Sadly_ I cannot recommend_ Breathedge (Review) -

 this video is brought to you by skillshare this video contains minor spoilers for breathage i am not going to spoil any specific story beats but i'm going to spoil some structural stuff about how the game kind of plays out some people are going to consider that too spoilery for their taste if you are sensitive to spoilers do not watch this video that is the warning this is a tough review to write because i desperately want to recommend this game to you but unfortunately i just can't i really want to recommend it because the setup for this is so so my jam i mean if you've heard anything about it you've heard that it's subnautica in space only it's running on a modern day graphics engine so it doesn't run like us while looking like a ps3 game who could say no to subnautica in space that looks this good i'd also seen really positive buzz on steam this was an early access title in development for a number of years and at the time of writing this game was sitting at an 88 positive rating on steam so clearly this title was delivering it was resonating with fans and it had laid solid foundations and i was in for a really good time i really did walk into this review process with a lot of excitement unfortunately that excitement was slowly worn down with each passing hour of tedious survival based grinding where the huge expanses of space became the ultimate foe as you move back and forth between your base and your destinations fighting against counter-intuitive ui a minuscule inventory tools that have less durability than breath of the wild weapons and an overall structure tha feels like it's there to pad out playtime worst though is the pivot that the game makes at the midpoint perhaps two-thirds the way through completely abandoning the build and survive based gameplay that was the initial promise of the title turning instead to an almost walking simulator style of gameplay where you just run back and forth down long corridors while your annoying suit ai belches out exposition to hurdle the story to an awkward conclusion so there's a lot of problems here and i'm going to talk about them but at the same time i want to point out that this is red ruins softworks first game and as a first game this is a huge achievement i know that sounds really contradictory because i just spent my opening paragraph [ __ ] on the game but you have to understand that the foundations for a brilliant game are all here it's just that red ruins didn't stick the landing still getting those foundations in place as well as they did is not easy and this title has a level of polish that i would not have expected from a newly formed indie studio as much as i don't recommend this specific game i will absolutely be checking out their next game because i really believe that these developers have demonstrated that they are super talented and i think these guys have a big future anyway that's enough preamble let's take a good look at breathage breathage this is how you pronounce the name by the way and i have no idea why you would call your game that but anyway breathage is ostensibly a survival game you're transporting your granddaddy's coffin aboard a luxury space cruiser when all of a sudden disaster strikes in an hour familiar trope you awaken within a life pod with no weapons no tools no food nothing at all and you somehow need to find a way to survive by scrounging for supplies building the necessary tools and hopefully finding a way to get your ass back home let's talk about the subnautica comparisons because that's obviously a huge thing that's made it into the narrative surrounding this game there are certainly some comparisons to be drawn to subnautica here it's a survival game you do wake up in a drop pod after your space shuttle has crashed the big thing is the oxygen whereas in subnautica your ability to explore is limited by your oxygen levels and a big part of the game's structure is breaking through those oxygen barriers through suit upgrades and later through vehicles there's also base building and the modules look similar to subnautica modules so yeah there's a lot of similarities on the surface but the similarities only hold at the surface and when you start getting deeper into each game system than into the overall structure you'll soon realize that these are vastly different games and the comparisons probably do more harm than good tonally this game is very much marching to the beat of its own drum most survival games either don't have a story or are pretty serious in tone breathage is quite story driven and it's meant to be a comedy you can see it in the notes and items you'll find lying around in the slapstick contortions of the dead bodies floating among the wreckages in the level design where at one point need to swim through a giant ball of mayonnaise more than anything though you'll hear it in the writingwhich simply put does not shut the [ __ ] up ever your suit ai is the most important narrative tool in this game because he explains the backstory he interprets current events and he communicates your objectives the problem is that every line of dialogue he says has to be a joke every single line i mean this game is around 15 to 20 hours long and your ai companion is almost never silent and almost everything he says has to be a gag imagine if i said to you hey you're a writer write me 20 hours of non-stop one-liner jokes it would probably turn out something like this toilet detected some of our clients are very sensitive about toilet talk and therefore we included a dictionary which will replace the word feces with word joy if you want to open morecoffins there's a chance that i'll be able to detect new potentially useful debris while my anti-vandal program scares you with criminal liability unfortunately this isn't what we're looking for although i would think of getting a hand transplant if i were you these are better than yours and it looks like nobody needs them anymore these ai jokes are so relentless that i truly wished i could just turn him off somehow i know some people will find this funny and certainly reading through some steam reviews plenty of people did but i did not i think it was super annoying and sometimes it really got in the way of my progress because this guy will often explain critical mission information but because he's just so often blurring out nonsense i kind of just mentally tuned him out only to later realize that he had mentioned something that probably would have saved me time had i heard it when he said it it's not great more than just not being funny or slowing me down what this tone in the writing does is it sucks a lot of the ambience and immersion out of this experience i mean you're seeing this gameplay right this is a really beautiful game set in this stunning debris-filled asteroid field wow that was hard to say and you're out there completely alone and you're just fighting to survive this game could have been one that leaned into the sense of scale and wonder and mystery that space invokes but it never gets the chance to do that because the developers are always looking for the next chance to serve up another fart joke this tonal conflict is perhaps best demonstrated by the game's soundtrack now there isn't much music in the game except when you're in your pod and you have the radio on there's probably like six tracks that play in a loop here's a brief listen to a few of them[Music] if you're thinking man what are these songs well yeah me too it just feels like they got some music and threw it in because reasons so you're out there exploring the silent reaches of outer space and you step back into your pod to find russian folk music followed by eurotrans followed by jazz blues and then it suddenly cuts off and it breaks into a dramatic chase scene music tonally this game feels at best conflicted and at worst really annoying and irritating but your mileage may vary on that point and it's a shame because the world they've built really does deservebetter

[Music]

the high point of breathage is its stunning world from the moment you step out of your pod you're immediately overruled by the scale and beauty of the debris field in front of you smash spacecraft float amid rock formations electric wiring festoons itself through wreckages cooling fluid coagulates and drifts across the expanse like waves frozen in time the lighting on display is particularly excellent where every sun-kissed tangle of steel seems to sparkle and every shadowy depth feels all the more ominous for the absence of light breathage has a level of visual pop that i would not expect from a newly formed indie studio honestly this feels like a solid double a game in terms of production values and redrew and softworks are punching well well above their weight when it comes to how good this game looks and runs by the way since it ran absolutely flawlessly on my pc with not a single frame lost and no crashes structurally the game is divided into six acts the first three of those are spent in this debris field and it's in these opening seven to ten hours that the game is at its absolute strongest the opening hours in particular really nailed the desperate fight for survival as your oxygen supplies are so limited that each excursion feels dangerous and each push to the father reaches feels so anxiety inducing you are constantly making these quick decisions about where to go what to bring what to take back because any delay in those decisions would cost you dearly you really feel like you're pushing against all of the game's systems at once and the game is pushing back on you in just the right way after about hour three you'll enter the second act which is where things open up quite a bit you'll arrive at the edge of a larger debris field and as you explore it you'll eventually be given six tasks around that area to complete and they can be tackled in any order but you do have some material and gear requirements that you'll bump into which will kind of force you to knock over certain tasks before accomplishing others there's a real sense of exploration in this part of the game the debris field is just full of things to discover from backstory items to collect to new recipes to scan and learn to just awesome sites to take in you really can strike out in any direction and bump into something cool and in so doing you'll eventually get an understanding of what you need to do and you can then begin working towards those objectives at this point i was loving the game and i was like hell yes can't wait to recommend this to everyone that would quickly change now the thing you need to understand about this debris field is that it's really [ __ ] big and the game is built in such a way that you have to go somewhere and when you get there you realize you need a specific tool but you don't have that tool so you need to go all the way back to your base and build it so a lot of your play time here and i mean a lot is spent just fearing yourself back and forth between your base and these objectives to get stuff done what really starts to great though is how much the game has clearly been designed to get you to make unnecessary trips back and forth so inventory size is a good example where it's actually really tiny already and it can't ever be expanded but more importantly you have to carry all of these tools with you wherever you go because at any point in time you could bump into some doorway that needs to be repaired or it needs to be bashed down or it needs to be shot open or it needs to be scanned or whatever so you always have to be prepared for everything by carrying all of these tools which essentially take up half your inventory that makes collecting resources half as efficient and just wastes twice as much of your time more specifically these tools have ridiculous durability i mean some of them are only good to extract materials from like three nodes before they break so so often i found myself progressing through some new area that i found only for my weird scanner thing to break halfway through and i need it to keep progressing so i have to go all the way back to my base make another scanner and then go all the way back to the thing because the durability on the scanner was so low this happens all the time and it's impossible to avoid this stuff because there's no way you can ever know what tools you'll need or even how much durability each of those tools should have there's also just so many frustratingand counter-intuitive design choices here that should have been ironed out during the early access phase but won't the way that craftable items are categorized is so confusing and you will never not find yourself just clicking through everything to find stuff because you can't rely on the categories i lost like nearly an hour because i didn't pick up an item to learn a pattern even though you never had to pick up items to learn patterns before but for this one specific item you had to so i just floated around for ages

until i eventually gave up and i looked it up online there's one tool that requires batteries to make to be able to make batteries you need resources that can only be obtained using this tool that needs batteries to make on two occasions i found myself in a position where i was just flying around space for like 45 minutes looking for one [ __ ] battery because i couldn't make any batteries because the tool i needed to make batteries needed batteries it was just like i got very angry so this act 2 starts really strong because it's all about exploration and discovery but the minute you need to start working towards more specific objectives it just becomes tedious because the game has been specifically designed to waste your time as often as possible this is also a good time to talk about the building now yes you can build little space stations out there pretty cool huh i mean we all remember the cool [ __ ] we could make in subnautica so this is gonna be great right no definitely not so building in this game is essentially pointless for a variety of reasons the biggest reason is that the buildings don't really provide you any useful functionality they're essentially just aesthetic so you can build a kitchen when all it does is make the same food you can make from your little fabricator desk thing there's this whole power management system where you have to keep your base powered but i built all this stuff and my base never ran out of power so that seemed to not do anything there's reinforcements for your structures like outer walls but it's not like they're getting hit by asteroids or attacked by aliens or whatever so i don't know why these are needed it all just seemed like a big waste of time in subnautica for example the stuff you built actually made you more efficient you could build a sonar station to track specific resources you needed you could build battery recharge stations you could make fish tanks so you could grow and harvest fish or pot plants for edible vegetation a base in subnautica made it easier to survive a base in breedage is just a place to hang out and store your [ __ ] and that's pretty much about it the biggest reason that base building is a waste of time though is that there's no base building whatsoever in the final like third of the game the tech tree stuff that you've been moving through the base you've built all of that stuff that the game has been building on and building towards it just is completely abandoned and the final three acts make this head-scratching pivot to what is essentially a walking simulator with some light crafting thrown in it's not great we'll talk about that now

[Music]

[Applause]

so as i said breathage was in early access for a few years acts one to three were playable up to this point and they've all gotten great feedback as i mentioned the rating on steam was 88 but prior to 1.0 it was actually at around 91 and i'm really really interested to see where that review score goes now that people can finally get their hands on these final three acts because these last acts are a big big departure from the first half of the game and not in a good way in these last three acts you gain control of a spaceship and you visit a new debris field at first i was like okay cool new beginnings i like it let's do it what i would soon learn is that you can't exit your spaceship here you can only dock in one of four locations that means that there is no base building whatsoever for this final third of the game if you put dozens of hours into building a cool base for some reason bad luck that's gone and there's no way to recreate it here the entire game system building stuff whatever all of that is completely abandoned at this point so these four docking stations what's the deal they are essentially just corridors that you walk back and forth along crafting some random new tools as the game tells you you need to i'm really not exaggerating when i say that you dock you get out there's some exposition stuff you eventually get to a door or a thing and you're missing a tool or a thing and then you get given a pattern and then you walk back to your ship and then you craft the tool or the thing and then you go back to the other place and you use it that's it right there's no resource management here at all because the game is flooding you with resources so i just dump them on the floor of my ship and that's how i spent that act just do these four docking stations walk back and forth along the corridors that's it acts 5 and 6 are really much more narrative driven as they shuttle you through even smaller spaces and you need to accomplish a few objectives by clicking on some things and there's two really awkward boss battles and that's itso there's really two questions to be asked here number one is this content good and two does this new style of play represent a sort of broken promise given how different this is from the first half of the game so number one is this good no a walking simulator lives and dies by its story and the story here is really confusing and messy and again it's entirely narrated by your ai companion who brings the same one-line approach to exposition as before if this game wanted to pivot to be story led in its final stretch i think it needed a better story or a better way to tell that story as for question two does this pivot break a promise that's implied in the first half of the game i think it does yeah i really believed as i was doing all the building stuff in act 3 that okay these building systems are really bare bones clearly we're gonna get a bunch of new stuff in the next act it'll all scale up and be worth my time in the end i never not once imagined that the game would just abandon all of this stuff altogether similarly exploration was where this game was absolutely at its strongest and again there's just no exploration in these final acts it's so linear and so unremarkable i really really don't understand why they did this but the end result was that i did feel a bit hoodwinked and that the game kind of strung me along in those opening acts only to really leave me hanging by the end of it so kind of a scathing review so i just want to kind of level it out a little bit at the end if you got this game on sale and if you played it to the end of act three only you'll have experienced an enjoyable seven hours and maybe a kind of frustrating three hours depending on your patience for the worst aspects of the survival genre so 10 hours of beautiful scenery rewarding exploration some familiar survival mechanics and some fun but ultimately pointless base building all of this stuff holds up just fine and i wouldn't necessarily steer anyone away from any of that this is especially the case when as i mentioned this is red ruins softworks first game the foundations that i've outlined here they're really good right there's just there's something in this package trust me there is an x factor that shines through and it leaves me feeling really glad that i played those sections of the game but taken as a whole i really just can't recommend this i think the tone is so annoying and it really shatters any potential immersion i think the survival aspects are tuned artificially prolong the play time i think the base building stuff is just there because it feels like it should be not because it needs to be and i think the final stretch of the game is such a radical departure from the first three acts that it kind of spoiled the experience here's the best parallel i can give you go and try re-watching game of thrones today it's hard to watch because even thoug you have like seven good seasons o television you know season eight is coming and it takes the wind out of the sails breather just first three acts feel like season one to seven but as i look back on my experience i can't but recall how let down i was by season eight for that reason i think it best to wait for the next game that red ruin software will work on because despite the shortcomings of this title i really do expect big things from them in the future

[Music]

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