ROOT Reviews

I can see why so few players have finished this game. The story is some overwrought bs mostly dropped on you before you've even started playing. The characters you meet are exclusively uninteresting, and thankfully their constant and gameplay-interrupting text dialogue can be turned off. There's none of the charm and bleakness of a real cyberpunk thriller. It feels like the people who made this game knew some cyberpunk tropes, a few things about coding, and produced a basic product to hook someone purely on looks. The world is as shallow as the plot. Between the terrible level design, and the stupid difficulty of actually playing stealthy, you'll quickly learn ROOT is just a shooter with an enemy vision system. The level design does improve in later levels, but interesting pathing is often pointless in a world were everything is blue (abba dee, abba die) and it's so easy to get lost. If you're not careful, you can easily stumble into enemies you previously avoided. Bullet sponges are introduced, which would seem to be an attempt to encourage stealthy play, but then you're forced to fight them either as bosses or as protectors of keys in open rooms. Additionally, any and all enemies you don't kill will often unerringly come find you if you're noticed, and the mechanics for being noticed on any difficulty over easy are insane. You're usually best off hunting down the hardest enemies as soon as a level begins and mopping up any lesser enemies that try to help them. There is no way to heal during missions outside of the rare checkpoint. Checkpoints appear to only exist because of the presence of bosses. Someone noticed the stealth was weak, and leaned into the weak shooting to try and make up for it. As a shooter, ROOT is merely OK. You get 2 guns for all 10 levels, 1 pistol and 1 shotgun, and the pistol is generally the best weapon as it can stunlock. The shotgun exploits chest-high walls, which can befuddle the AI, and can be good at mid-range for 1 or 2-hit kills. However, weapon swapping and reloading take a frustrating length of time, and I found myself always defaulting to the pistol unless I was worried about ammo. This game does not appear to be an asset flip. Or, at the very least, some effort was put in. That's the best I can say for it.

[h1] Kinda average FPS where you sneak past enemies or take them down. Game is set in cybernetic simulation. You can dodge enemy bullets by dashing left or right. Gameplay is not very complex except finding your out of the maze. You can crawl through the vents occasionally farting for some fresh air. When you die - repeat whole stage. Game doesn't have much depth, no stealth kills, no tactics, no interesting weapons. Visuals are somewhat unique but nothing too amazing. Music is ambient like. Sounds are like some kind of muffled echo. Can't recommend this one as it feels very mediocre to me. Better solution - play Severed Steel. PS: Glad that enemies are stupid enough to not smell anything coming from the vents... [/h1]