I like it. (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Friday, October 31, 2025, 14:22 (8 hours, 50 minutes ago) @ Kermit

I played a bunch last night, and so far it's a lot of fun. Matches have ranged from not encountering a single player, to grouping up with some folks I just encountered out in the wild, to tense firefights with both enemy players and ARC. In solos, a lot of people tend to be friendly. If they don't want to team up and stick together, they at least seem to be okay with just sort of passing each other by without starting anything. That's not always the case, but that's also great. The tension of running into another player and not knowing if it's going to be a firefight or not is just cool.

The progression seems cool so far. There is a skill tree to work through, along with building and upgrading crafting stations. You can pin recipes for stuff you need to craft, and it works well to give every match a purpose. Sometimes you can focus on one of the vendor quests (which range from finding specific materials to killing ARC to doing little things out in the world), and sometimes I just need a specific thing to craft a new weapon or upgrade a workbench, so I'm trying to find that thing and get out.

The sound design is the real standout feature for me. Distant gunfire and explosions, bullets whizzing by, the shield pop noise, etc. all sound incredible. The directionality is better than just about any game I've ever played--I feel like I can always pinpoint exactly where something came from. Even the proximity chat has filters applied so that it sounds convincing for the environment the players are in, like echoing in big open underground bunkers and such.

I also love that the enemies non-humanoid robots. I haven't played many extraction shooters, but most of them I've seen seem to just have NPC combatants be other humans, so having something distinct is a huge plus. And they are so well designed. There's a bunch of variation, but they all have weak spots you can focus on to bring down even big ARC if you're smart.

I have three maps unlocked, and I like the way they handle that, too. Each has a difficulty rating, which seems to mostly affect the ARC enemies. The higher the difficulty, the more ARC there are on the map, and the more deadly ones will be more common, so they do feel like distinct experiences. Each map seems to also have at least one unique variant that will pop up on a timer such as night time or extreme weather.