Not sure if it’s just me being thick but I’ve spoken to a couple of people who had the same problem so thought I’d post this top tip (it’s not a spoiler but just in case).
I spent ages early (ish) game passing loads of upgrade stations with no credits to do anything useful, then at random discovered that the small red boxes with blue lights more often give ~50 credits a time when stomped.
It kind of feels like this mechanism is easy to miss as the game sign posts resources either sat in the open, in the large resource crates or cupboards with open prompt or from stomped monsters but as far as I remember it never sign posts grp small box off high inaccessible shelf and stomp!
I literally just finished the game a few minutes ago and the credits are rolling now. Below is my review that I have spoiler tagged. Doesn’t reveal plot points or anything like that and is more based on the negatives I had with the combat and gameplay. With the negatives I had, I did enjoy the middle section immensely and do hope for a sequel and that Striking Distance learns from their mistakes and improves upon them.
Overall, it’s the visuals and audio that carry the game in my opinion. Story and characters kept me interested but it’s nothing special. Combat/gameplay is the weakest aspect of the game, at least for me. Even on easy, the difficulty spikes were bad especially near the end, the dodge mechanic is horrible, takes literally 5+ seconds to heal yourself using a health injector, boss fights were disappointing especially since they repeat and don’t change until the very end. The camera is worse than the dodging mechanic because it’s just way too fucking close at all times and when fighting the bosses, trying to run which your character barely does (I mean seriously, I can walk faster in reality) and trying to get a good field of view is just a pain the ass.
Below are my ratings for each category and overall rating. I have spoiler tagged this as well because you can obviously see what were the strengths and weaknesses. If you clicked on the spoiler tag above, then you’re fine.
Kiss of death for me. If I’m interested in a game’s story and world, which I am in this case, I have no problem putting up with bad gameplay as long as I can set it on the easiest difficulty and breeze through it. If the game doesn’t let me do that… see ya.
I don’t understand why devs have issues with this. If easy mode isn’t easy enough for babies, it needs to be easier. Like why is this hard to understand.
I know some people like hard games and that’s awesome, I don’t want to take that away from anyone. But if you’re bothering to put in an easy mode, but it’s not actually easy… what are you doing.
Maybe they’ll patch in an invincibility mode someday, like Control did.
I don’t mind hard, as long as it is fair and functions properly. But there should also be very easy settings for those who don’t care for it. In this case it seems to have neither.
If whatever difficulty is in a game isn’t fun there is no point to it, I hate repeating shit for the sake of repeating shit. I saw Jesse redo the same segment for half an hour due to bad mechanics and to top it off the game has shitty save functions. That is exactly what I don’t want in a game.
I was good for the entire except for the last few hours. I will say that once you “master” or become real good with the dodge mechanic, the game is easier. It basically comes down to timing your dodges and not going right or left twice in a row.
Overall, I did enjoy the game despite the negatives and do hope for a sequel. They need to make improvements and while there aren’t many improvements that need to be made, they are major. But we’ll see how the game ends up doing which will most likely determine if we get a sequel or not.
I finished this up yesterday (just before the latest patch hit needing a complete 12G redownload!) and have to agree that there are a few silly difficulty spikes in there.
But I did find that both of the main ones could be seriously reduced with the right load outs. The final boss fight especially. I was lucky that I had some high value items in my inventory just before it so that I could experiment with different load outs. Most made the fight pretty much impossible but the last one I tried fully upgraded standard pistol and all pistol ammo, explosive shots to face/shield standard shots for crawlers made it almost trivial.
Same for the moving platform/first 2 head boss fight where I had many failed attempts until I upgraded the GRP sufficiently.
Not great game design when there are some points a fully melee focussed play through would fail as the baton is not useable.