Conscript

“The story is extremely disappointing and generic. Do yourself a favor: don’t buy this game. Go watch Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge and you’ll experience some of the greatest atmospheric world war films ever made, and also be done within an hour and a half. They’ll be way more memorable than whatever this was trying to be.”

“Survival horror has never really been the best genre to shine in the writing department, but every plot point is take over this military base, go to that base, go back to this base, clear out this base, until credits, with no memorable characters outside of that one leech that kept bumming for cigarettes.”

“The game is ok when they actually try to tell a story and there are story elements, but when they drop you in these open world maps, the game basically is just chores and fetch quests with very little narrative engagement.”

“The atmosphere tries to feel tense but fails miserably since enemy aggro instantly resets if you leave the level.”

“Also I could get into the atmosphere in the last chapters, but the game just turned into a walking simulator with guns and nothing more.”

“I'm gonna try to keep playing but all it's got going for it is the graphics and atmosphere because the gameplay is just awful so far.”

“Some puzzles are impacted by low graphics although brute force thankfully works.”

“Conscript has some pacing and level design issues, including too much backtracking and visuals that poorly show what is walkable, mainly outside the trenches, but it also features several extremely well-crafted sections.”

“The pixelated visuals, while stylistically fitting, can occasionally make environmental hazards difficult to discern, leading to unintended deaths or confusion about navigation.”

“And when these sections end, the music and ambience just turn off, leaving you in silence until the next scripted music or ambience trigger.”

“While Conscript seems mostly polished I did run into bugs, especially with the audio: sometimes the music cuts out at certain areas (especially save rooms), and there was a point where the player starts breathing heavily like he was using the gas mask, before I’d even gotten one!”

“Had a glitch where chapter 1 battle music carried into the cottage scene and chapter 2 until restarted the game, but no other glitches.”

“There was a lot of backtracking in chapter 2 but it was fine because of all the shortcuts and small area to cover, but by chapter 4 the map is huge, the number of item boxes to drop off or save are few and far or sometimes even blocked off or destroyed, and it became super tedious by that point.”

“Making things even worse - the save points are relatively close together and far away from every single important item... so add save-quests to fetch-quests and you start to see that I'm not exaggerating when I say: 10 minutes of action for every three hours of questing back and forth through the same tedious map... I once appreciated the pixel art but now seeing it makes me want to puke.”

“Extremely tedious backtracking, without a guide your first run or two is going to be majority backtracking and searching around, though chapter 3 and its terrible map design is mostly at fault there, also I get enemy AI can be hard, but I'd appreciate more rifleman with bayonet style enemies, and less ubersoldaten that can tank several full magazines of rifle ammunition at point blank range, while killing you in 5ish hits, also one of the fastest enemies in the game despite wearing the 'lobster' armor that was known to be rather heavy.”

“Indeed, there is much about the gameplay to dislike: linear, frustrating hit boxes, monotonous backtracking and map looping, lack of weapon and enemy variety, low replayability, and so on.”

“- Item descriptions don't give enough details and force trial and error (which is fine for replay value but it makes it very difficult to analyze if the design decision was intentional or not).”

“Creating longevity and replayability in the game with additional difficulty modes with extra challenge, with ranking at the end of the playthrough, where each subsequent playthrough would have less and less appreciation for the tender moments the game has to offer and is instead a problem to solve as fast and efficiently as possible.”

“I should also mention that I experienced a couple of technical glitches here and there - particularly one where the screen would violently flicker until I minimized and re-opened its window, in addition to instances of Andre’s character model vanishing after checking the item box until I aimed one of his weapons, but other than that the game mostly ran fine.”

“The AI from the soldiers is a bit buggy; I often encounter them stopping running towards me and staying like that for minutes on end unless I change my location.”

“They're faster than you, functionally invincible because the game is buggy with collision detection, and every time they hit you, you have to use a full medkit because of poison.”

“The game seems to be locked to 60fps, which is unfortunate.”

“Lengthy initial load time and occasional but severe stuttering when entering a new area.”

“Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle.”

“For the amount of advertisement this gets, you'd think the 19.99 price tag was justified.”