The Killing Antidote
Bought this game a while ago and have completed the campaign so far. It is an Indie by a small Chinese development team of five at MetalStar Studio.
It's pretty good. Has satisfying combat, nice graphics, good voice acting, animations are well done, nice soundtrack, etc. The main character is also quite pretty.
Even though it is an Unreal Engine game it runs pretty well. Though to be fair the maps are pretty basic and empty in their design.
The game is still a work in progress. Currently they are working on NPC's that can be hired as team members.
As far as I can tell they plan to add three acts into the game. So far they're are finishing act two, and I'm pretty sure they have the writing of act three finished as well.
Lunar Eclipse
Caught my eye after playing The Killing Antidote.
It is clearly inspired by The Killing Antidote and is developed by Black Rabbit's Tales which consists of only two developers. As far as I can tell the development team is based in Ukraine but I could be wrong.
The original developer stated that it was initially supposed to be an open-world, post-apocalyptic survival game, however developers who worked with him kept leaving. In the end the developer realised it was a bit ambitious, and decided to drastically reduce the scope of the project to a smaller, more focused game.
From my playthrough, it was clearly early in development. Quite rough around the edges and the combat felt quite off.
I also found the animations to be bit off on the main character, whether it was the walking animation or the combat animations.
There is also a lack of voice acting, I have no idea if the developer is going to add some of that in later. For now it is just a dialogue box with a character portrait.
The graphics are pretty good though. There are also nude options which can be toggled on and off if you care about that sort of thing.
Overall, despite the things I pointed out, it is a pretty good TKA-Like (I'm dubbing these other games as TKA-Likes), although it needs quite a bit more polish, especially in the combat.
Other than that I think it's pretty good for a somewhat solo-developer project. I enjoyed it.
Dawn Break
This one is another TKA-Like by another chinese development team, SYN-Studio.
I only tried the demo. It was a bit hard to play as there is no translation and everything is obviously in chinese.
It is very rough and buggy, is really poorly optimized, and looks more like an asset flip than anything.
They also ripped off the infinity gauntlet from Avengers and based the entire game around it.
I mean, while the concept is not that bad in my opinion, the gameplay was just to rough for me to recommend it.
The character are also kind of ugly honestly.
It is a work in progress game and they plan to release it in Q3 2025.
They have a lot of work to do to make this worth a purchase. I'm hoping they end up making it fairly decent at least.
There is no official trailer on YouTube, and can't seem to link the Steam one, so I just added in the cover image.
Overall
Overall I think out of all of these The Killing Antidote is the most polished and the combat is really satisfying. Definately worth a buy if your into trying out these smaller indie games.
If the developer keeps working on Lunar Eclipse I think it could be a close contender. I enjoyed it despite it's flaws. Worth a try if you are interested.
Wouln't recommend Dawn Break at the minute unless you know Chinese.