Solace Inc.

I wanted to refund [i]Solace Inc.[/i], but then I decided to give it a chance, because [i]"it gets better later"[/i]. I should've gone with the refund. [h1]A castle built on quicksand[/h1] The reason I stayed with [i]SI[/i] for so long is that I knew it contained a grabbag of fun-sounding, crazy gimmicks. It's a bullet heaven game that turns into a platformer, a racer, or a [i]Clash of Clans[/i] parody! And, well, an early gimmick - [spoiler]going shopping in a mall[/spoiler] - was genuinely funny. (Also: [b]the breakroom cutscenes[/b] won me over. They are on the weirdly intriguing border between funny and heartwarming, and moderately embarassing wish-fullfilment. Predictably, there are too few of them to be worth it, even [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/dragomok/recommended/2811160/]with the free DLC, which is horrible "adult entertainment" but good addition to the game[/url].) I played 24 out of 30 missions, and have grown to [b]HATE[/b] the game. To understand why, we can break [i]SI[/i] down into the base game and the gimmicks. [h2]The base game[/h2] [h3]A bullet heaven by someone who doesn't get bullet heavens?[/h3] Critics of [i]Vampire Survivors[/i] often called it a shallow and mindless game. This was not true - there was strategic tension between balancing several categories of weapons ("ice-trawlers", "point defense", "big awkward moneymakers"), maximising evolutions and picking passives that work well with your "main" weapons, and factoring in items already on the map; the tactics of movement, or the pushing-your-luck rationing of the chests, having to choose between the safe choice of extra levels now and the risky choice of falling behind the curve but getting an evolution; and the meta level of scavenger hunt. [i]Deep Rock Galacting: Survivor[/i] pushed some of that even further, and added the whole dimension of juking the horde. I'm bringing this up because [b][i]SI[/i] feels like that shallow game the critics saw[/b]. Firstly, it [b]does away with the staples[/b] of the genre. The enemy count is extremely low, they come in 1-3 types per map with no variation in spawn pattern, and those types are extremely basic (think "melee vs. ranged"). The "regular" maps are flat empty planes - no obstacles, no items, no cul-de-sacs, no secrets, no changes in scenery, [i]no nothing[/i]. Weapon categories, evolutions, chest? Not applicable, gone, just gives 3 levels. And the gems... well, the gems stayed, but you get XP over time anyway. Secondly, [i]SI[/i]... doesn't really replace the staples with [b]anything good[/b]? Instead of separate weapons or passives, you get to pick up to seven "employees" (your player character and the "interns"), who are a two-in-one weapon-and-passive package deal. You'd think this would lead to some interesting choices, but no, it doesn't really matter who you pick. 99% of the passives are just mundane stat boosts. A notable exception is the developer's self-insert avatar who gives a mundane [i]level[/i] boost to enemies [i]and[/i] spawns a miniboss, so you'll pick him out of sheer boredom. If you're very lucky and pick two or three specific characters that fit a theme - a mechanic that has no UI reminders on the level-up or the pause screens - you get... a [i]conditional[/i] stat boost. Interns have many varied patterns of attack: melee, ranged, circular shooting, giant slashes, ground hazards, legally distinct sticky jumping, chainsaw and machine gun combo... ...but all of this is [b]a distinction without a difference[/b]. In practice, all of them walk off screen, kill enemies on their own, and possibly soak up an odd projectile. You've got a jump - but nothing to jump over. You've got a parry - it requires a very fast reflex and you should do it all the time. You can call your interns back into formation, so you can briefly get them back onto a single screen. There's an alternate mode where you play the resident Evil Army of Faceless Mooks, but all it does is replace your six generic-feeling interns with an uncapped horde of [i]actually generic[/i] minions. A direct downgrade to an already downgraded game. Last but not least, [i]SI's[/i] [b]difficulty feels out of whack[/b]. For me, it was one of those horrible games where you experience utter boredom when fighting mooks, and then experience sudden death when the (mini)boss shows up. ...except worse, since about four times the experience of utter boredom was interrupted by me dying to a stray projectile that was too fast for me to dodge or parry. [h2]The gimmick levels[/h2] [h3]Derivative and innovative boredom[/h3] The gimmick levels form two groups that fail in different ways. In the first group are gimmicks that don't change nearly enough, so they [b]fail on account of being attached to the base game that's horribly unfun[/b]. It doesn't help the goal in these is [i]"kill X enemies"[/i] (directly or [i]"get me Y bear asses"[/i]), where X is a number that's dang too high considering the anorexically thin enemy density. Assault on the HQ of the grand storywise antagonists? Just a regular map. Candy harvest, horror, liberation of slaves, [i]Clash of Clans[/i]? Regular map where some enemies are stationary and/or there's a central point where you need to drop the bear asses. Defending a train from heist? Regular map shaped as a thin strip. Platformers? Regular map reduced to basically a line, where platforming is unnecessary and everyone's targetting is worse. Boss fight? Mercifully shorter if you don't count restarts, but it's still a worse take on a regular bullet heaven gameplay. In the second group are gimmicks that change quite a lot, and... [b]fail on their own[/b]. While racing is lackluster, mansion exploration distills the worst parts of the base game, and even the funny [spoiler]shopping mall[/spoiler] level is two cutscenes and several easter eggs packed into tedious [i]"grab X MacGuffins"[/i]... ...among them there's the golf level that [b][i]BROKE ME[/i][/b]. [h3]The golf level that BROKE ME[/h3] ApLove took the world's most boring pastime, [b]and made it [i]even worse[/i][/b]. The golf level is, of course, an infinitely empty flat plane. No sand, no ponds, no walls. (Which, I suppose, is a blessing in disguise; but still: boring from the get-go.) You win the level, of course, by getting points. The standard golf scoring applies, where the fewer strokes it takes to put the ball in the hole, the better. The goal, of course, is to get too many dang points. You can, [i]OF COURSE[/i], only aim in the 8 cardinal+diagonal directions. (Maybe there's a super tight reaction window where you can hit the ball at an intermediate angle? I haven't managed to hit it once.) And a hole can, [i]OF-♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-COURSE[/i], give you net negative points, with no way out except putting the ball in the hole. ... So it's a boring idea realised in the most basic way, where 100% of the difficulty is dealing with controls unsuited to the gameplay, and every stroke of luck is utterly smothered by the long march of tedious repetition. ... I spent way too long on this goshdarn level. It didn't make me quit the game. But it did make me feel dead inside, and the very next time I experienced a difficulty (another case of regular level's utter boredom getting interrupted by sudden miniboss-delivered death), I quit. [h2]Other issues[/h2] [i]SI[/i] has the telltale mark of a passion project - the UI is rudimentary, bordering on bad. Especially the mission list: it resets to top every time you open it, so playing missions one-by-one involves loads of scrolling. Plus, one time I encountered a bizzare bug where alt-tabbing broke the game's display: it went from fullscreen to window, and mouse pointer could't reach the options button in the pause menu. [hr][/hr] [h3]In conclusion,[/h3] if ApLove loves this game, then I must be CarambLoathing.