Fear Effect Sedna is a tactical strategy game, a new game from an existing series of PlayStation games. This game is currently in alpha state and everything below is only valid for the current build of the game and may or may not change in the future.
Steam: Alpha
Developer: Sushee
Publisher: SQUARE ENIX
Genre: Pausable Real-time Tactical Action
Release Date: 2017
Type: Multi-player
What is happening in the game:
You control four members of a team (Hana, Rain, Deke and Glas) to complete a mission they were given. You have to fight the enemies and explore the surroundings to progress and finish your task. You have to be careful, as the enemies you are facing are not weak and before you know it, the health bars get lower than you would want them to.
Pros:
Graphics | I love how the graphics contribute towards the atmosphere of the game (I will also talk about this later). Everything is a bit dark and it’s quite pleasant to look at. Since you sometimes need to make quick decisions, it also helps a lot that everything is clearly visible.
Cutscenes | The cutscenes really do a great job at presenting the story to the player. It’s hard to show anything meaningful in the top-down strategy world, so they decided to make all cutscenes in 3D. This was a really good choice as it kind of shifts the whole game into a different perspective as you see the characters in a different way than in usual gameplay.
World Interactive | There are several ways to interact with the surroundings: you can loot the dead bodies, gather different items lying around (health packs, for example) and also unlock doors and passages. It’s a good way to keep boredom away from the game as such games often fail to keep the player’s attention.
Voice Acting | During the cutscenes, one of the things I enjoyed the most was the voice acting. It’s not uncommon for developers to either get bad actors or even not to include acting into the game at all, but this Fear Effect Sedna has this aspect of the game sorted out well and it’s quite enjoyable to sit through the cutscenes and listen to what the main characters have to say.
Controls | I rarely say this, but the characters in this game are very enjoyable and easy to control. Everything is very intuitive and you don’t need to learn a lot of things apart from a few basic buttons.
Perfomance| This game was running very well on my computer. It doesn’t use a lot of system resources and it still looks good, which is a huge plus. If your machine is not very good, it should still be able to run Fear Effect Sedna.
Cons:
Save File Problems | When I first booted up the game I was able to press “Continue” for some reason. I never started the game before so I don’t know how that was possible. I was curious and I pressed it. The only thing I saw was a completely black screen and I had to terminate the process to be able to leave the game as nothing I pressed worked. The next time I launched the game, the Continue button was disabled. How weird.
Unbalanced Combat | It might be my fault, but to me it seemed like the enemies were too strong at times. I tried different strategies, some very aggressive and some very cautious, but my health bar was always going down a bit faster than I would like. Thankfully, I had a lot of health packs, but I hope that this is not how the developers tried to balance the game.
Monotony in Certain Levels | As written, some levels were a bit too boring. I did say that interaction with the environment made the game better, but some levels lacked that. Maybe it would be a good idea to include a few more puzzle elements to this game to make the player think a bit more.
Soundtrack | I feel like this game could use a good soundtrack. Although the current sounds are not too bad, I sometimes feel like it’s getting too repetitive and that I could use a change. I like that the current one is minimalistic, but it wouldn’t hurt to add something else every once in a while, maybe.
The final verdict:
Overall, the game is quite good in its current state. I especially like the cutscenes and the graphics, it’s really something that makes me want to keep playing. There are also some downsides to the game, but I hope most of them will be eliminated in future builds.
