Score: 6
"Good, not Great"
date: May 11, 2009
I really liked Epsilon Strain at first, but as I played more it quickly became repetitive and that led to fustration and boredom. I can think of several ways to easily improve the game to make it more enjoyable and addictive for the player, here are a few:
1) Faster Player and/or enemies. Nothing keeps me on my toes like a charging zombie horde.
2) Different zombie types. All the zombie types had different was a colour change, which is like no difference at all to me. There are maybe 4 types of zombies in the game (weak/fast zombie, slow/heavy zombie, 1-shot zombie, 3+ shot zombie) so lets have a different model for each.
3) Varied level designs. There was a bit of variation (different size / wall colour) but not much. when you get down to it every room was a box or varying proportions. After a while it starts to get repetitive.
4) Different weapons = different projectiles. All the guns fire the same bullets. The damage and number of projectiles may vary by weapon type, but (again, aside from colour) they're all the same projectiles.
I think from here you can guess that variety is the key thing to be improved upon...
Anyway, the strong points:
1) Zombies
2) Space
3) Zombies in Space
4) Good, dark atmosphere
5) Inventive weapon/mod system
6) Good map-based level selection (but not used to fullest potential. Purhaps tactical information could be given besides 1-6 difficulty gradient. Maybe some levels are more likely to have shooting zombies. That's the kind of stuff you could tell us.
Hope you didn't fall asleep, but I though that the author would appreciate somebody being thorough about what they thought. Hope it helps...
