EDIT: Oh yeah, if your performance in this game is dogshit regardless of settings, it's b/c they force RT/Lumen on, with no setting to turn it off. It makes the game look flatter (and much more like HL1 tbh) but I also got like 40% more FPS out of it. Check out how to turn them off here.
I actually think their logo and key art does a bit of a disservice to the vibe I get from the game, b/c it's not nearly as colourful and wacky as it suggests.
The premise, of what I've played so far, is great: a SurvivalCraft game, but not 'open world', where the scenario is essentially 'you're one of the non-Freeman scientists from Half-Life 1; it's your first day, and the facility has started to go to shit.' And it's pretty cool! Co-op 1-6 players, self-hosted servers, all good things to see.
It's even got a light story/plot/direction, there's voiced NPCs, and the tutorial even has a (very short) HL-1-tram-ride-style elevator entrance which is great. It's a unique setting for a SurvivalCraft - you're not mining nodes and punching trees, you're smashing computers and dismantling furniture. Instead of a day-night cycle, the facility powers down at night (for security reasons, apparently!), leading to both almost total darkness (save for battery lights/robots/etc), and a massive drop in temperature (b/c ofc the facility is underground!), but in a consistent, controlled way. It's a very good take on the whole idea tbh.
And, of course, dealing with a whole facility of escaped dimensional horrors, experiments, and tech gone wrong. Weirder and more dangerous stuff happens at night, too. Strange out-of-phase lights that I can't grab (yet), security mechs come out, and likely other phenomena I haven't encountered.
Based on the trailers, there's a lot of locations and content to explore already; I see many half a dozen (or more!) unique facility areas on top of the few I've seen in-game already, there's vehicles (and craftable vehicles like a hand cart, etc!), swimming, there's minor base-building - no 'walls/floor/roof/door' thankfully, but barricades and traps instead, and a focus on being able to move and use existing furniture, which is great.
Definitely feels a bit more balanced for co-op - not in enemy difficulty (game servers are decently configurable), but in hard-coded game mechanics like how many default inventory spaces you get, how many resources there are, what does and doesn't respawn, etc. Respawn is a bit odd; enemies will respawn (so food is endless, but it comes with rads, which are slow but cause you problems over a longer time, which is a good implementation of it.), but AFAIK Items won't unless you turn on the server option, and even then, furniture won't, so there's a sense of limit to your environment - that if you dally far too long, you'll run out of stuff. I can't, in practice, see that easily happening, but you can quickly drain the local area of everything useful and need to move on, which is kinda cool.
This is also the only game I've seen with a bladder mechanic that isn't weird about it. As a facility, there are, of course, restrooms in many places. Sometimes they can have problems in them. But they have both water, and toilets. You have a continence bar, and you need to go every now and then. Things can make you need to go faster or more often, like sickness or rad poisoning, etc. You actually have to sit and wait, and you can play a little qte minigame to go faster. I like the implementation a lot more than most other games I've seen with the mechanic, and I like the idea that you can't/won't just take a hot shit wherever, and must use the toilets in designated areas which vary depending on where you are in the facility. It's nice, easily solvable, but can occasionally cause you problems, which is all I want out of my bars in these games anyway.
Skills level up as you use them, there's no 'points to spend', just actions to do, which is great. Recipes are learned when picking up key materials - there's a cute little 'invention' minigame where you have to guess the components for the recipe with a few hints, but there's no consequence for getting it wrong, and each time it reduces the number of options until you can't get it wrong, so it's mostly a challenge to quickly overcome since the game doesn't pause in your game menus, only in the escape menu in single player. There is, thankfully, an option to turn this off! So that's decent.
Haven't gone too far into it yet (there's a bit of back and forth gathering supplies with such limited inventory space, but there are backpacks and vehicles to help a bit later tho), but it seems pretty dang cool. No idea if I'd like it in co-op or not, but it's fun if you like SurvivalCrafts and Half-Life 1.
