CRYPTARK Reviews

TLDR: The game gets old fast and the learning curve could be better, campaign kinda sucks. The funny thing is I dont actually want to give this a thumbs down, but I also don't want to give this a thumbs up either. I guess I am leaning more towards thumbs down, Sure would be nice if there were more options thn up or down but there ya go. The game overall is fun but frustrating, theres a lot I want to say about this game but I dnt want to leave a wall of text so I will focus on the frustrating over the fun because its a thumbs down review not thumbs up. There are probably 3X that which will tell you whats good about the game. Here we go. The game modes. There are two game modes, rogue and campaign. Both have a strange diffuclty curve you got to learn to process before jumping into a new mission. Rogue starts you off with a pretty decent difficulty and not too friendly for new players, it also doesn't refill any health of ammunition between missions. There are items you can find to refill both of these but they are a bit scarce, leaving rogue to be something for the veterans who get tired of campaign and are used to the resource grind. The only other mode is campaign, which leaves a lot to be desired. It plays more as a glorified tutorial thn anything. You go from one selection of derelict ships and choose on to board. You are given a selection of Icons to let you know whats on board, but you are not told what said Icons actually mean so its a guess to whats on the ship until you memorize them over time. Once you start a mission the difficulty curve is actually REALLY drastic. I think this is due to the campaign being generally short, you can beat it in under 2 hours. It suppose to have a replay value by unlocking new mech like outfits to try, but besides that it feels rather lacking in replay department. It also did something that I wish less rogue likes would do. That is, having a less than instant restart. It's a rogue like, you are suppose to die and go back at it but so many of these games dont have that restart that lets you start a fresh life and dive into the action right away. When you know you got a bad run you just want to press ESC and RETRY, Nope, not here either. In fact in campaign you are significantly punished for dying. In a game genre built around, try, try, try again this game rips away a large sum of your funds you are given as earnings upon every death leaving a real bad taste in your mouth. In the end what ultimately leaned my rating towards thumbs down was, each game session lasted barley an hour, and I didnt even really want to return. But I spent cash on the game so In a way I felt like I gotta. The game is heavily lacking in a lot of features that should give it depth, but it's just an average shoot'em up rogue like. The kind we get five dozen of every year. It doesn't do enough to stick out from the bunch, and it doesn't have that much replay value in comparison to the competition.