Death In Abyss

if your looking for a more horror themed starfox like id pass on this one. you have a constant enemy bombardment that swarms your screen making you have to become a super sweat the second you start the game without any build up to learn the controls on top of enemy design so grossly overtuned against the player this is more of a thing to look at than play. you dont 1v1 bosses they join in slowly and darken your screen making everything attack you in a grim haze with even less visible range. on top of this there is no mini map or boundry marker so you will constantly move into the out of bounds and risk instantly losing. oh and there are enemys that can apparently 1 shot you. this is what happens when you have a richly creative mind misunderstand what difficulty is.

The first boss has an attack where it will eject a limb out into the center of the screen and then start rotating in one of the four cardinal directions. If you happen to already be moving in that direction there is quite literally no time to react because the hitbox is perpetually active and it takes longer to notice the motion and then switch directional movement keys (up/down is on e/q so switching from left/right to up/down requires relocating your fingers) than it does for the tentacle to hit you. Moving diagonally seems to only work around 50% of the time. It is also proximity based, there seems to be less room to react at closer distances and the movement quickly loses the four-direction tracking as it instead tries to track to you. It does this attack seemingly anywhere from 4-6 times throughout the fight, so statistically you are likely to take a guaranteed hit at least once in the fight. Did I mention this is all while aoe explosive enemies are swarming around you that explode regardless of if you kill them or bump them? This sort of sums up the game. It requires full 360 awareness at all times in a 3d space on a 2d screen. Its not feasible for most people. You will dodge in a direction expecting to clear something, only for it to hit you anyways. You will dodge in a direction, and magically there is already an enemy outside of your field of view in that direction that hits you anyways. You need to be fully aware of all 30+ off-screen enemies at all times, or things will just hit you anyways. It's not as simple as manipulating a swarm together because spawns are random across the whole arena. A lot of attacks in the game continually aim at your current position, leading to moments where you dodge and the fully-extended attack seems to pivot to hit you anyways. Enemies will chase you down to grab you, turning on a dime, forcing you to prioritize them and back away, leading to you backing into things and getting hit anyways. Swarms of smaller enemies will end up naturally forming shields around larger targets, leading to you trying to kill a larger target and it takes too long and you get hit anyways. Oh and the ending [spoiler]is you just get killed anyways at the end of it all, so that checks out I guess.[/spoiler] There is skill involved, but there's just so much going on that the only way to actually apply the skill is if you literally have a hyper autistic level of spatial awareness beyond your field of view. The result for me is simply a trial and error game. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel satisfying to finally get through the trial and error just for the game to call your performance "weak" without any indication of how you could have improved. It shows you your time, hits and kills, but no individual rankings so no way to know what to improve. The game gives you exactly zero tips or guidance on seemingly fairly fundamental things like swarm management, leading crowds into bombs, how much you actually need to kill to hit quotas, etc, its just "here is a list of the controls play around until you're ready" then immediately puts you into the hardest possible encounter you could have faced in the combat system. Any questions you may have will never be answered. All levels are simply either fight a boss in a spherical arena, or kill enemies indefinitely in a spherical arena until you hit a quota. It loses appeal fast because even though there is enemy variety, the chaos of it all causes it to just blend together. The only ability upgrade you ever see doesn't change much about the combat loop, the projectiles you're supposed to dodge into are introduced alongside the upgrade so it feels like that was how they were always supposed to be dealt with. The countering mechanic with the dodge is hardly noticeable since again, there's always swarms so getting a big hit off on one doesn't feel very impactful, and it only works on projectiles and lasers which needed to be dodged anyways. Because the difficulty is always at max, it never feels like there's any kind of ramping or building up to something, the stakes are always the same. The music(?) I've heard has been unimpressive, at least compared to that steam trailer. It's either ambient or not present, which does not help that feeling of blending together at all. I managed to kind of just find myself bored after a while.

SNES Star Fox was one of the first games I ever played, and an all time favorite. Nowadays I tend to enjoy souls-likes mostly, I LOVE THIS GAME. The sound design is choice, and the vibes are immaculate. The difficulty is as intense as the atmosphere, and the final boss payoff is so so so worth it. The way it demands you split your attention in many directions while managing all of your controls tickles the same part of the brain that Armored Core 6 does for me, so do not sleep on this if you liked AC6. Play the demo at least!

What a phenomenal game Sure, it looks like Star Fox as if it were a deep-sea sci-fi horror, but it's so esoteric & mysterious that calling it a Star-Fox-like would be doing a disservice to Death in Abyss. I am a HUGE fan of retraux (or faux-retro) games, and even tho I never played a whole lot of PlayStation 1 games, I adore the jagged & gritty design direction in this game. I particularly love the art style & audio design. The artwork meshes jagged models & pixelated textures with an old green-colored computer interface. Probably close to something like Metal Gear Solid's art direction. The sound design is deliciously bit-crunched, which usually employs a cacophony of weird alien sounds (fitting for the setting) but it can also sound mysteriously frightening at times. Death in Abyss is PUNISHINGLY DIFFICULT, which is fitting for a PS1-like game. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone who doesn't want challenging gameplay. Completing the full campaign is short, but beating each mission is very exhausting since it tests your 3D spatial awareness, movement, and gunplay all at once. If you can't beat a mission the first time, then take a break & try it again another day, that's how I maintained my sanity. Death in Abyss is so cool, creepy, and engaging all throughout. I just wish I had MORE missions to play on this game, which I think would be a testament to how freakin amazing it is. If you're squeamish about the price tag, (which is understandable, it seems a little steep for a 6-7 hour game) then wait for a sale.

Despite the negative review, this game is very fun. I love the enemy visual design and the controls are smooth and lovely and the sound effects are grand. I love being able to bomb the enemies using the tumours and the power ups that give you swarms of rockets and it's all so cool! HOWEVER the game scales WAY too quickly with its difficulty. Enemies do massive damage, so you're expected to dodge, but the amount of stuff they pile onto you gets very overwhelming very quickly. By level 2, you already have massive swarms of enemies combining with enemies that latch onto your ship, draining your health and blocking your vision, an enemy that covers the entire map in darkness and removes the audio cues -- the things I was using to tell when I should dodge enemy attacks -- that is super tanky and difficult to kill on top of an enemy that snipes you from afar. Combine that with levels that take a long time to complete, very little breathing room in between waves and the fact that these levels are apparently all there are to the game and I just don't see myself sticking with this for too long. I am, admittedly, not very good at most games. Part of this may definitely be a skill issue on my part. But I wish I could mitigate that. I wish I could be bad and still play this game. I don't expect this game to get down on its knees and serve me victory on a plate, but I do want to be able to feel like I'm getting somewhere when I die instead of just saying "so they spawned a ton of audio-cue enemies at the same time as the darkness enemy, now I die." I'm trying to save cash at the moment. If this game was half the price it is now, I would probably keep it. I'd bang my head against that wall because, well, it was cheap! But it wasn't cheap. It's frustrating and annoying and I just want to have a fun arcade gaming experience that I can come onto for an hour and have a blast! If they tone the game's difficulty down in the future -- maybe by adding something that lets you reduce enemy damage or health because I could otherwise deal with the large crowds -- then I might buy the game again because, like I said, I did have fun with the game. But, for now, I think I'd rather have my money back.

Wasted potential… but still fun. Extremely unique gameplay - needed expanded upon. Very little enemy variation. Core of a great game is in here. But nothing else? If you’re curious try the demo. It is 70% of the full game. Price is too high. I’m sadly disappointed. Was looking forward to this one. Was on wish list since demo. Cool boss designs.

Very cool linear arena (sort of) shooter game with an element of horror. And by an element I mean I was genuinely terrified (AND I LOVED IT) when playing the 2nd level... and then the 6th one. Crab class enemies were just so legitimately scary for me alongside everything else also being kinda creepy, and back then i haven't even seen the full model of the first crab and it seemed so much bigger and always in the distance, unreachable, so my imagination made it seem way spookier. Idk how i should rate the story of the game, wouldn't say it's the main point, it's quite vague and the ending is kinda dark,[spoiler] the name says it all [/spoiler]. Oh and i should also mention this game is quite [b] difficult [/b] (best way to know if it's too difficult or not is to play the DEMO !!! ) [h3] PEAK GAME MOMENTS: [/h3] - Death screen showing the title card (absolute cinema) - Reaper Leviathan from Subnautica being an enemy in this game - Peaceful leviathan that surrounds the air (water, actually) with absolute dread and despair - Agressive and (sort of) blind blåhaj - Very fun shooty pew pew - Fun dashy dash shmovement (ALTHOUGH YOU MIGHT HAVE TO[b] CHANGE YOUR KEYBINDS [/b]. default ones were unintuitive for me so i had to come up with something of my own!) - [spoiler] [i] tiddies [/i] [/spoiler] [h3 ]NOT SO PEAK GAME MOMENTS [/h3] - The first boss made me kinda mad (still does but now because i can't figure out how to improve my time in speedruns of this ♥♥♥♥♥♥) - Ovum - The 2nd boss (♥♥♥♥♥) (deserved backlash) (even more so of a ♥♥♥♥♥ after trying to speedrun him) (he's actually such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ♥♥♥♥♥) [spoiler] final boss is transition goals [/spoiler]

Brilliant answer to a seemingly absurd question--what if Star Fox 64 was a brutal, undersea horror game? Fast-paced, blisteringly difficult but deeply satisfying to master, I had an amazing time steering my frail little ship safely through swarms of what I can only describe as cancerous tumors covered in teeth and tentacles. Special, life-shortening shout-out to the enemies in the second level for making the "look behind you" function as essential as the fire button--if you liked Devil Daggers, you've gotta try this one

Нас всех обманули: на дне морском ни хрена не Губка Боб, а хтонический зубастый ужас.