Finished it, summary: utter, complete, total rubbish.
While the base gameplay is same as Mutant Year Zero, the following is missing in this game:
- characters - every character in your party (all 3 of them!) is the future cyborg soldier with no humanity left. No differentiation between the characters at all.
- skill/perk trees - you get implants instead, 3 per character. you can freely change them between the missions. every soldier can use whatever combo you want
- cool guns - every gun is super weak (I think hugest damage is 5, if you don't count BOYOs that do 15, but are more special weapons than primaries). wtf sniper rifle dealing same damage per shot as a pistol...
- any kind of economy - no scrap, no reason for exploration, no shops to buy stuff
- upgrades for weapons - what you get is what you get, you want shooty farther, plug in an implant
- reasons to explore - already wrote about scrap, but you can't even find any weapons during the missions. the only incentive to look around are notes/newspapers telling the "story"
- armour - no armour or helmets for your dudes
- enemy variety - all the enemies just feel and look like guys with guns, not much smarts in them either. they always have superior numbers though
- map variety - the game is 18 missions, 6 in every chapter. in the whole game you have 7 maps. Seven, that's it. Some missions require you to go between maps, so you might see a location more than once during single mission. Not even small things change - all those cars, bodies, etc. are always in the same place. Buildings you blew up in previous mission get magicked back to their normal state when you revisit. Enemy locations are exactly the same. The only thing that changes in chapter 3 is that everything gets a horrible red tint, all your enemies get more hp, and a red aura around them
- colours - everything is drab grey or brown
- mission variety - shoot everyone; rescue someone by shooting everyone then take them to another map, shoot everyone, call evac; touch mcguffin (you can skip killing everyone in those)
- inventory management - in MYZ your characters had limited granades it was per char. here you have 3 granades per squad, and you can configure them at the time of throw to be fire/explosive/etc. Medkits and remote explosives are also per-squad
- any kind of plot development - even in MYZ you got the whole where are the mutants coming from arc and the main story arc. not high-brow writing, but not utterly shit. In here, you have barely any development, you can feel that whoever is giving you orders is evil by mission 2 (so you aren't bad guys, you're stupid guys from good faction that get duped to do big evil's bidding). The general that shows up in chapter 3 makes no sense whatsoever either. Only decent flavour comes from conversations you can overhear between enemies, and one or two decent notes. No way to review those after the mission though.
What this game has is boredom, as every mission after first 3-4 feels exactly the same. And due to low weapon damage it is also a grind. Enemies aren't particularly smart either.
I did say no bugs earlier, but there are some. Most visible was discovering enemies when shooting with sniper rifle, as camera follows the bullet. You could end up with an enemy behind a wall being targetable. And sometimes you wouldn't see the buildings enemies are in when targetting with sniper rifle and max range implant.
Anyway, waste of time and money. And for the studio, colossal waste of good will and potential. MYZ with better stealth (cones of vision/hearing range), more open world, and even a light strategic layer a-la xcom would be great. Instead we got something that feels like something interns whipped up during summer vacation using the existing tech.
Major fucking disappointment, and if I haven't spent time on this to provide this glorious review, I would have asked for a refund.
MYZ is superior in every single aspect.
I agree with almost everything in this review.
- MYZ is certainly the better game, and can be quite fun if you don't abuse the sneakiness. Both games have also in common that they are fun when you fuck up, but not too much. My best moment of grace in MYZ and C2029 is when I failed a sneak killed, triggered all the "survivors" from the map... and came up ahead. The problem is that if you fuck up too early there is nothing you can do against the sheer mass of enemies when you have 3 dudes, and if you don't fuck up it is just a puzzle game where you need to manage how to kill groups of 1 or 2 before they can react.
- 3 characters is reaallly bad. I actually had the most fun in those missions where you need to free a fourth guy, at which point having that extra guy allowed me to survive when failing a sneak attack.
- On the other hand, I actually like the implant system, as you can create pretty cool systems and it forces you to make choices, though a bit too much of these are "must-have" (eg the Mozambican one mentioned above)
- I don't find combats to be that much of a grind. Indeed, guns are fairly weak at 4, but then enemies have very few HP themselves (all of them have 4-14, plus some armor) and by then you will have the powerful grenades, consistent critical on most of your characters (so assume 6 damage most of the time), the absolutely necessary "Mozambique drill" (aka 12-15 damage in one impulse), the heavy machine-gun (12 damage for everything in front of you), ...
- Weapon variety is indeed terrible : Base Pistol, Base rifle, ONE silent rifle, ONE silent pistol ONE shotgun, ONE sniper rifle (which allows you to do sneak kill because if you shoot from far enough you won't be heard), ONE super-machine gun and one end-game flamethrower that you won't use because it is just terrible.
- Enemy diversity is pretty low indeed : Weak grunt ("protector" mostly there to recharge your skills as your skill recharge after X kills), Normal grunt, grenadier, sniper, commander that summons melee drone, repair drone. All those have "elite" version (with 4 more HP) and then "corrupted" version (same as elite, +1 armor), except that corrupted commanders don't summon drones but instead has a brain-control attack.
- 7 maps, and while a couple of them are pretty good, a couple of them are also pretty boring in my opinion. They could have really leverage the small number of maps if they had brought significant change between chapters and if the damage were persistent between missions, but no.
- A few good ideas that fall flat :
1. grenades that you can change purpose before throwing - sadly I only ever had to use the explosive grenades because the other grenades are not worth it,
2. I never used the remote explosive because if you can put it on the patrol path of an enemy you can probably sneak kill that enemy. I assume there are some usage, like planting on the ground floor below an enemy in a tower, I will test on the 3 missions I still have to do,
3. You can hack turrets so it kills everything around it. It is nice, but since it is not considered sneak kills (obviously) it is kept for the end and is "fun" rather than useful, or not used about. It is made worse by the fact that you need to spend a consumable NEXT to the turret to be able to later hack it, which means that you don't do it on each turret on a map "for the future"
- The fact that you don't have to clean up a level of all enemies and inspect every tiles like in MRY has its advantage, you can really focus on the mission, and some of them you can play chirurgically (neutralizing JUST your main target). I enjoyed the mission in Chapter 3 where you need to recover one officer on top of a building and where you can sneak around by the back, avoid the patrolling drone, create a distraction to get the guard away, and then reach the officer without firing a shoot. Sadly, many missions objectives are : "Go to A and kill everyone".
Overall, the game feels like a FPP (
first playable publishable) that was... published. It feels like they decide to stop the project, move to something else, so they just created mission around the 7 environment they had and released it.
The game did not know how to leverage its few good ideas : a system that would have allowed laser-focused mission, but no half your missions are "kill everyone". Simple system of implants that could have added depth to the game... but no half of them are "must have" for sneak attack and the rest are rarely creative // changing your approach. Nice turret-hacking system... but no way to evade a battle when the objective is accomplished so no real use to it...
I had some fun, but I cannot recommend it. 19 USD is still too much, get it when inevitably it will be free on the EPIC store (or at least at 5 USD). I would have much prefered a "mission-based" expansion to MRY, à la
Jagged Alliance Deadly Games.
