The Outrider demo is out today.I feel like this game has been floating around for a while now and while it never looked like it had set itself apart, it's a concept I'm always willing to try.

For my part, while I think it's cool that this is the very beginning of the game and progress transfers to the full game, the prologue is a slow slog and not really a great intro in to what is potentially interesting about this game. You barely shoot or honestly do much of anything except run between cutscene triggers and watch a stilted and so far pretty boring story unfold. Once you finally get to choose a class and get to power and guns (and the game even promises you'll never have to do all that again and can just start from the class selection screen, which is nice I guess) you start to see what this game has to offer. The gunplay has a good feel and the impacts so far are great, the powers seem underwhelming, which isn't surprising this early I suppose, the keyboard and mouse controls work, but the keybindings seem poor, specifically which combination of things each key does. It gives off vibes of Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, which I played a lot of but was also many years ago.

I just finished the first full mission after you choose a class and have a couple of the abilities. Obviously there is still more to do but I'm curious what y'all think.

I'm curious about it if it plays well. Does it seem like something you can play alone or with randoms?

Ooooh boy I thought this was not good. I think expectations need to be set: This ain't no Destiny killer, not even fucking close.

This has a lot more in common with Mass Effect/ Gears of Wars, but with an much lower budget. This game is sloppy: From the mechanics, to the visual presentation. Like How certain cutscenes end in the most baffling ways. The aesthetic is generic: It's the brown and grey of the 360/ps3 generation turned up a notch. It really feels like they just kind of scooped together different from infuences from various games--Destiny, Mass Effect, Gears of War--but it really only serves how much better those games are.

The Demo does a poor job in contextualizing the world the game is set. Why am an I Outrider? What do I do? Who am I even fighting? And why am I doing this at all.

Man holy shit...if this is what the final game is. Yikes.

The gameplay itself seems like a pretty cool mesh of Division 2 cover shooting and Warframe style power usage but man the general presentation is pretty 2009 Xbox 360 era B game. Everything's got that bland brown grim dark look that Unreal Engine games had for a while, which is pretty coincidental considering this is a UE4 game. Speaking of Division 2, this game might have taken it's spot for "Worst Voice Acting I've Ever Heard in a Big Studio Game." It's got some serious Dave Snider Eurojank vibes and the fact that everyone sounds like a Peter Stormare character doesn't really do it any favors. I think it'll probably occupy the same space as Borderlands 3 does for me where I just tune everyone speaking out of my head and shoot dudes while listening to a podcast or ASMR video as I get ready for bed or something.

@bicycleham: Eurojank is pretty much perfect for this.

The fact that they're charging full price for this is insane.

@kemuri07: Yeah, I booted up the second mission and, welp, I think I'm good. You seem right on.

To clarify an earlier pointwhen I said the gunplay felt good, I'd like to adjust to say sniper headshots feel good, everything else I saw was fine to ineffective feeling. Also fighting people with powers and shields, when you barely have abilities to stop them from healing or whatever was not super enjoyable.

@bicycleham: This is also a good take. Everything felt stilted and, I'm not sure how to articulate this, fake? Like it was a videogame on a tv show that got shown for 15 seconds. The amount of TV talk and shorthand that was spewed in the Prologue made it clear that I was not going to care about any of these characters or the story at large.

@csl316: I didn't get into any coop so I can't comment on that, though with the games corridor layout I can't imagine playing with randos would be hard. This game probably would be better with a couple of friends, but soloing was possible.

This definitely gives off that vibe of a game that Matt Rorie brings up the bombcast a month after release and everyone else is just wondering why he's still playing it. Then a month after that Jeff jumps back into and talks about how confused he was playing and how much trouble he had figuring out what exactly was going on. Outriders kinda seems like it's the Ghost Recon: Breakpoint of 2021, and honestly I think there's definitely an audience for that and my dumb ass kinda like what I've played so far.

The gameplay is solid enough that it wouldn't surprise me if there it does find some cult following. But again--they're charging full price for this.

This is easily a $40 budget title. I cannot imagine anyone springing full price for it, especially after this demo.

watching videos of this game just reminds me that I want a remnant: from the ashes sequel

This honestly feels like kind of an evolution of that in some ways.

Welp. Three tries, three crashes on startup that are so bad I have to quit out of Steam entirely.

Yeah. Watched a vod of a stream and... yeah, people who are saying this is "The division with warframe abilities" is giving this game way too much credit. They are a LOT closer to the Destiny style "don't overshadow the shooting" variety

Still, looks... "fine". If i get this on gamepass or as part of a console IGC I might play it as the shooting looked decent and it looks like it could scratch my Division itch without being developed by a company run by abusers or encouraging doomsday preppers to arm themselves to kill their neighbors.

And honestly? Every time I see this is just reminds me of the Defiance pseudo-MMO.

It's actually been pretty surprising how good this is, but something about it is still not great.

The story set-up is surprisingly decent, the characters and performances too. It's not Last of Us or anything, but it's solid. The gameplay is rough around the edges, but I'm playing trickster and just got the teleport ability, and it's totally similar to the vanguard from Mass Effect. It's good fun, and there's a videogamey absurdity to teleporting, slowing time, and watching bullets slowly pass by as you shotgun dudes into blood explosions.

The whole thing feels like a game from a bygone era. Just a videogame-ass videogame. And the story feels very much like an action movie you'll watch expecting nothing great out of and be pleasantly surprised by. That's how it's been so far anyhow. The reveal of how things have changed after the time-skip, the way they very obviously raise questions about who you're fighting for, fuckin superdude named Seth talkin about fighting a bigger fight. It's all very cute and earnest without coming off as edgy or tryhard.

Like, if I told you the People Can Fly folks were making a Mass Effect-esque light RPG with a second-Earth post-apocalyptic war-torn superhero slant, well you'd get what this game looks to be.

I dunno how long it'd keep me interested, but so far I'm enjoying it. There's just still something about the pacing that's got me ready to drop it the moment it becomes a slog though. Could just be I'm tired of down-time in games these days. Thankfully, the hub here isn't that much of a burden, and every time I've tempted fate to investigate a side-quest or optional dialogue, I've been pleasantly surprised.

But again, the shooting is satisfying, the powers so far are good fun, and the story is coming along to be less uninteresting than I initially expected. Definitely feels like a B-game, but that's a bit of what's adding to its charm for me. It doesn't come off as trying to be more than a fun action game.

Oh, and there were two lines that really took me out of the game for very different reasons.

First was a reference to a time the main character and another had to stave off a "redneck mob storming D.C." Oof.

And the second was when Seth says you need to be "their shepherd." Lmao, yeah this some space cowboy sci-fi channel Mass Effect shit.

But there's also been some kinda great set-up and payoffs, and decent intrigue being built. Frequencies scrawled in a hurry figuring back into the story, a digital signal when the anomaly storms have wiped out most digital tech.

This game was difficult to pin down before getting my hands on it, and goddamn if it isn't still a challenge.

@theht: “It’s not Last of Us or anything” would be an amazing tag line on the retail box

I've just started it and, yeah, the opening is truly abysmal. The game looks great in terms of the tech but the dialog is so boring, and why would you lead with that? The story might as well just be "generic video game scenario 8." Something something apocalypse earth. Something something you're a last minute replacement for the real heroes who were supposed to be there. Something something this is a fresh start. Something something if we kill enough baddies we can have peace or something.

Insert shouty boss guy back at base who doesn't appreciate you, simmer for 30 minutes and you got a stew going, baby.

Also...

So I've played some more of the game and once you actually get to the shooting part it's...better. It definitely feels like someone played The Division and decided to set that game IN SPAAAAAAAACE!

The actual mechanics of the shooting and powers are passable in a 2012 kind of way, the visuals still look really good to me (I'm pretty sure this is hitting a solid 4K on the PS5) etc...

The number of gibs is absolutely out of control. Heads blow off when you head shot, bodies explode into mush when you shotgun them, etc... It's all very 2012. I don't hate that stuff but it feels cheap, like they didn't have the budget to animate deaths well so they just made everything explode.

The story is the most 2012 aspect of everything. It just sucks. It flat out sucks. Every part of it sucks. It makes no sense, none of the characters are interesting or at all consistent, there's optional dialog for some stupid reason (This is primarily a co-op game but they want people to stand around chatting with NPCs about inane stuff?) and the voice acting is bad.

I'm making it sound like I hate this game and I don't. The fundamentals of a looter shooter are sound, and just because the gameplay feels like it copies from The Division doesn't make it bad. I am with people who feel like this could be a decent $20-40 pickup on sale at some point but it would have to get stellar review scores for me to consider it at full price and right now I'm guessing it gets a metacritic of 75 or lower, depending on how things play out deeper in the game.

The World Tier difficulty stuff seems cool. I'm down with a deeply scalable difficulty that you can pump up and down at will. That seems good.

What I'm not down with is...

YOU CAN'T PAUSE!

YOU CAN'T PAUSE!

YOU CAN'T PAUSE! YOU CAN'T PAUSE! YOU CAN'T PAUSE!

I don't understand games like this that you can't pause while playing solo. If you're actively in a multiplayer session then sure, I get it, it is what it is, but when you're playing on your own you should absolutely be able to pause, no exceptions, no excuses. I don't care if it's server based (and this game isn't; it's peer to peer) but the inability to pause is just total bullshit.

I may just write an angry rant about this elsewhere, but it's absolutely the worst design choice in a game with a lot of questionable design choices.

The worst part is when you go into your inventory, it blacks out for a second or two before it takes you to the menu, and I thought "oh maybe this paused the game."

Nope.

Still heard gunfire. It works in Destiny because it immediately gets you to the menu so you can do your shit and just go.

@kemuri07: I just get so mad when you can't pause a game. Do the developers not have people in their lives who they may need to attend to at a moment's notice? Kids? Partners? Aging parents? Gosh dang pets?

And what about bladders? Bowels?

How is it possible to be a human and be like "yeah, this is fine, why would anyone want to STOP playing?" It just smacks of contempt for the player, their time, their lives etc...

Destiny and The Division get a pass because those are genuinely MMO games and there's no practical way to implement pausing in all the shared spaces (and even in the instanced spaces you may not be alone and may be with a stranger) so fair enough, but this is just a single player game on your local machine when you're playing solo.

@bicycleham: idk kind of looks like a step backwards if anything

Decided to give it a shot and I don't think I've played a more boring and uninspired game in a while. It's just dull. The shooting feels just serviceable but barely anything above that. The beginning Prologue is just poorly put together. 15 minutes of gameplay cut up into 2 minute chunks separated by cutscenes with some astoundingly bad dialogue and voice acting. Even when you unlock the abilities they feel very stiff and do not look very good. I chose pyromancer because it looked the flashiest and man does that fire shockwave just look bad and is slow to cast. The second ability I unlocked was supposed to pull enemies towards me and it appears to pull them about 2 feet forward.

At some point I just turned it off. This feels rough and B-Game tier in all the worst ways. I would say that the worst thing about it is that it's not necessarily terrible, just boring. There didn't seem to be some sort of diamond in the rough here that you might want to suffer the bad story for. It's all the embodiment of a big shoulder shrug.

@humanity: The game gets more interesting further in, at least as the Technomancer. Your powers really matter quite a lot and unlike many games like this they aren't on a very long cool down so you can use them. I got a gun that slows enemies and it is way OP but also, again, more interesting than most guns in games like these where all the status effects are just some version of damage over time.

The slow effect hilariously survives death too so you see the guy's head blow off and spurt blood in quarter time, which is gross and a little funny.

Where the game is extremely, almost shockingly, boring is in its mission design. It's very much "enter area, kill everyone (most of which rush at you or sit behind cover and shoot at you" and repeat. You're fragile in a way you rarely are in games these days, which is interesting. The "do damage to heal" mechanic is also well implemented IMO.

So I think there is some potential and some cool systems, but the story is terrible and the encounters are boring. I could definitely see this being a good podcast game, or a game for friends to play mindlessly like a chat room Destiny style, but I have no idea how long it is or whether it changes things up deeper in.

Kind of interested to see review scores on it. I do think that it gets better after what can only be described as a rotten prologue, but it's clearly lower budget and there were a lot of corners cut.

Wonder how long it will take to drop in price. I'm guessing that it's $45 on PSN within 2 months and $30 before the end of summer. Probably $20 by the end of the year.

Could see it hitting Game Pass within 6 months too.

@bigsocrates: I can honestly say I had more fun with the combat in Mass Effect Andromeda than the time I spent here even with the powers. More importantly it just doesn't even look very good. I thought AC Valhalla was profoundly boring but man that game looked beautiful and ran real well. Here it's just.. so square. Waist high cover in barren rooms.

The one thing I'll give it is that the "twist" from the prologue is interesting and in the hands of a different studio might have actually been a really amazing reveal. Which is odd because I never equated People Can Fly with such low quality work. Granted all I really know them from is Bulletstorm and Painkiller, but even Bulletstorm had a way better presentation, more interesting combat and was generally better put together than this.

@humanity: I haven't played Mass Effect Andromeda, but maybe I should. I think the first 3 Mass Effect games had pretty decent combat (and were obviously much better games than this.) Andromeda is free on Game Pass so I have literally nothing to lose.

The art style is bad and there is definitely a lot of sameness in the environments, but the game runs pretty well. It seems like 4K with a steady frame rate to me. There's a lot of repetition for sure. It reminds me of Fracture in some ways.

This game isn't close to as good as Bulletstorm or Painkiller. Bulletstorm was legitimately a very good game, with a unique tone (whether you liked it or not, and I did, it wasn't like other games on the market) and innovative gameplay. I can't think of another FPS with nearly the emphasis on environmental kills that game had, and the boss fights were fantastic for an FPS too.

I just think you're being harsh when saying this has no value and can't even cut it as a B game. I think it's not good (after getting further I'm now predicting a 65-70 metacritic unless mission design changes drastically after the demo; especially because the end of demo splash screen says it's 35 hours...which seems like too much. It's too much!) but it does some interesting things and I think that a small community will enjoy the looter shooter aspects, especially because the weapons have some cool effects on them and the powers at least provide a little variety.

A graphics driver update and full game reinstall later, I've put about half an hour into it. Half of that was replaying the intro because of the game server losing internet connection.

This game looks good. Hopefully I can have some more time without losing the server connection.

Finally managed to actually play the game. It's fun, I like the abilities. If the servers are this bad when the final product is out, I'll be pissed.

I jumped in with two friends so we skipped the story to get to the action, but it feels like I didn’t miss anything. The missions were a bit too short so it was hard at first to get a good feel for the game. But once we got a bit further we started having a lot of fun. When the demo finished we all wanted more and will definitely buy it at launch. Sure, it’s nothing groundbreaking and I haven’t tried it solo yet but playing with friends was awesome I think.

I'm still trying to figure out how the game's mission structure of "enter area, have everyone rush at you, kill them all, unlock next area" is going to work for 35 hours of gameplay. If they don't mix things up it's going to get super monotonous. Even vanilla Destiny had much more complicated mission design. I have to hope that there's something else to do later, but if there is one wonders why they didn't try to do more to make the demo exciting.

@bigsocrates: I think they are making a big bet to keep people onboard long term since progress from the demo carries over to the main game and this demo is essentially supposed to be the first chunk of the full game. It’s almost like Shareware. So the downside is that they can’t skip you ahead to the cool stuff, if there is cooler stuff down the road.

@humanity: I get that they wanted to give you the first piece of the game, and other games have done that too, but if they knew they were going to do that you'd think that if they had more interesting stuff to show they would have put some of that into the first couple hours. Like reworked one of the missions or something. Or if that's too much then they could have given you the first chunk of the game and ALSO given you a mission from a later chunk that showed off some of the more interesting environments and enemies. From the video you get when you finish the demo it looks like not all the environments are straight out of Fracture and you fight stuff that's not just the same 4 human soldier types, but none of that shows through in the demo.

The game is structured kind of like a roguelike in that it's a series of rooms you have to clear to get through, but obviously it doesn't have any of the stuff that makes that genre work. Even the original Gears of War had substantially more variety. It had vehicle sections and turret sections and that section where you need to move forward staying in the light etc...

Maybe this does too but it sure didn't show.

There is one boss fight, to be fair, but I did not enjoy it.

@bigsocrates: it’s a trade-off for sure. Keep your progress but get tied down to the early chunks of the game which in this case are not great. Surprisingly it seems to be the opposite of modern game design where developers spend a lot more time on the early parts of the game to get you hooked and then begin to lose steam in the latter thirds of the experience.

Okay now I'm confused and intrigued. Remnant was pretty good. I played that game for 100 hours and solo'd the second-hardest difficulty and unlocked nearly every piece of weapon and armour. Is this an evolution in ideas, not execution? Or is it better than Remnant even to play?

edit: it keeps crashing after the walk-and-talk sequence lmao

@bigsocrates: I mean, that aspect in particular kind of appeals to me. Sounds like it is a "classic" shooter along the era of Painkiller (hmmmm) and Serious Sam where it is more about unlocking the next combat arena. In theory I can't see myself playing that for 30 something hours... but I know I have played stuff like that for probably closer to 60 or 70 all told (and that number is probably actually higher). Its the idea of a story heavy RPG with endless combat (Baldurs Gate and sort of Icewind Dale) versus something that is unapologetically an ARPG (Diablo or TQ/GD)

I am sure later missions will have the same "Dude from Defiance, Jaime Murray has asked you to defend this point while we get our whatsits online. We're counting on you" and "This Elite spawn is behind everything. Kill them" but I also know that in games like Warframe I tend to REALLY enjoy a solid Defense or Mobile Defense where I just can unload on solid walls of enemies for drops.

I do kind of feel the rush to transition shlooters to live games kind of made us lose out on that. I know that I am due to reinstall Grim Dawn pretty soon and run through the first two or three acts over a dozen hours or so and then not touch it for another year. Would be nice to have that in the first/third person shooties as well (the start of games like Borderlands is just too obnoxious to fill that niche).

@gundato: I don't really think it's like Serious Sam or Painkiller because those games find their variety in the enemy design and scenarios. Any given arena in Serious Sam might have a horde of headless suicide bombers, or a Kleer herd, or a bunch of those multi armed dudes on top of pillars etc...

The layout of the room and the enemy selection and the various triggers that cause bad guys to appear or whatever create level design variety. That goes all the way back to Doom and it's a great formula.

In a cover shooter where you carry 2 weapons and a side arm and (so far) all the bad guys are just various forms of humans with minor variations it doesn't work that way. You have less mobility (this is not a game where you really circle strafe) and you don't really get the same combat puzzles where you're picking the right weapon for the right enemy and constantly unloading.

A lot of time in this game is spent behind cover while the enemies are also behind cover and you're trying to pick them off with an assault rifle or sniper rifle or whatever. Maybe some of the classes allow for more of a frontal assault, but it's still not going to be that classic constant action constant motion shooter experience.

Have you tried Immortal Redneck? Because I really liked that (one of the relatively few Roguelikes I have finished) and it had that kind of constant motion action, but this game is miles away from that.

It feels like an evolution in the Assassin's Creed Unity to Assassin's Creed Origins kind of way. It has the same bones as Remnant in the cover based roll to dodge coop shooting, but it skews harder towards randomized loot. Remnant borrowed the Castlevania/Dark Souls style of loot where weapon's stats weren't randomized but their drop rates were the thing to farm while this is more Diablo type with randomized stats on weapons found in corridor styled missions. I'd also go as far as to say that it also does better making the discrete classes in its class system feel more unique than Remnant does since this game has 3 branching trees per class as opposed to Remnant where the class you pick at the beginning doesn't matter since you eventually unlock everything from every class anyway.

@bigsocrates: I guess I am not saying it is exactly the same (I will always argue that cover shooters are what made streaming games viable... and not in a good way) and more just the general idea of removing/not having the thin layer of "Oh, this time you are defending a terminal. next time you'll defend a super slow door and maybe later you'll defend an off screen repair sequence". "Mindless" gameplay as it were

Well after hours of troubleshooting and still putting up with the occasional server losing connection (at least the most recent time this happened, the game reestablished connection shortly after and I didn't have to restart the whole program), I've finally gotten some time with this game and have more refined thoughts.

As others have said: if you play this demo and then watch the video at the end of the demo where you see a ton of different enemies and environments, it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that this demo does a disservice to the game as a whole. The game looks good! I don't think the art direction is particularly inspired, but in terms of "graphics, technical," I really like what I see. But because the devs wanted to give everyone the opportunity to bring their demo progress into the main game, the player is asked to spend hours replaying the same gray-and-brown bombed out ruins.

This game isn't a cover shooter. It's a third-person shooter with a cover mechanic, but the way health works in this game means that staying in one spot and taking shots at enemies behind cover is a good way to get killed.

This game is fucking hard. Holy shit. I've never been a huge fan of super fast combat because I find it more stressful than fun. Fortunately the easier difficulties seem to make this a lot more manageable. (I played the recent Doom games on easy and loved them.) I did re-run one of the side quests on a higher world tier to see if the game would give me better quest rewards for doing so, but it doesn't seem to work like that. This makes me question how the world tier system is implemented and why quests are repeatable to begin with.

The devs are lucky that UI can't be trademarked, because holy Destiny, Batman.

No sign of ancient aliens yet, but we'll see. I could go for a sci-fi game without ancient aliens.

My brother and I already pre-ordered this. I don't think this game is breaking any new ground, but I know it's the type of game we're gonna have fun with.

Trying to take cover in this game just makes me appreciate GoW even more. Other than that, I'm really looking forward to this game.

@bladeofcreation: It absolutely is a cover shooter. It may depend somewhat on the class (I went through as the long range class) but I finished the demo playing from cover at the highest World Tier the game would give me (it went up to 4 in may playthrough) and it was not hard. I died a couple times when encountering new enemies because you are pretty fragile, but once I knew what I was doing it was average.

More importantly the game has reloading, limited movement options, and chest high walls all over, which are like the hallmarks of a cover shooter. Enemies take cover, there are some areas where there are big, dangerous, areas you'd have to get around to get to the enemies behind cover etc... It may not have to be played strictly from behind cover but it's a cover shooter.

The world tier system tells you what each tier does. It tends to bump up enemy levels and also increase your chances of getting better loot. So it's increasing drop rates, not quest rewards (though maybe those are also coded as drops).

I am also skeptical that the game will actually introduce variety further in. It's possible. People Can Fly certainly has the pedigree and the trailer looks good, but it's a trailer and we all know how misleading those can be. It could easily be 30 more hours of the same thing with different graphics.

The prologue and the game’s world and characters were such a drag that i almost deleted the demo immediately. Getting into the character classes made it a bit more interesting, some of the powers seems cool, but from what I’ve played it seems so boilerplate and dull I can’t imagine playing more.

Also, this is a nitpick, but I really hate how it fades to black bringing the menu up. It’s a weird touch considering the game itself doesn’t pause.

@onlineatron: it’s even weirder that a game which doesn’t pause has a menu that covers the entire screen instead of like a transparent window or something that lets you see your surroundings in the periphery

Got no opinions on this game what so ever. But it does seems like quite a lot of people are pre-ordering it.

The game feels very clunky to play on a controller aiming is both too fast and too slow at the same time some sort of weird acceleration going on which you can't tweak or turn off. Metro Exodus had the exact same problems which took months to fix.

The amount of cut scenes in the prologue with shanky cam and poor frame rate is nauseating the heavy motion blur during gameplay is quite painful too.

Considering as a looter shooter you'll probably be repeating missions not having an option to skip the cut scenes and dialogue seems like an oversight, especially when my impressions so far is the story quite poor.

Can we stop doing Destiny menu's.

The Outriders demo doesn't make a good first impression theirs plenty of technical issues alone to make it a wait and see.

The game feels like it was made in 2009, but we are seeing an HD remake of a 360 version. It has that aesthetic and design philosophy of a Lost Planet/Fracture/Army of Two/Eat Lead cover shooter (you know the type, when everyone was trying to do gears, but few developers even iterate on the genre), with somewhat modern graphics.

The demo does not make the best first impression. It hardcrashed on me several times in the first seconds of the opening cutscene, and froze on menus several times later. After that, I was locked in (at least) half an hour long unskippable tutorial segment where we are presented with a dry lore with unlikeable characters, lots of cutscenes (seriously, there are loading screens between a cutscene of my character making a jump), and a tutorial on such revolutionary elements like "cover" and "reload". It really felt like it was made for people that have never even seen a shooter.

And then the game starts, and a lot of potential got squandered. I had no expectation going in, but seeing some big creatures and cool powers in the opening cutscene, with Square Enix and People Can Fly logos made me think of Warframe with cool weapons and Monster Hunter style huge monsters. Instead I found some underwhelming powers an hour into the game, fought military dudes, pyro dudes, scavenger dudes and madmax melee dudes for hours, and all weapons were just generic pistols, shotguns and rifles, with the occasional rifle with more numbers for some extra damage or faster reload. Also, bosses and unique encounters don't seem to drop loot on replays, so that is a lot of potential squandered again. There were very little imagination in the combat or worldbuilding we know People Can Fly and Square Enix can deliver...

I do appreciate they put out a demo, though. Me and several friends played it and we went from "I have no idea what this thing is" to "I might consider it, if it is heavily discounted and others want to play". It is not an untapped market, with free to play behemoths like Warframe and Destiny, but I am sure it made well for them considering how little buzz there was before the demo. However, I don't think it's a good showpiece. I think I would have prefered if the demo covered some latter parts picked to showcase more interesting environments, exciting encounters and allude to a bigger lore, than getting to play the first few hours of a game designed to be long, even if I missed on the lore, was confused on how to aim and shoot or lose my progress, the possibility of which made me skip all cutscenes, and I think I did the right call there.

It seems like most people here are pretty down on the game, and I agree that the time spent in the demo before you get powers feels off somehow. The cutscenes are all locked to 30 while gameplay is 60, at least on PS5, and I think there's some dialogue syncing issues to boot. It all felt a little disjointed, but as soon as my character got powers, everything started to fall into place.

I played Trickster, Pyromancer and Technomancer to test them all out and the former two felt powerful in a way I wasn't expecting from the game. The skills all come off cooldown fairly quickly and once I had all three slots filled, it always seemed like one of them was ready to use.

However, I found the Technomancer to feel pretty bad in comparison. Their first skill is a grenade/proximity mine that didn't really feel powerful, the turret was boring, and the third skill, the missile barrage, seemed better. They also seemed to heal themselves slower than the other classes, and just all around felt bad. So if you're reading this and thinking about giving the demo a shot, maybe play anything other than the Technomancer.

It's.... alright? In a B game type of way. I like the world funnily enough with it's promise of a lush world and then trown back to a more hellish WW1 type of setting where everyone is fighting for scraps again. I wouldn't be surprised if the game opens up a little bit with more varation once you get past the valley area. At least it doesn't feel boring and generic like a Destiny to me.

The combat is fun. I only tried the Devestator class (?, the tank one) and that was alright with jumping in and shotgunning people in the face. It's fast and brutal in both presentation and gameplay without that many bulletsponges (although the endgame will most likely be that again looking at every other game like this).

The audiovisual quality is all over the place. It doesn't look bad and the guns and powers look and sound quite meaty at times. But you also have odd sound mixing, characters talking to eachother while it sounds there're not in the same room, cutsences cutting off weirdly (too many of them anyway, I mean, you don't need a cutsence everytime you enter a new area), ugly motionblur and vaseline like effects, subtitles not following along, clipping of clothing, ect.

If this was a free to play or even a $20 game with some battlepasses or whatever, I would be getting it. But this just doesn't play or feel like $60 dollar game yet.

I downloaded the demo, but haven't played it yet myself. I did watch a stream of the whole thing though and...hmmh. Like some others have said, it definitely seems like a game from a handful of years ago. Some small things, like the shaky-ass camera, are hopefully things they can fix before the actual game releases. The bland grey color scheme of the first proper area, for example, isn't as easy to change though, so hopefully you get to more greener zones quickly after that.

Shame about the publisher being SE. Unless the game sells 5 million copies within the first month, I assume they'll deem it a failure. At least People Can Fly's not owned by them, so they can't be booted like IO.