Shadowgrounds (game): I wanted to like it but i just dont

This is another one of those games that was gifted to me by a friend on Steam. I don't know how he does this but he assures me that it is legal and he paid for it in a bundle. I honestly didn't play the game for very long (only 5 hours) so perhaps I am being quick to judgement but you know, games should catch your attention at the beginning and this one just didn't.

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It is a top down (perhaps the wrong term) shooter that takes place on a space colony and you guessed it, aliens are attacking the colony and it is up to you to save the day. As is typical, the enemies start out as easily dispatched and increase in difficulty. The entire colony is of course filled with bottles of explosive gasses that make clearing certain areas much simpler.

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The game's shoot-em-up simplicity appealed to me at first but here are some gripes i have with it.

  • i was playing the game on the easiest setting and it is entirely too difficult
  • there is a massive scarcity of ammo that results in you returning to your pistol with unlimited ammo on a regular basis
  • on occasion you will have someone running around with you that is also armed, they contribute almost not at all to battle situations.
  • this is the biggest problem in the game - in order to use an xbox controller (or any other controller) you have to download a "fix" otherwise the rotation spins wildly out of control and is unusable in its default setup. I would almost find this forgivable if the game was merely ported to PC from consoles but this game exists ONLY on PC. How can a productions company put a game to market, especially a simple shoot-em-up, and not include properly functioning controller support? This doesn't make business sense to me. I don't want to play a game like this with a keyboard and mouse. Urgh!
  • There is no traditional save-game system. You have a limited amount of respawns in an area after which point you have to start the entire zone over again or in my situation - stop playing the game forever.

I did enjoy the fact that the game is very reminiscent of Aliens, one of my favorite movies of all time, but to be honest the constant onslaught of alien dogs gets old pretty quick. Perhaps the gameplay is more exciting in multi-player mode, but mostly I found this game to be a bit of a dud.

If you can get this game for really cheap and have the patience to apply the fix for controller support (seriously, it is completely absurd that a game wouldn't have this by default.) Mostly, i would say give this one a miss

4 / 10

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