SlavicPunk: Oldtimer Reviews

Game would be better if it was longer. Beat it in 3.5 hrs without much difficulty. Didn't even get a chance to upgrade many weapons or utilities. Do not pay full price for this game.

This would have been a passable top-down cyberpunk game if it wasn't for a number of pretty serious problems. Pros: + Cool cyberpunk setting + Decent graphics + Weapons feel good to use Cons: - Buggy, crashed twice in 2 hours of gametime - Stutters occasionally on a system that is above recommended specs - Story and characters are very bad - Average upgrade system - Terrible checkpoint system, the game would sometimes set you back 10 min worth of gametime if you die or PC crashes

I play it on hard and it is not a bad game, but there is no option of a neutral review so i had to make it negative because of the things i will mention down below. First, some positive things. --Cyberpunk world looks nice . --Main hero is appealing badass. --Story seems interesting. Now bad things. --Story, even though it looks interesting it is partly given through messages between heroes in some kind of small chat with small letters in the upper right corner of the screen. I rarely noticed that they have some dialog going in. A really bad way to make it. I think it should be in the lower or upper side of the screen so that player would instantly notice it. Also in this kind of games there is no time to read anything because you concentrate on killing stuff, so it should be voiced (though maybe they have those dialogs when there are no enemies around, i can't tell. As i said, i rarely noticed that there is a dialog). --Reload. You shoot your rifle unloading every bullet in your clip and then... nothing happens. You need to press shoot again or R for reload. This makes rifle a bad choice of a weapon in such an action game, because you hold mouse button to shoot, not click it like in case of revolver or shotgun. --Dodge and dash. Both are useless, you are not invulnerable during them. If you want to die faster then use dodge. As for dash, i thought it could be of some use to get behind shielded brute, but no, they turn a way too fast. --Crouch. Why is it in the game, i do not know. Enemies can shoot you fine when you are crouching behind something - it is a fast way to die. When you, on the opposite, unable to hit enemies behind cover. --Aim. Camera is moving along with your crosshair. It is hard to get used to it and it makes shooting worse. --Hacking. It is useful only when you have nothing but revolver. And it is the only way to deal with shielded brutes, to stun them and shoot them in the back. In other cases it is of no use because it is a dozen times faster to just shoot the guy. --Shielded brutes. The only way to deal with them i found so far is to hack them. You can't get around them or destroy their shield, i tryed. Shield seems indestructable (i unloaded a hell lot of bullets in it). --Upgrades. I have yet to see through them, but now i can tell that you can buy upgrade level 3 right away, passing level 1 and 2. A strange way to do them, but it is fine i guess. They are expensive though. --Shooting. There is no hipfire, character does aim+shooting when you click to shoot. Also when you are close to the enemy, your character is using knife instead of shooting. --Time slower thing. I found no use to it, it just makes everything a lot slower for a couple of seconds. Overall the game has a nice cyberpunk setting but the game itself is too simple. Enemies have a good aim and there is no way to evade their bullets. So it is you kill them fast while eating out medkits, or you just die. The most frustrating was the level where you need to stay in the PC zone and defend yourself against endless enemies. Because of the things i mentioned above you are in the open in there. I failed dozens of times before i noticed that there is a bit of zone near a chest which is behind the PC. Only by holding out in that place i was finally able to pass it. A little further there was a room where enemies could literally spawn on you out of nowhere. I was instantly pulverized by a shotgunner this way. I will beat this game till the end, but like some people said in other reviews - The Ascent is a better choice of a game.

this is a tough one...love this style of game and was excited to play. sadly this game is a mess; constant crashes and lag, broken missions lead to an arrow and then stop, doors and chest won't open for some reason, broken save points that just crash the game when you try to load them. i restarted this game 3 times to get it to run which means i've played it longer than 2 hrs so steam won't give me my $$ back for a game that needs so much work.

The Ascent: balkan edition. Maybe finish the game before releasing it? I dunno, just an idea. Instant refund.

This is gonna be a rant review. Mosty. I don't usually do that but I see that as an painful but needed feedback since the game is just released and much can be improved. I wouldn't wate my time if I didn't see a potential here. I really love who this game looks, I love how it sounds, how it feels, gives me this hardcoded Blade Runner feeling which I love. But the ux, the design, the mechanics is just totally different matter and I'm hoping it will get better. So firstly when I saw this game "Slavic Punk" I thought wtf another cyberpunk ripoff? Like why do you do that to your game - it does have so much more than the name suggests... Second on the offender index is tutorial. Like honestly WTF - you really believe I can read tutorial in the middle of the fight and figure out that I need to tab into hacking a guy without a big red flashing notification or o popup screen that freezes a game and let me read it without dying? I do understand you didn't want to interuput the flow, sure, but why there's no visible option to read it again? I'd recommend reading / listening to Celia Hodent books or podcasts - there's so much about how to design stuff that works accordingly to player perception there. Low health notification mechanics - it doesn't exist. You get all bloody after just one shot and then you ignore it so when your health is red low somewhere in the bottom of the screen it's already too late since get a surprise death. Is there a keayboard mapping in this game? Couldn't find any and opening boxes with F instead of E sux. Enemy health bar is also a joke. You don't see them loosing health like at all. Sometimes you shoot and your character doesn't shoot at all - long reload, reload glith? Like furiously irritating. And where are the trading cards? For this price I believe you really should include them since your game is so pretty and you could really show off here. And I really loved that when you press esc and get to the "press any key to activate stream" the escape key doesn't work to get back oh lol it got me force kill the game app like at least once. And the best for last - achievements are not working. Like at all lol. Did someone forgot to turn them on? It's like quite visible to notice you get 0% of overal population and 0% in progress in any of them when you play. So the general feeling is like someone wanted to realease on Summer Fest. Maybe there was this poor, lone QA who said, "oh wait it's not ready for a release yet...." but it more feel like one of these situations when someone says "oh why do we need to pay QA if we can have community test it for free?". So dear developers here and of all games. FFS pay your QA, they're heavily underpaid and they are crucial part of your company. Secondly it does feel like a game created by bunch of ppl who did their jira tasks but there was no (or very inexperienced) leads or no producers who had the actual ownership. Nobody who did managed the game. I know that producers seems obsolete for so many developers but your game proves just how important that role is to have your sh... maintained. Well then why the hell yes, recommend? Because it was just released, at best it's a BETA, it SHOULD had been released as early access. But judging by developer responses they know their problems and hopefuly in a month of two it will be awesome game. And I will come back to see it in like this month or two. That is of course if I won't get into another game and forget this one. Anyway I do recommend this game (with all the warnings said above) since I don't want to add to sinking the ship and I really hope it will get back to the surface.

Wonderful game - looking for DLC Love the atmosphere and the character. - I'll gladly pay for DLC. The graphics are not quite as good as Ascent, it's much more fun. While SlavicPunk has it's frantic moments, it is generally a slower game with individual enemies (not just hordes), giving the player more direction and time to evaluate actions. The controller feels great with generous auto-aim. And I didn't see any of the glitches that other reviewers reported. It ran great for me, The game is too short, about 4 hours, and I'm a slow player.. I'm on my third run now. If you like these slower paced twin stick games with a story, you may also enjoy The Last Stand: Aftermath and Aliens: Dark Descent.

Met the creators on the convention where they presented the demo version of the game, and despite some small issues, both me and my gf got hooked on this game. That being said: As for now, I've played through only the first mission. Although a few bugs are visible here and there, I've decided to go easy on them. It's the day of the premiere after all, and the dev team seems to be happy to address the issues when they're brought up! Communication with them is great! That being said, the game crashed 3 times. Didn't affect my progress too much but was still pretty irritating. When it comes to the game's overall vibe: it's there. You can feel it in the voices of the characters, you can see it all around the world, you can hear it in very climactic music. Is it slavic? Hell yeah. I'm feeling like I'm walking through more technologicaly advanced and morally depraved version of my own town. Dialogues between NPC's as well as their behavior bring this nice realistic touch to the world. Gameplay? Not too easy, but pretty forgiving. Playing on normal is pretty fluent, controls are quite easy to navigate (although tbf a little bit packed in one place for someone with as big of a hands like mine). Never complained about lack of resources, didn't feel like overflowing with them (yet). I like this game. I'm not a die-hard fan, but I enjoy it. I will post updates as I go, but for now, to sum it up: Easy to learn gameplay, with really forgiving mechanics. Simple story, but really atmospheric setting. Bugs are noticable, but don't affect the gameplay too much and are being addressed by the devs. Only game crashes are an annoyance. Solid 7/10 as for now. Keep it up! EDIT: Four days after the premiere, got softlocked in a few locations, fell under the map few times, enemies keep spawning under the map, camera glitches in the wall in multiple places, progress is halted, game crashed many, many times. Potential is here, but it gets annoying to try and make any meaningful progress. Can't wait for the update that fixes these issues, as for now my fun from the game comes in 50% from bug-hunting XDDD

It's enjoyable enough, especially for a $25 game, but it has some real issues, many of which could easily be patched and I don't know why they haven't. I WANT to love this game, but it is so frustrating. It doesn't support Steam Cloud saves... like, what? Why not? You cannot save when you want to and the checkpointing is utterly random. It can send you back to slog through the same 2-3 easy fights over and over because there's one hard fight at the end. And the fights are only hard because NPCs just spawn at random all over the map, popping into existence 10 feet away or so. Some of them can 2 shot you. And I mean like 7 at a time, maybe 30 per fight. And there's no cover system. You can run them in circles around pillars but you can't crouch behind things and fire from them. Even if you could they just run around your cover like idiots. I can just walk back, through a door, stand on the other side, and shotgun an endless steam of bad guys as they mindlessly come in one at a time. The most egregious poor fight design are these turrets which can easily kill you in 2-3 hits, take several clips or close up shots with a shotgun to kill, have 360 degree coverage, and X-ray vision. It is literally impossible to kill one without a stagger hack, which makes killing them both unrewarding and resource dependent - no skill involved. And they just put 1 or two in every room at this point. It's not a rewarding challenge to overcome, it's like doing your taxes. There's no inventory screen from what I can tell, and I'm like 3.5 hours in and still have not found a store which sells weapon upgrades, despite finding 3-4 'workshops' in levels that would, supposedly, let me edit my gun loadout. "You must purchase this" is all those workshops say. The 2 stores there are sell levels of health and stam improvement but you can just skip to buying the best one - they don't build up. So I got all the best versions right away. There's no pip or any kind of sign that a store is 'real' they look exactly like the background stores, so you just have to grind your face along the walls till you see 'Press to interact' if you forget where they are. My last gripe is that the "cut scenes' just reuse the same, admittedly gorgeous, static art pics while a voice over plays. Like a repetitive comic book. Honestly a great style if they had just executed it well. The acting is good enough-ish, but there's a disconnect between the pictures and the text. Like they might be in your apartment, but it is showing them standing in some other place, or at one point a character was speaking then said "...Agghh" suddenly mid sentence, then kept speaking but angry. I THINK that the main character slapped her at that point? There was no picture of it or any change on screen to let me know what happened or even a slapping sound. I am honestly puzzled by what that was. It sounded like the actress was too, because her aggh sounded like she suddenly had a tummy ache for no reason or something. And I keep finding these computers to hack and "check the files" which spawns enemies, but as near as I can tell there is absolutely no reward for this. Almost seems like an unfinished feature. Honestly this game is SO CLOSE to greatness it is frustrating as hell. If they just polished that stuff up, and added the steam cloud saves, it would be right up there with Ruinier or The Ascent. Just gotta finish the home stretch.

[b]Tl;dr:[/b] There's so much potential here but the game really needed more time in the oven. I haven't finished the game at this time. [b]Pros:[/b] +Cool aesthetic +Story and characters seem interesting so far +I like the combat but pretty much default to using the shotgun all the time [b]Cons[/b] -Many fatal errors -Performance is better after a couple of patches but still stuttering here and there -Too many shield enemies -Turret health, range, and damage too high -Enemies have grenades, you don't -The slow time ability is useless because enemies can still turn to face you -If whatever a chest is giving you is full in your inventory, you get nothing and the chest becomes unlootable -Made it to a level where I can't progress because the key won't spawn [b]Closing thoughts:[/b] I got this because the demo was fun but it's had nothing but issues since launch. I'm just tired of playing a little bit and then stopping to wait for a fix for whatever issue happens next. They put out a couple of patches but it's still too rough to recommend.