Which bundle was this in: Retrovirus

So imagine my surprise when I download a game that starts with "Retro" in the title and expect an entirely different game, one I'm not altogether excited for at all, and instead end up with something I didn't even realize existed and is actually from the guys who made Sol Survivor - which I really liked - that is more or less a Descent style game. Descent, in case no one has ever heard of it, was a moderately successful fully three dimensional fps in which you played a little space ship and I don't remember much else about it. It was a long time ago, and anyway, it was a sweet game that had a bunch of sequels ... And let's not get too far into describing ancient games.

I really liked Sol Survivor and never realized the guys (or gals, who knows) who worked on it were doing anything at all, let alone anything that might appeal to my nostalgia bone. So when I fired it up and the neat little opening video began running I was sort of staring at the screen in complete confusion. When did I buy this? I thought I bought something else, something I wasn't too excited to play.

Retrovirus feels like a fusion of Descent and the best I can come up with is ReBoot by way of Tron. The world design is top notch and interesting, although the game isn't quite as pretty as the model and texture work would allow. The game's story focuses on a "worm" which is infecting the system, and running through the system trying to piece together how to fight it while butting heads with various other major agencies within the system. Your character "agent" has no voice, but the game's story is mostly explained through dialogue delivered by 'Oracle' and her contemporaries, who are a mixed and oft times silly lot.

Out of the box Retrovirus doesn't look great, but as you get deeper into the game the level design is really fascinating stuff. The system is represented by a variety of environments that emulate real world concepts but with a cyber flair. You fight through train systems, cities, refineries and assembly lines that are all slick, strange and interesting to just sit, watching. There's good feeling in this game of battling in an environment and not "a level", though at times this had make the game a bit more tedious than it should have. I think the main issue is one of color - Nothing in the game should be red other than enemies, since you scan enemies to figure out where they are, but there's some unnecessary reds and other stuff.

I do wish the engine used more of its lighting tricks. There's too much light in this game and it washes all the little details out where shadows would have allowed them to be visually articulate. I noticed later on that the engine can do shadows, but basically decided it didn't want to til the final act of the game, and it's a bit saddening. The game is built like tron, but more detailed and vibrant, but it's too bright and colorful when it should be using neon lights, patches of darkness and lots of shadows to really highlight the harsh lines of the world.

But seriously the first half of the game - before it turns into a slog for reasons I'll go into in detail - really make for a fantastic chillout game with some really awesome looking environments that were delightful to just float around in. The voice acting, primarily the voice of Oracle, is really nice and suits the music well. The music, throughout the whole game, was pretty damn good. I'd say the first five or six hours of the game were really enjoyable, and then things took a turn.

A turn for tedium.

Enemy design in Retrovirus really needs work and is a low point in the game. As I've said, I'm unwilling to play a shooter like this on a keyboard mouse and frankly consider it ridiculous to design enemies the way they did. Most of them are fine or fun to interact with, but there's three big issues. The main one early on is that civilians - That is, the benign residents of the system - do not "flee" from viral enemies, rather they just sort of idiotically beep boop around. So after you cleanse them they sit there and enter an irritating cycle of being corrupted again, being cleansed again, waste my life. They're cute and have personality, but it's really annoying. They make sad noises when it happens, too.

This wouldn't be too much of an issue except for other enemy design - there's one enemy that is immune to being fired upon from most angles and has a weird "vortex pull" that tugs your craft towards it. So you're trying to line up some delicate shots to cleanse an idiot civilian that refuses to leave the combat arena while some other idiot you can't fire upon unless you go into the room since he's immune to 270 degrees of incoming damage pulls you into walls or otherwise nudges you around. This doesn't really create tension, it's just frustrating. You can't destroy civilians, as best I can tell, which is also sort of a bit of tension they just blew. There could have been a penalty for destroying civilian code, or there could be some benefit to them being alive or just ... Anything. Nope, instead they sit there, get recorrupted while you try to fight off some stupid gravity rock.

There's also a real love for the "spawning pod" enemies in this game, which are cool and feel good to shoot, except they hide them out of the way. Your "scan" ability - which is awesome, and maybe from something else, but still really awesome - allows you to see through walls, highlighting enemy targets hiding behind cover. But the scan ability is kinda flakey when it comes to pointing you towards enemies that are hidden out of the way, meaning you abruptly realize you're basically making no progress towards clearing a room out as they spawn, recorrupt and bonk you around.

The other one - Really guys, seriously - a turret section? In a 360 degree game? That I'm supposed to desperately stealth past? With enemies in the mix who are immune to the turrets most of the time? See, the issue here isn't one really of challenge - It's the fact where do I go is a constant issue with this game. "Where do I go" becomes incredibly frustrating and unfun when you're juggling the need to hide and fight in a three dimensional space. Stealth lasts far, far too short to be even vaguely useful. I actually did the stealth sections primarily by boosting by as quickly as possible. The game does have Dead Space's bread crumb button to tell you where to go, but it works in this absolutely bizarre way - It sort of wiggles around your screen, doing what it wants, doing loops and it doesn't point you so you have to swerve around to try to figure out where the line is going.

Boss fights in this game were a little weird. The first one is a large version of a common enemy, but a big scary one, so I dug that. The second one - a stealthy fiend inside the main core - was interesting but felt like I wasn't getting it. I beat it, but I didn't think I would have been able to do so on a higher difficulty. Maybe I needed to roll?  The third one was more or less an add flood section I cheesed by using spam/scan drain and the fourth one was impossible to hit so it took ages. I gave up on the game on the fifth one, which is bar none one of the trippiest, most awesome looking boss fights in any game ever. Why did I give up? The fight takes a long time and there's no clear evidence what you're doing is right or wrong, and then I got one shot by the boss. Entire health bar gone in an instant.

Seriously, if you want to do long fights, that's cool. Hard Reset had long trippy boss fights too, but you could tell you were doing them right or wrong because either you instantly died or the boss started falling apart. Here the boss took about fifty full clips of ammo and then one shot me. Not exactly satisfying gameplay.

Gunplay in the game is probably the second lowest point but only really on one crutch. You are allocated infinite ammo, but ammo depletes from your weapons and must regenerate without firing or "boosting". You can spend an upgrade to get around the boost problem, but your issues with ammo persist for the entire game, growing worse with each step forward. This is not well suited to the gameplay at all, as lining up a shot on a moving target in such a wide area is very difficult with the controller while three dimensional flight is kinda frustrating with the mouse. The game on the other hand doesn't seem like it was designed around this mechanic at all. Enemies usually take, even on Easy (well I think I played it on easy?) an entire clip of ammo at point blank to kill. There are 10+ enemies in each room. So add up several hard to track enemies, some of whom are immune to damage in their face, with a clip that takes several seconds to regenerate to full before you can fire again. If the sum is "a lot of time spent doing nothing, staring at the screen" you guessed right.

This just isn't well thought out. It's a real pity that just jams its face into yours upon every harried fight. You will deplete your ammo stock and you will stare at the screen haplessly as it far too slowly regenerates. I don't even understand why the mechanic is in the game at all. Is it for multiplayer? Because if it's for multiplayer there's far better way to not screw up your single player experience than this. The game does allow you to consume canisters of ammo to replenish your stock, but I'm really not certain why I should be slamming through these on every fight with 2-3 enemies on screen.

Enemies are, as well, just way too small on screen and your shots too precise as well - Other than gravity asteroid idiots, who are quite large but are entirely immune from the front, even if you use a piercing weapon or explosives, which doesn't make any sense (I sort of thought the piercing laser upgrade would work on them in specific but alas) - and some of them are outright tiny. One enemy splits into several pieces, each piece smaller and smaller. The tiniest pieces will actually flank you, and while I'm not sure they damage you even at all, they're really annoying and make an actual grating noise into your ears. The hell? Again, you drain your clip in a few seconds. And while you're fighting those, other civilians are bumbling into viruses and being corrupted. Oh your clip is empty again. Oh. Boy.

Simply put the combat is generally fine (and sometimes really cool) but has moments of powerful, needless tedium. I don't really understand why the game was set out the way it was - if the corrupted civilians thing needed to be in the game so bad, why not set it up so there's some real tension as they flee? If you're going to limit my shots to barely being able to kill one enemy per clip, why not make enemies more elusive and more cunning, but softer targets? Enemies take way, way too much damage. You have to line up multiple shots with the sniper rifle to kill them, even with the damage upgrade. And this is on easy!

I don't even mean I'm missing them. I mean you can empty a clip and fail to kill two enemies meleeing you in the face!

Frankly, let's step back for a second - Is it actually "fun" to constantly have to wait on ammo recharging, given it's already a difficult game to hit things with? Not really. I really don't know what the appeal on forcing you to juggle weapon heat is, or why they're so attached to the mechanic, but it's awful. You can't even do the mass effect 1 thing where you can flip weapons around to get around heat - Here, it's universal to all weapons and you just spend tons of time doing nothing. In Mass Effect at least I got into the rhythm of switching to and from my shotgun as range and heat issues changed in combat. That was interesting, if sort of annoying.

The game has six weapons, but I find myself using one of them - the Thrash - basically all of the time. The thrash does added damage over time, so you can ease off on firing on an enemy near death and begin regenerating cycles, which is such a huge point that you really find other weapons way more frustrating. There's also a piercing laser upgrade to the first weapon, but it depletes its clip often before killing a single enemy at all, so as much as I want to use it, it's basically too tedious to bother. It works really well when you can stack enemies up and rip through them with vampiric restoration on your shots, but that doesn't happen often.

There's also a homing missile - which can't hit the various small fast enemies - and a sniper rifle that does almost no damage at all. I'm pretty sure I'm using it wrong, but it feels like it barely justifies the hassle when there's no way I'm picking off a tiny target with the sniper rifle anyway. I think it might stack a damage debuff, but weapon swapping is barely functional on the controller and the keybinding system is extremely finicky. All in all, while the weapons have variety, they don't feel balanced for the hassle of using them, so I just ended up using mostly Thrash. There were points where each weapon other than the sniper rifle was helpful to have, which is good design, and also the game (again, on easy anyway) allows you to unlock and respend any upgrade points you have down.

The upgrade system is something of an odd mixed bag. I really enjoyed being able to respend points whenever I wanted to, since it allowed me to stretch points in the early game and use the weapons, as they needed to be upgraded, when I needed to use them. There's a bug where loading levels sometimes turned off upgrades until respent, though, so you probably need to do that anyway. Many of the upgrades are way too weak though and don't offer any compelling gameplay change ups, which is frustrating. Many of the upgrades feel like sidegrades or they break other functionality. The seek weapon for example seems to rely on your scan to detect the target, but when upgraded to clusters it just ... I have no idea what it did. It just seems to go where it wants with no input from me. I probably should have used the do more damage / fire slower upgrade of the laser, now that I think about it, but the laser is pretty piddly... Several weapons work with scan to do "things" but often get turned off or don't seem to work right.

All in all, would I recommend Retrovirus? Sort of. As I've yammered about endlessly, the game becomes increasingly, stupidly, unbelievably tedious as it goes on to the point that I did the last level by ramming through without even hitting enemies. If there's a cardinal sin in shooters, it's that you should never ever have an enemy the player feels they simply shouldn't fight, not is hard to fight but actually just such a waste of time you just want to leave - this game has two, and neither the asteroid idiots or the splitting spawn enemies have any reason to be in the game. Maybe conceptually, but an enemy that spits into pieces that flank you, are already hard to hit and make annoying noises at you? No, not at all. The asteroid idiots look cool, but mechanically they worsen the game on every level. I think there's four enemies jammed into two here that could have been interesting but instead just frustrate me. A splitting enemy would be neat if there's someway to avoid the splitting (creates tension) or even if it just split into more dangerous enemies.

Also, for a game that relies heavily on filling your screen with stuff, the heat mechanic on your weapon is baffling, poorly designed and fundamentally unenjoyable. You spend too often simply "out of shots" weaving around as you wait for it to recharge, which just can't be how a shooter is supposed to be played. Reloading creates tension, but it's rare for a weapon in any shooter to need anywhere near the number of hits on normal enemies to kill - In Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, for example, reloading comes up if you engage a group of 3-5 enemies and get into a bad spot. It's not something that a well done fight ever brings up, other than that satisfying feel of reloading after you use one clip to kill ten guys. I really wish the game either rewarded weapon hot swapping midcombat - I'd certainly use the shotgun type weapon more often - or just had some tweaks.

Regardless, I really enjoyed the first couple hours, and the environments throughout the entire game were enjoyable to look at and really neat. The sundial level is gorgeous and the refinery was memorably pretty. When you're fighting 2-3 enemies and you can, with skill, kill all of them without having to wait for a full clip regeneration cycle, the game feels rewarding. When there simply are too many, too tiny to hit enemies on screen, the game is tedious. I think there were lots of solutions available - Making the canister system self-replenishing instead of unreliable, making the upgrade trees actually mitigate this problem over the course of the game, maybe making enemies not hard to hit bullet sponges that flood the screen at the end?

The game also apparently allows you to do the campaign coop. If there's no significant boosting of enemy health in this mode then I'd absolutely recommend playing it in coop, it would have been great if I'd known and played it with another player. There's so few games with good solid coop campaigns and Retrovirus would have made for a fantastic coop experience.

There's also a couple different mini-games in the campaign - There's a race, which was really cool and I wish there was more of - And there's some physics action early on where you can move things around, but those were dropped later on and I'm not sure why. One level has fans that push you back, and I looked around for debris to jam into an intake or something? Nope, nothing, you just duck into alcoves... The race thing is especially weird since they could have easily made a couple races, say in the refinery and the mail sorting level, that could have used the terrain in an interesting way.

Lastly I don't think the game is, on any level, properly tuned for being played on a controller and should be avoided for that. There's no snap to, the acceleration is wonky, the original keybinds are stone atrocious and rebinding them took me a really long time. I'm not even sure what I was doing wrong, it feels like it wants you to hold the key in some weird way. I'd really suggest playing it on a mouse, which I hope is better, or just not buying it at all unless you're really good with controller you're using.

Still, like I said, the game's environments are wonderful and most of the enemies do look really cool in action. It's really not on any level poorly done - Everything feels good and solid, I didn't have any crashes and while it does lag a little in two points they were pretty obvious as to why. It's just that the mechanics don't appear to have been well thought out as they relate to the game world. Make the enemies a little bigger, split the gravity rocks into two guys and make it so the canister button just takes a second to reload a larger clip that doesn't regenerate - I'd probably have had a blast all the way through.

I really hope if they make another game they just reuse these art assets. Retrovirus' game world, and heck, engine in general are really great. I'd love to play a cyberpunk on the ground shooter in this world, or even just another Tower defense game looking down on it.