Here's a mini review:
Pros
- Highly customizable world settings so you can tune the game to your liking.
- Not buggy at all. Came across maybe only a handful of very minor bugs across 50 hours of gameplay.
- Relatively optimized performance.
- I didn't like the lowpoly aesthetic at first but it grew on me.
- Co-op so you can play with your buddies/sexual partners/whoever
- Neat and intuitive base-building system (although it comes with a strong caveat in the cons below).
- Great exploration.
- Great level design, including Soulslike/metroidvania style shortcuts, most of the map is interconnected.
- Writing is good too, although I didn't want to spend time reading the emails because I was playing with a friend.
- The plot is sort of generic (SCP containment break with multiple factions) but handled well.
- Lots of biomes and unique places.
- Clearly heavily Half-life inspired and probably the best Half-Life-like that I've played.
- Also very heavily SCP-inspired and probably the best game of that type I've played too.
- Crafting and progression are actually handled in a way that is tolerable. There are some very strong late-game items in terms of utility (I love anything that teleports).
- You have numerous ways to increase your travel speed which is very gratifying.
Cons
- The game halts completely several times when you are forced to do something that smacks of bad game design. The most memorable one is where the story progression is stopped until you farm 4 resources from a ... that appears erratically. At that point in the game you have no in-game option to force it to appear, to increase the chances of it appearing, etc. You just have to wait.► Show Spoiler
- Weapon balance is completely whack. Early game struggle weapons are fine, you have enough resources to produce decent enough melee weapons and primitive ranged ones. Towards the midgame you notice that melee weapons are outclassed and borderline not really worth the effort of making (the antique shotgun is arguably the best melee weapon). The mid-endgame is essentially dominated by the deatomizer. I've seen other people talking about using other weapon setups, but the deatomizer has among the highest DPS in the game, easily refillable "ammo" that costs next to no resources, and has pinpoint accuracy once you're used to it. The only problem is you're likely using the alternate fire that consumes a lot of "ammo," but at that point you've probably unlocked the teleporter so it's easy to go back to your base to refill.
- I don't know if I bugged out my game, or if I built my base somewhere weird, but non-portal attacks on my base never occured. And there's an upgrade to your crafting table that zaps portals so... I never had to worry about base defense. So there's no point to any of the base defenses except maybe to kill that energy critter that zaps your electricity?
- Survival mechanics are generally fine if you're into that kind of thing, but having to find a place to poop is a complete and tedious time-waster with a minigame that serves no real purpose.
- For a game named Abiotic Factor, the actual environmental conditions never... really mattered. I only swapped for heat/cold clothing maybe twice in the entire game, as some of the armor sets already give you a good amount of protection.
- Fall damage is way too overtuned. You'll probably die a few times with the jetpack in drops you thought were perfectly survivable.
- Most melee enemies can be completely cheesed by jumping on an area they can't reach and just shooting them. Farmed the robots this way in early game.
- Talking about robots, probably 30% of the story missions was just to use robot parts to make a better hacker.
- There aren't many "boss fights" but they're all kind of bad. You can also use the above melee method here against the behemoth.
- The game's ending is kind of a letdown.
That's it! The cons are most nitpicks and don't dock that much of a score against the game.
Overall I'd rate the Abiotic Factor 4.5/5 and highly recommend it.
