REVIEW: HEPH

There are ups and downs to every game, and I caught this one in what appears to have been its final Beta stage, so take what I’m going to say here with a pinch of salt– Some of these things may have changed or likely will be changed in the near future.

Author: lordcrocosquirrel

STATUS: RELEASED

DEVELOPER: Creature of the Rise

PUBLISHER: Creature of the Rise

RELEASE DATE: 24TH OF January, 2017

GENRE: Third person Survival Horror

TYPE: Single-player

I received the key for this game directly from the developer via Steam Chat, and I have already informed them of the findings that will form the baseline for this review.

HEPH is a sci-fi based 3rd-person survivalcraft game with  some limited shooting. Most of what you’ll be shooting at will be stuff you need to obliterate so you can get the bits to make other things. Getting out of that first room will require you figure out how to do that, as the puzzle-maker decided not to give you enough parts to get completely clear of the room otherwise.

I’m not saying this is a problem, but maybe setting that room up separately as a general operations tutorial might not have been a bad plan. Most of what you’re going to do throughout the entire game will hinge on that very first room.As for combat, there’s very little of it in the early going, but like all good Resident Evil-style games, it’s dependent on  you aiming before you can fire. Sad part is, the rest of the game in no way resembles any Resident Evil ever produced.

Now for the “survival” part: Like any other survival game, you have the omnipresent food and thirst meters, combined with an oxygen meter. The Oxygen meter seems to not move a lot, but the other two do at a significant rate. Even with the game in time-lapse mode, you wouldn’t get dangerously hungry inside of a couple of hours.The general rule of thumb is, at least for humans:

Three minutes without air,
Three days without water,
Three weeks without food.

Not one of these babysitting-based games ever learns this and I should think that the metal environmental suit the protagonist comes encased in could do those things all on its own. Not indefinitely, but it wouldn’t exactly be hard for an interstellar species to make that work.Now for brass tacks: The controls are all wonky, and a stray keystroke can make your life a waking nightmare. They do explain it in a neat little booklet at the very beginning, but the chances of you accidentally skipping through it looking for the volume control are extremely high. Changing the graphics settings doesn’t  work: it will automatically downsample for 1920×1080, but any attempt to switch to Windowed mode or change the resolution directly will be met with abject failure.

The volume controls work in the menus, but take off your headset before you hit the button to start the game. Should you fail to do so, I will not be responsible for any bleeding you endure as a result. You. Have. Been. Warned.The news isn’t all bad– they made an effort to actually do things to make the game look good. So much so that at max settings, it introduced a 50% frame drop every other second in large-ish areas. The game never made it above 30FPS on my GeForce GTX 1060 card, so you can imagine just how ugly that was when it happened.

All in all, I really can’t recommend the game in its current state. There are too many core mechanical issues present for a game that runs $15 US to warrant it.

(click on the image to see the rating explanation)

Written by
Dead Parrot
Join the discussion

Archives

Calendar

February 2017
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  

About Us

Save or Quit (SoQ) is a community of fanatical gamers who love to give you their opinions.

See Our Writers

We’re always looking for new reviewers! Interested?