[h1]Sum-Up[/h1]
[h3]In-depth analysis further down.[/h3]
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[th]🟩 [b]Pros[/b][/th]
[th]🟥 [b]Cons[/b][/th]
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[td]
• You can choose to buy a bottle of decent vodka with the money. It will surely hurt your brain less, and make you happier, than playing this game.
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[td]
• Extremely repetitive gameplay loop that, despite some additions as you progress, never really evolves or becomes more interesting at any point.
• Horrendous story, with butchered English translation and generic sci-fi / post-apo themes. It reads out, and evolves, like an AI-generated script more than anything else.
• Very low enemy archetypes roster: even if there are multiple factions, most foes behave too similarly to each other, resulting in limited mechanical variety.
• Shallow combat mechanics that never evolve in depth at any point. Most fights, excluding a few bosses, are simple trades of blows / DPS checks without any quirks to them whatsoever.
• Immense content bloat, due to the heavy recycling of assets, animations, enemies and pretty much anything else. It feels like grinding the same map 50 times over, just with different color palettes.
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[th]🟨 [b]Bugs & Issues[/b][/th]
[th]🔧 [b]Specs[/b][/th]
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[td]
• Rarely, your character may get stuck inside some props.
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[td]
• i9 13980HX
• 64GB RAM DDR5
• RTX 4090
• SSD
• 3840x2160
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[td][b]Content & Replay Value:[/b][/td]
[td]It took me 52 incredibly boring hours to clear about 70% of the map, including unlockable dungeons and extra levels; to fully 100% everything, I estimate no less than 75 hours are needed. The entire content is linear, there’s no reason to replay.[/td]
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[td][b]Is it worth buying?[/b][/td]
[td]God, no. It’s a low-effort, incredibly shallow and repetitive conversion of a previously F2P mobile game. It has no place in a PC gaming library, and isn’t worth anyone’s time or money.[/td]
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[td][h3]Verdict: Terrible[/h3]
[url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2548409603]Rating Chart Here[/url][/td]
[td]One of the most boring, generic titles I had the displeasure of playing in 25 years of gaming. An affront to anything that could be even remotely considered ‘fun’.[/td]
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[h1]In-Depth[/h1]
[h3]Writing & Worldbuilding[/h3]
After something along the lines of WW3 went down, Nations decided to use bioweapons as a last resort, consequently transforming a good chunk of the population into anthropomorphic furries; which could be a dream come true for some, but a nightmare for most. Also, the majority of them went feral or insane, while an evil PMC known As APEX is speedrunning world domination amidst the chaos.
This might sound like a fairly exciting and ‘weird in a good way’ premise, however its narrative execution is terribly lackluster, even for the low expectations you’d have from an ARPG hybrid subgenre such as this one. None of the events, characters or locations you’ll encounter during the main or side quests feel remotely memorable. They’re all generic elements to justify gameplay, nothing more. What little elaboration upon lore is written so awfully, that half of it is atrocious to read, or at times, incomprehensible. Even if it was readable grammatically, it would still bore most people to death after half an hour.
The post-apocalyptic, warzone-themed (no, not that warzone) worldbuilding could be decent, if the art style couldn’t be resumed in a shovel of repetitive, generic assets scattered throughout all-too-similar maps. Every single location feels generic, boring, and just not interesting to explore or look at in any way.
[h3]Exploration & Secrets[/h3]
The world map is divided into self-contained, interconnected areas that you can freely explore with your squad, and fast travel to and from once you find and repair each zone’s helipad. Initially, each zone will be covered by fog of war, progressively dispelled as you move around and detect POIs, loot caches and sometimes unique encounters like merchants and bosses.
There aren’t any secrets or hidden loot: everything you can find is clearly highlighted and evident, while intelligence files can be bought at your base to know exactly where to find specific components to upgrade facilities, which are about the only thing worth looting for, aside from basic materials you’ll always have an excess of. The exploration pacing is rather slow, because not only it takes some time to traverse maps, but also the looting and exploration are hindered by a multitude of unnecessary animations, loading screens and transitions that bloat the gameplay time to hell.
[h3]Combat System & Bosses[/h3]
In B2B:A you’ll command a squad of operatives, deciding their combat formations, each giving different set bonuses, their equipment and skills as they level up. Fights play out in real-time, against enemies that range from crazed mutants to highly-skilled hostile operatives and AI-powered robots. During each fight, you’ll be able to use each operative’s unique abilities and equipment, other than consumables and support call-ins like artillery barrages or helicopter support, once unlocked. Even if it all seems deep and varied enough, it’s really not, in practical terms.
Beyond the basic decision of what formation suits your needs the most at the current time, and assigning the best weapons to each operative for their skill trees, there isn’t really any further depth to combat mechanics. Most fights play out as a reciprocating trade of blows, with no skill-based way to dodge attacks or make combat more dynamic. All you’ll see during fights are bullets flying between two sides, the one with the best DPS and HP coming out as the victor. Since you’ll have to fight thousands of enemies across dozens of large maps, this becomes an extremely repetitive ordeal, also because most foes feel too same-y, while the skill evolution of each operative isn’t deep enough to add more nuance to combat.
Boss fights are just marginally better, with a few diverse attack patterns that will keep your attention up, and that could actually pose a threat if you don’t get the right positioning to avoid large AoE attacks. However, these are few and far in-between, surely not enough to make you escape the endless boredom that standard combat represents.
[h3]Progression & Crafting[/h3]
While not fighting or exploring, you’ll have to manage your base and operatives. Change equipment, craft better ones with the materials you find on the field, and enhance base facilities to gain better passive bonuses, or access higher crafting tiers for weapons and armor. Generally, you’ll always have a surplus of crafting materials for basic consumables such as ammo, bandages, foodstuffs that grants passives, while crafting new weapons or upgrading existing ones requires considerably more grinding to acquire enough parts. Also in this aspect, B2B:A doesn’t deliver enough, as far as the sense of meaningful progression and its pacing are concerned. Most of the time, it feels like an endless slog for minimal improvements, over an overly-long, repetitive, bloated period of time that isn’t justified by any kind of complexity or variety. The crafting system is basic, using resources found during exploration to craft consumables, special ammunition types, foods that give long-lasting buffs. Generally, the progression is about equipping your operatives with better gear, while also assigning skill points as they level up. The issue is that the sense of progression is barely tangible, due to how bloated and diluted it is when compared to the total extent of the game’s content.
