Depth of Extinction Reviews

This is a very soft recommendation. It's like a budget X-Com, and you get what you pay for. The lack of variety makes it repetitive, but the core mechanics are good enough that I kept playing it for 40 hours and finished it. However, I was a bit relieved when it was over, and do not plan to play any more for additional content or achievements. The plot is the worst part of the game. There is almost none at all. All of the story text could probably fit on a single sheet of paper, and it reads like it was written by a C-student in middle school. It's not clear how any of the story missions are connected, or why you are pursuing your objectives. The dialog is laughable. I still have no idea how the opening sequence led me to embark on the mission that led to the closing sequence, or how the two are related. Pros: -Great pixel graphics -Nice atmosphere -Good sound, except for the voice acting -Solid core mechanics Cons: -Essentially no plot -What little plot there is makes no sense -Little variety in maps, equipment, enemies, and equipment, making it repetitive -Occasionally clunky interface

The game gets repetitive and boring quite quickly, not to mention that there are still bugs like game getting stuck on the AI turn, or UI not responding.

So, it's not bad, but there's definitely some jank. Depth is an Xcom-like set in a water world with a setting reminiscent of Rick Remender's "Low." The Xcom gameplay feels a little simplified, but it's much more forgiving. Characters are pretty tanky, and the meta revolves around finding ways to do burst damage rather than abusing reactions, explosives, and cover. Due to the length and structure of the game, it's way less likely your characters will get obliterated in a single shot, and that's a blessing. Depth mixes in some FTL elements into the formula, and you unlock sidegrades by doing non-story missions, but overall the gameplay gets easier the further you go, and can be tough as nails in some early missions. Now, where Depth sort of falls on its face is the writing. The writing for peripheral content, such as weapons and abilities and locations, is perfectly fine. The writing for the core story and dialogue feels like it's being done by someone who is not comfortable or familiar with writing fiction. It's not actively bad, but it's *powerfully* mediocre. Depth is also not perfectly bug-free. I only encountered one bug, but it was an enemy's pathing going squirrely in a way that caused a softlock, so it's possible you may end up with a bricked save due to unavoidable circumstances. Overall, if you like cool settings and you like trying out different approaches to the turn-based shooter genre, I think this is still worth checking out. But if you need a really high level of polish in all aspects of a game, or if you're plot-first-gameplay-second, this might not be your thing.

if XCOM combat and FTL exploration had a roguelike baby this would be the ugly charming one. DoE is what would happen if humanity would be driven to live under the sea like little crabs that fight each other for survival with a rogue AI and crazy cultists thrown into the mix. The story is average but the music and spritework is nice. The combat missions and environments get really repetitive, really fast but the enemies do get stronger and more clever as the story progresses. If there is a room for great improvement in this game is the variation of the tile the mission areas are made of, I fought in stupid warehouses like 90% of the time and when I found myself fighting in an indoor farm, it was a breath of fresh air. Fighting enemy submarines is weird, since the enemy crew politely gets out of their death machines to engage you in combat.. its so dumb.. oh yeah, you also get out of your own submarine to cordially meet them. I had fun most of the time, this game's strength is making up your squad from several classes which you can pick and figuring out the synergy between them, should you get 3 snipers and a warden to lure enemies out while the snipers overwatches and kills everything that comes after you? or have 2 wildcats with their deadly bullet hell skills firing one after another destroying everything in a room like suicide bombers.. or yeah, just grab some wreckers and blow all the shit up.. all of it! Yeah, that was great. Achievements are easy and linear, do the story, do side missions that unlock different submaries or missions that let you gather intel so you can get a powerful plasma weapon later. Its hard to die in normal mode so if you need the death achievements, you'll need hardcore. DoE gets 7 stupid low profile assassin enemies that refuse to die out of 10 obliterated enemies thanks to my roid up wildcat SMG explosive bullet build that kills them all in one turn.

Jesus, I found a bug in this game and the dude fixed it like 2 days after I reported it. This is a cool and good game, if a little grindy, I'm probably half way through it at about 25 hours. Getting a rad group of dudes and dudettes together than just slay is very satisfying and the 'follow' mechanic that makes moving around between combat is super smart. I spend 3 dollars on this game which feels like an absolute steal.

If you are an X-Com fan it's good fun for an hour or so but quickly several problems arise that for the moment make me not recommend this game. Pros: * Soundtrack is banging * Follow mode is fantastic (here's hoping we see something like that in the next X-Com) * Combat feels good at the start * Nice customization, variety of items, weapons, etc. * Enjoyed the leveling and growing of the characters in general Cons: * There needs to be more maps to play in. You very quickly get tired of the exact same maps with different but not different enough layouts. There is never enough space for your guys which leads to them either never doing anything or standing out in the open. * More variety of enemy types. * In general everything takes too long. Walking around takes forever, which is further exaccerbated by how many encounters you need to do to complete a mission. You can beeline for the end but then I wonder why put all these paths in place? * Everyone is too powerful. I use a ballistic mask on my warden and have him hunker down somewhere. Everyone runs to the enemies and kills them as quickly as possible as they won't attack them until the next round. I have so much health that even if one makes it it's no big deal. * Difficulty needs tweaked. Breezing through hard missions without so much as a care using the above strat. * It's clear the game dev loves X-Com and FTL as it shows here. However the abilities are copied almost verbatim and more thought needs to be put on making these abilities balanced in this game. The map where you go from encounter to encounter is interesting but the repeated maps/areas quickly make it so you just want to beeline for the exit, rendering it useless. * Maybe there is a reason to pick different ships but honestly it didn't really seem to matter which one I took. Perhaps later in the game it starts to impact things but I think a lot could be done to improve this selection from the start. There is a good game here but needs a few tweaks, content, and balancing there. It's cheap and if you are hungering for X-Com/FTL hybrid it's a lot of fun before the repetiveness of it wears on you. Otherwise in it's current state I'd say wait for the devs to add content/polish/balance before buying.

I wanted to like this game, I really did. I was hoping for an atmospheric. difficult tactical game. What I got was a surprisingly dry, uninspired game borrowing from others. I got to the end of the first area and just didn't care enough anymore to finish it. On paper this game sounds great, but the execution of it is rather lacking. I never felt tension, everything looked rather samey, and the pixel graphics are lacking in personality. I guess I wanted something more in line with old Terror From the Deep, this was not that game I guess. It's not an awful game by any means, it just lack drive and a wow factor to keep things going dooming it to being another game to rot away in my library.

The music and graphics for this game are great. It is very similar to XCOM and FTL, and the world is interesting. Unfortunately, the gameplay is mindnumbingly boring. I decided to play longer than 2 hours, hoping the gameplay would open up, but each and every engagement is exactly the same. Save your money.

Faster Than X-COM, essentially, with all the flaws of both and little of the charm. You're exploring a procedurally designed grid of missions to get to your objectives, each grid location giving you a chance to visit a merchant, risk some ship integrity/fuel or take on a combat mission to accomplish something, and the last objective of each "zone" generally giving an overall bonus to your campaign. This is conceptually something I'd love, the problem is in the execution. Generally each combat mission, and there are more combat missions than any other type of event, are small, slow and extremely similar, which means that they rapidly become a repetitive chore which you start expecting to be over and done with extremely quickly. However, this changes once the difficulty increases, whereupon the game starts pulling things on you like enemies that can see you through doors and run in to blow you up before you have a chance to do anything(real fun), enemies with huge piles of HP that can blow up cover(obviating that entire mechanic) while also damaging whoever's behind it and enemies that attack from inside the fog of war which means you have no real way to actually take cover or otherwise prepare for their attacks. You're also extremely at the mercy of what room layouts the procedural generation decides to cough up, as it'll happily create a situation where you have literally no cover while your opponent has tons of it. Interface issues also abound, like the game being extremely happy to let you waste an important shot on cover instead of an enemy, when sprites overlap or being extremely insistent about "suggesting" actions. For instance, character's ammo out? It'll suggest you reload, and you have to pretty much kick and wrestle the interface to let you move first or perhaps use a secondary weapon instead, making the whole thing feel kind of weirdly "sticky." Sometimes, to activate or deactivate certain actions, you also need to "maneuver" your cursor between other active buttons that might give the game different ideas about what you want to do. From FTL it also inherits the issue of gear drops being insanely random and also insanely important. For instance, one character of mine randomly got dropped a weapon that deals twice as much damage as any other party member's, and once I start hitting the bullet-spongey Hard mission enemies, he's the only one who can do meaningful damage to them, everyone else starts being kind of irrelevant. Unlike FTL, a run also isn't a quick half-hour or one-hour thing, but an entire persistent campaign, so if the dice roll against you it isn't just a quick re-roll to try again. It's a game that I really wanted to like and, after the early stages, thought I would, but having to redo an entire 20-minute mission just because the AI decided it could suddenly see through walls just isn't something I have the patience for in a game like this, and the random factors really hurt it. It feels like a game that would have been much better with a single, non-random campaign filled with only hand-crafted missions.

[h1]Preface[/h1] When I first played Depth of Extinction around 9 months ago, many of the negative reviews were valid; while the game undeniably had potential, it got boring quick. However, that has all changed. The developer has clearly taken the feedback to heart, and made many awesome changes: [list] [*] Several new map types, with more planned, which offer not only aesthetic variety, but also diverse tactical challenges, as different maps require different approaches, and will be better for certain classes/builds. [*] More details about nodes on the overmap. For example, you canplan your route so as to avoid maps that will be more difficult for your team, or go out of your way to target warehouses looking for upgraded weapons/armor. [*] Many new difficult enemy units (again, with more planned) that will keep you on your toes, and challenge you to come up with new strategies in order to reliably defeat them. [*] An enemy database, in which you can see enemyies' loadouts and stats, allowing you to plan your strategies with more certainty. [*] Enemies now can hear you from nearby rooms if you walk or fire weaponry too close to them. This does a great job of breaking up the formula of "open doors -> clear room -> repeat," occasionally throwing a wrench into your plans and facing you with the decision of trying to fight it out with more enemies than you bargained for, or take what loot you can and retreat back to the sub. [*] Many more changes. It really is impressive to me, as a programmer myself, how much progress the developer (just one guy AFAIK) has made in these 9 months. [/list] Ok, enough of the recent changes, let me talk about the game as a whole. [h1]Tactical Gameplay[/h1] 10/10 I don't give that rating of 10 lightly. I am a veteran of squad-based tactics games, and that's what this is at heart; comparisons to FTL are only skin-deep. A good squad-based tactics game is all about options; different approaches should be possible in all areas of the game, from soldier level progression, to equipment loadouts, to which character classes you choose for your squad, to the literal approach you take when engaging enemies. These allow the player to explore the tactical space, and find the best approach for a variety of different situations. Of course, to be fun, it needs to be consistently challenging as well. Depth of Extinction has both these things in spades. The only other games I've played that nailed the tactical gameplay this well has been the Long War mods for XCOM and XCOM 2. [h1]Overall Gameplay[/h1] 8/10 With any non-linear tactics game, you need a gameplay presentation for mission selection. In Depth of Extinction, this is really pretty bare-bones. Which is kind of okay, as it's better for the strategic layer to be short and simple than to be a drawn-out and boring interlude to the exciting tactical gameplay. Still, I would like to see a bit more challenge and depth to the resource management side of the game. One thing it does have going for it is objective selection: each objective is a specific mission with a specific reward, though you will inevitably end up fighting several missions moving towards it. That reward can be main story progression, or unlocking a new sub, or retrieving an advanced piece of equipment. Being able to choose what you're fighting towards makes you much more attached to the outcome. [h1]Story & Setting[/h1] 8/10 I haven't progressed a ton in the main story, so take this rating with a grain of salt, but the setting is pretty original, and personally makes my imagination run wild. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic version of Earth, where the sea level is so high that only the tops of mountains remain. Most of civilization seems to reside in underwater bases and floating habitats, and people travel via submarine. Some of the pre-mission blurbs mention things like skyscrapers where only the top floors are above water, which is a really cool idea. [h1]Sound and music[/h1] 6/10 The real story here is two-fold: The voice acting and the music. The voice acting is bad, unfortunately. The sound quality itself is fine, but the lines are delivered in a way that feels a bit too light-hearted for a game where you're fighting against marauding raiders and killer androids in rickety underwater buildings. However, the music is what saves this sections rating from disaster. There's not a huge variety of tracks, but the ones there are well-composed, good quality, fit the aesthetic of the rest of the game quite well, and are occasionally downright catchy. [h1]Graphics[/h1] 9/10 I usually don't like pixel art too much, finding it often too simple and low-resolution for me to figure out what it's trying to represent. However, I love the graphics in this game, mostly for how detail-oriented it is. The shadows of fish swimming that can be seen through windows, the rust stains on the seams of walls, the dynamic blood stains (from humans) and oil stains (from mechanical enemies). These details really sell the atmosphere of the game. Also, bonus points for the fact that all armor and weapons, (and even some small items, like helmets) actually appear on your characters. I love when indie games go the extra mile do that, because it's a lot of work. [h1]Developer[/h1] In any in-development game, the attitude of the developer is incredibly important. I have seen the reviews talking about sketchy behavior from the dev. I don't know whether these rumors are true, and frankly, I don't much care: All I see from the dev on the forums is a person who is communicative, friendly, patient, and incredibly receptive to constructive feedback; I myself posted a list of suggestions, and the dev responded to each individual one with an explanation of how that particular issue could be addressed or is already being addressed). [h1]Conclusion[/h1] Depth of Extinction is easily one of my favorite squad-based tactics games. It has a cool and well-conveyed setting, an indie charm, and most importantly, the gameplay constantly offers fresh challenges. I've put 50 hours in it so far, but could see myself putting in hundreds more once the game has more content and the dev finishes ironing out the few balancing/pacing issues that remain (the next few builds will be focused on this, ostensibly). If you are a fan of the genre, I highly recommend this game, though you might want to play on the new "Casual" difficulty to start, as Depth of Extinction can be quite difficult, and you can always turn it back to classic mid-playthrough if you want more challenge.