unlimited healing system, but without full-facetank possibilities. And on top, there is an easier difficulty too for people with a lower frustration tolerance, when it comes to learning enemy patterns.

Neutral:
- Music: Background music are short loops, which are fine and fitting for most of the areas. overall not on a level where I had to mute it, but I just turned it down to 20% volume, because some loops were annoying if too much in foreground.
- Puzzles: Only some standard push puzzles and with just some basic currency rewards all the time, which results in the feeling of wanting to skip them, but they are easy, fast and not too many of them, so its faster/better doing them than grinding enemies, because there are shops with nice stuff to buy. This mix leaves a bad aftertaste for those puzzles.
- Achievements: A thing i personaly don't like: achievements getting added after release with patches, so get 100% once doesn't mean you keep the 100% most likely. And on top there are missables ones, because of some which exclude each other (easy to get with save scum), but then there is "beat in under 5h" and "beat with 100%", which is more chilled if done separated in two playthroughs. But the game isn't that long, so it's acceptable, but not great. Those stuff always feels like unnecessary stretching playtime for people who want achievements.

Fantastic Metroidvania

In terms of difficulty:
Its a game for everyone, because there is a custom difficulty setting aka story-mode, where you can adjust attack damage and injury multiplier up to only getting 1% damage and doing 1000% Damage, so you can adjust to your liking

Pro:
- Great art style, sound design, music.
- Nice storytelling with different endings
- Combat-loop is satisfying and fluid with parry, dodge, bow and talisman-bomb.
- Skilltree and charm-system (jades)
- Not that much back traveling for a metroidvania, because of a nice map and travel system
- Performance is really great and game is polished. got no bugs or crashes. loading screens are short

Neutral:
- Achievements: there are some missable ones, if you dont look them up before playing and do some backup saves

A nice journey through a fairytale wood. I had alot of fun with it. Around 20h for all collectibles, quests and achievements.

Pro:
- fantastic voice over and story telling of a not boring story
- super fitting soundtrack and sound design
- worldbuilding and level design with a lot of variation and a ton of optional side stuff to explore
- gameplay is fluid, feels great and never unfair. even traveling around is pretty fast (if you use your skills)
- talent tree has some nice stuff in it which is worth to unlock
- very polished
- ingame help for missing collectibles, so no guide needed for doing and finding everything

Neutral:
- story only is 4-5h, so dont rush and do exploration for sidequests and collectibles for more story. its worth it.
- savesystem maybe not for everyone. there are enough save points and some auto checkpoints in front of bigger events, but i would guess some people forget to save and then maybe die after alot of exploring and then are back at the last save and get frustrated. (saw this type of problem in forums/reviews and most other games with that type of save system, which are gotten released nowadays, have gotten the same critique too. personaly i cant understand this, but just saying it, because it can be an issue)

Cons:
- "too short" (but for that price i got more and on a higher quality than i expected)

The game is fully solo playable and about 8-12h long, depending on the amount of side quests and how much exploration.

Pro:
- Beautiful art style and enough variety in the world design.
- Great and fitting visual effects
- Sound design and Music are great
- Gunplay feels fluid and nice with different weapons, perks and different classes, which you can switch at any time, classes at every station
- Performance is really smooth
- Quests and Story are not too bad for this type of genre, of course it's mostly bring/kill but at least not always same goal, but I didn't have the intention feeling of need to skip dialogues.

Neutral:
- Old school save system on specific spots which are frequently. I personally don't have a problem with it, other games in this genre reset the whole level or have very spare checkpoints.
- play it for the fun gameplay and not for a challenge. it's too easy for many people who play more games of this genre. I would call it "normal" and in a speed which you can self define by how much you are pulling, because maps are big and hit&run always an option. (and with using turrets it's become absurdly easy :P)
- Maps fully reset on area change, the events too, which are required for the story. Only shortcuts are still open. I would say that can be frustrating for some people.
- for the 100% achievements people: 2 of the achievements require full group coop (at release state only via steam friend invite) and 1 achievement require being level 30 which is a grind after the story, I was not even close.

Contra:
- no public lobbies, coop only via steam friend list invites (release state, not a contra for me, but I would guess for many)

Overall you get more like the first game with new things and stuff (but less and better fightning), but with (in my opinion) better world building in terms of shortcuts. game performance and gameplay fluid and wonderful, like always.

There are some references from first game, but i would say its not requiered to be played beforehand, but you should do it if you did not, because its really awesome too.

Playing just for the story is maybe too short, so i recommend going for 90-100% collectibles to see all the places and stuff. The story ends a little too abruptly, but there is more to explore afterwards.

If you like exploration and you can ignore the story and voice acting of the main characters, it can be enjoyable. It have nice additions, but the story is so bad, that i cant give the overall rating a good.

No Spoilers

Pro:
- Quality of Life and Performance Improvements to a point where the gameplay is so much more fun to play than 1 (and at the same time you dont want to go back)
- Music: I really like it, hard to say if its better or not than 1. i would say same level and you can loop it.
- Sounds: i like them. they fit the gameplay.
- Graphics/Artdesign: Great.

Neutral:
- Leveldesign: It feels smaller, because the underwater part is less, but you have the over water areas. Its not directly a bad thing. Subnautica 1 had many big open spaces which felt way too empty, too. In below zero you have way richer filled enviroments.
- most of the new Items & Stuff feel unnecessary or worse than the counter part from subnautica 1, some things are nice yes, but overall this feels like a addon, where you dont have to use the new stuff or only in some story parts, which feels that they only there so that you have a reason to craft and use new item x.

Contra:
- Story and Progression: Its bad. Bad writing, specially of the main characters dialogues, boring and predictable. And i have to say it "in my opinion more worse compared to the version they had in the game before the rewrite end of october 2020", because of the amount of hand helding you have in the game now, it is too linear for my taste in a exploration game and the fact that you have even more dumb dialogues. Felt like torture at some points. The feeling is that you know the planet and everything, you know what to do and where to go, because they are talking about that all the time and the pda's are explain the others stuff in combination with the markers.
- Voice Acting: i dont know, but at some points i was close to muting, because of the amount of bad dialogues with those voices from main characters. other voice actors are fine, maybe because their dialogues are not that dumb.

TD;LR rating:
if i had to give a rating, i would have gave subnautica 1 a 8 out of 10 at the release date back then. and below zero a 6 to 6.5 of 10 now and thats only because of the story dialogues and progression feeling, otherwise a 8 out of 10 too.

Wonderful exploration game with combat and plattforming. More like Nier than Darksouls.

Pro:
- Artdesign: lovely low-poly graphic, which gives in combination with the soundtrack a great atmosphere
- Leveldesign: great verticalness, good shortcuts
- Tons of Secrets: even on places where you think that it would be outside of the level. was a lot of fun to explore and to find stuff in the sneakiest places.
- Soundtrack
- Story with different endings

Neutral:
- maybe not enough different enemies. i didnt care about it, but for some people this could be a problem.
- fighting against enemies on stairs is not great. most of the time you cant hit them when you are slightly below them, same happens on some roofs. but with jump attack you can always hit them, its okay, if you know it.