EARTH'S DAWN

[quote]Just saying, but I do have a curator page. If you like my remarks about games, you can find more of them here: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44130985-TDP%27s-Gaming-Escapades [/quote] I saw Earth's Dawn years ago on a PC Gamer(?) article, calling it one of the lesser-known but great hack and slash games that you should definitely play. I got the game on a sale, threw it in the deepest parts of my Steam account and forgot about it. Then I suddenly remembered that I own it as I was going through my backlog and decided to finally give it a try... and it didn't take me long to drop it with extreme displeasure. This is why no one trusts reviewers or gives a damn about them anymore. They are afraid of criticizing games and losing all of their connections to the developers. They do not treat gaming as an expensive type of entertainment which many try to enjoy with very limited budgets, and constantly ignore critical problems. All of this results in people buying games that they will later regret spending money on. Just like how I'm regretting buying Earth's Dawn because of their opinions. [h2]It's time to save the world... and by "world" I mean america...[/h2] Despite the game featuring a lot of voice acted cutscenes (featuring 2D artworks that are slightly animated to have more movement), the story is nothing special. All you need to know is that alien lifeforms are attacking the world... err... I mean specifically the United States, because apparently that's what "world" means now. You are part of a special taskforce utilizing armor that is infused with alien technology, and have to make sure humanity's last stand is successful or all hope is lost. Every once in a while, you get a cutscene featuring one of the NPCs in the game. It will be either your commanding officer or one of the scientists giving you information about the operation, or your team leader offering background information through a recording. Now this is fine and all, but unfortunately not only these go on for quite a while, but their presentation is very dry and boring. Not to mention the audio mixing that can really bad sometimes (on default values), making you barely hear the characters over the music. Therefore, I don't blame anyone for getting tired with the story and trying to skip it. [h2]I beg your absolute pardon? 12 HOURS?![/h2] The story does affect the gameplay in a direct way though: It presents every major mission as something big that needs proper preparation. Basically, the game puts up a countdown timer which prevents you from progressing through major story missions until it runs out; And this timer only counts down whenever you successfully complete a mission (dying in a level makes it not count), or are idling in the main menu as going anywhere else or exiting the game stops the timer. When it enters the final minute or hits 0, the game forces you into doing the next story mission. So you need to prepare yourself for the upcoming battle in the timeframe it gives you by playing through other missions and enhancing your equipment. I initially thought "what can possibly go wrong?" and imagined the game giving me a carefully curated amount of time to prepare, as the first time limit gave me 15 minutes. But when I saw it suddenly asking me for 12 hours of in-game playtime, I immediately quit. Yes, I agree. Maybe the game would have let me fast forward and play the next mission earlier or surprised me with a sudden deployment if I went and cleared all of the available missions, but I was not going to do that. I was not going to waste even one more minute of my time playing a game that is this boring, repetitive and grindy. Hell, it's not even a good hack and slash with how many things it gets wrong. [h2]All spectacle, no substance...[/h2] Sure, the artstyle look decent and the game looks flashy and cinematic, with a lot of visual effects and finishers happening on the screen. But that's all there is to it. When you put the spectacle aside, you will see how many problems it has and how easy it is to get bored of the game and abandon it. Despite everything the game adds to the mix, the core of the combat system is oversimplified and relies on button mashing. You just need to constantly mash the attack button and dash around to dodge enemy attacks whenever necessary. That's it. There's no blocking, no parrying, no distinct attack combos... absolutely nothing that would encourage you to be creative with your attacks. And the ranking system makes no sense. You can start a simple extermination mission, get a B rating after the only enemy encounter in it, and then suddenly get an S rank after getting to the mission results screen. You can screw up big time in combat and get your health decreased so much that 1 more hit kills you, then still get a combat ranking of S after finishing the encounter. Now I know what some of you want to say: "Well actually, if you spent more time with the game, you would know it gets better". And to that I respond with: I don't have enough free time in my life to spend it on something that gets boring in an hour, just in hopes of it getting better later. People said the same thing to me about Skyrim and guess what? I still hate that game. Also, the game's problems are not all related to combat. [h2]Contrary to game developers' belief, not all games need grinding[/h2] You don't have to play long enough to see what I mean. The camera is insanely close to your character, so you won't be able to see enemies that are far ahead, above or below you (especially when you are walking on sloped surfaces) and get ready for their attacks. Not only that, some enemies have attacks with blinding status effects that further restrict your field of view, to the point that playing the game gets impossible. Your guns are very big and their projectiles' hitbox starts from the muzzle, so if you stand next to an enemy and start shooting, the bullets will go through them. The levels are very big, without anything special happening in them, and your character is slow which makes navigation a boring chore unless you dash around whenever you can. And that is without mentioning the fact that aside from major story levels and scripted enemy encounters, no music plays in the background. To make matters worse, you have to go through these levels over and over again, with the exact same item and enemy placements in them, causing repetition to kick in quickly. Why? Because Earth's Dawn is not a linear game. You need to craft better equipment to be able to finish later missions and beat some of the overpowered bosses and to do that, you need to grind for enemy drops. And the grinding is not pleasant, because the game is using multiple types of resources. First, we have enemy parts that are needed for the creation of your equipment. Then we have other enemy parts and collectibles that are required for leveling them up. And then we have a separate resource in the form of energy that is spent whenever you want to craft equipment or level up, which you accumulate slowly and burn through pretty fast. Furthermore, the exp required for leveling up the equipment drastically increases with each level. You go from 50 to 200 to 450 required EXP just to get an equipment to level 3! Imagine how bad it can get later! So yeah... I do not recommend this game. Trust me on this one, you don't wanna play this. I shouldn't have trusted a PCGamer reviewer, but I did. And now I'm telling you, you don't wanna play this. On a final note, what's the point of NPC teammates if they always vanish when a fight starts and come back afterwards? Either use them properly or don't. [h2]TL;DR[/h2] Has spectacle but no substance. While the visuals look flashy, the rest of the game is an utterly repetitive, grindy and boring mess with various questionable design choices.