GAIN Reviews

ass

https://youtu.be/0ElR66329Kc GAIN is a stealth game with permadeath. You have limited resources to take care of the guards in each level. Dying sends you back to level one. It is advertised as a "hardcore" game, but its difficulty comes purely from the permadeath. I finished the game in forty minutes and wasn't at all satisfied. I subsequently beat the game again in just four minutes. It boils down to being trial and error, once you know the simple level layout, there is zero challenge.

An interesting concept of a game, I have played this for around an hour so far and the farthest I've got is the start of level 3, the game allows you to live as Xavier, a guy hoping to collect the documents and exit through the door. One thing I have noticed though is that the crosshair is not aligned with the bullets, I aim down the gun sights rather than using the crosshair, and the knife can sometimes float away. Other than that it's addictive and fun :) You can see some of my first attempts here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnXGoopd31Y

I went in thinking "This is exactly what I was looking for in a stealth game, even though I never did thought about that". A Rogue-like stealth game, it just makes so much sense and it's great!... on paper. The problem is, this game falls short. A great idea that is, in my opinion, just not polished enough. You start with a throwing knife and a gun loaded with 5 bullets. The aiming and hit-scan is wonky, sometime I aim properly and miss my target where sometimes I just run and gun to get headshot after headshot. And the throwing knife... the problem with it is that it's a THROWING knife. I have a hard time thinking that a stealthy person on a mission would throw away its only knife and then be weaponless. Also the guards will sometime see you from afar and yet, sometime you could be near enough to whisper insults in their ears and be unseen. Oh, and when they see you, they will shoot. Either you get the 1 shot-kill treatment or the "80's movie vilain" treatment; 6 shoots and still be alive. The 2 powers that you have, see thru wall and slow time, are nice but the X-ray vision is hard to get used to. There is no cooldown on the screen to tell you when to use it again and it shows you a cone to display the enemy sighting range... or so I think? Sometime the cone go thru the wall and it gets confusing fast. And this is just a pet peeve of mine but the menus and options are not easy to navigate. Pressing ESC to quit is not enabled, the screen resolution options makes the UI moves left or right if you transition it. I'm fetching far, I know, but everything adds up in the end. Dev, you have an excellent premise for the game, just need a bit more polishing I love it and will keep on playing but... the game is hard mostly because of problems here and there. I personally love a game that is hard by implementation and design (Dark Soul series) and not because of "bad" design for lack of better term. TL;DR: Great idea but bugs and rough edges makes it hard.