Depths of Extinction

Depths of Extinction seems to check off all the boxes. It's a turn-based tactical, squad-level game in a sunken, post-apocalyptic Earth where you sail from port to port getting into a lot of trouble while hoarding fuel, money, and equipment, levelling your squaddies and outfitting them with your appropriated wares, blasting robots, cultists, defence systems, and pirates on the hunt for a rogue A.I. In the individual moments things seem to work but as we'll see, when a game's overall experience of these moments is bundled together, the feel of a game can be altered, and not always for the better.

To start the game's main quest is thrown into your lap: to find keys to a location and stop what caused the opening cinematic, but so little of this is explored that it feels nakedly like breadcrumbs to lead you to unlocking various regions so that you can fight a boss at the end. Beyond the tutorial, players can choose between different missions, with the plot missions clearly marked, while others give you a small lump of cash, clues to finding equipment, a new submarine, or unlocking a new character class. The plot missions allow unlocking a harder area which will more likely have different enemy types who might yield different loot (though most loot in the game dropped by enemies tends to be pocket change) and tougher encounters.

Players explore the game world starting at a regional level and picking an over-arching mission. Then you zoom in to a randomly generated area with several nodes. Within those nodes are more nodes representing different ports, each costing one fuel point to reach. Ports have different themes which increase the likelihood of merchants or hostile encounters or places that will likely have interesting loot, but there are few guarantees. Each port encounter is resolved through a blurb of text followed by a dialogue tree that usually boils down to skipping the area or exploring (and likely a battle), though at times you'll be choosing what sort of encounter you'll want to have. Unless you try to avoid everything, you will frequently find yourself in combat, which is usually the best way to scrounge extra fuel, cash, and equipment.

There were three types of maps in the release build: compartmentalised undersea rooms orthogonally linked that feel as though they're the most common, with doors sealing each area and sometimes automated turrets in some rooms that deploy with certain triggers; sea platform maps where there are only a few sealed off areas but otherwise your troops are more exposed to enemies coming from unexpected directions; and maps where each side stands atop their submarines in close-proximity that always feel same, characters standing in initiative order, you likely go first, you'll probably do fine. Within these three map types, we did get a few scenarios that had the enemies coming after us, and we sort of set up our defences and waited for them to besiege us. That was an enjoyable novelty but happened too infrequently, usually the larger maps expect a section-to-section search with enemies to neutralise more often than not. A fourth map type is being introduced with the latest patch as of the time of writing which combines the segmented rooms with more open areas, presumably increasing the likelihood of more enemies barrelling in when conflict starts.

Combat itself can be satisfying in small doses. Each character moves in initiative order, with two actions that can constitute movement (using equipment, or activating a door, locker, or switch), and gets up to one attack action that ends their turn, usually. Your loadout is typically a piece of armour that adds hit points, one weapon (all combat is ranged combat, no melee in the game at all), one support item that provides passive benefits, and one item that can be activated such as a grenade, a first aid kit, a revival pack, or stim. Initially fairly challenging, once your troops differentiate themselves it's easier to feel a bit of affection for the group as they quickly gain skills that make them more competitive. Watching your team fire during overwatch to take out cultists or androids sneaking through their field of fire, managing obstacle destruction bonuses that allow for an extra turn as well as opening up areas to better hit targets, running a character into the middle of a crowd of enemies and having them fire randomly at everyone around them and somehow surviving can all be fun moments. The game's cover system is involved enough that it becomes second nature to try to run each character behind some boxes that have shield symbols that show they're un-flanked and provide a cover bonus, with each non-wall cover element having visible hit points so you can plan to take out cover or switch if it looks like it's going to fold. Weapons include area effect explosives, energy weapons, miniguns with a high rate of fire, harpoons, sniper rifles, poisonous bio-weapons, and others, and while they have unlimited ammunition each must be reloaded, requiring some management of actions.

But in the bigger picture, the game has a degree of repetition that reduces the return on your time investment the longer you play, especially during a single sitting. You do the sensible thing and put your team in cover, open the door, spot an enemy, they get a free move, you either overwatch or try to go in aggressively. Usually, the enemy moves toward you, finds cover, does a decent job of taking advantage of their surroundings, attacking groups, focusing fire. Sometimes a few will retreat and go into overwatch, but you'll never get what feels like an ambush, and the game will tell you there are still active hostiles in an area even if you can't see them. Assuming things go well you loot corpses which usually have a small pile of credits, then maybe open a safe on the far end of the room, or activate a switch needed to complete the map's scenario. Between maps you make choices on nodes that begin to feel a bit similar, with a rare diversion not happening nearly as much as combat that takes long enough that it's a real pain that you can't save in the middle of a map. The battle maps can be fun, and the open platforms tend to allow you to clear areas in a more haphazard, chaotic fashion that feels a bit more unpredictable, but the game is best experienced in short stints so the repetition isn't as grating.

Most of the time, the degree of your success in a scenario is dictated by the relative difficulty level. In higher difficulties you will encounter turrets that pop up out of the ground when fire is first exchanged or a secured safe is opened, and stronger enemies will have deadlier attacks and have a LOT more hit points you have to carve through, with some chucking grenades or regenerating hits like your own troops might. When the difficulty is on the easy side you will only likely lose people if you're reckless, but recklessness can happen when you're tired of clearing similar rooms with similar hazards, especially when the maps are big. When things are tougher it's much tenser, but at times you may not be able to make it out unscathed despite best efforts because you're swarmed by enemies that do more damage than you can handle. This in itself is fine, but coupled with repetition it can be exhausting to plough through each room carefully, doing the same sort of manoeuvres each time, activating turrets and destroying them, hoping your character who is trying to start a fight doesn't get too exposed before they can retreat or find cover.

The game has a sort of permadeath, where characters can be killed for good if you don't have the equipment to revive them, so when the difficulty balances just right things can be pretty exciting. Should you lose a character you've spent several levels training it can be a bit rough to have to bring a low hit point newbie up to speed. There are mercenaries you can hire, usually at the beginning of a mission, and rescuing people means you can have low-level recruits, but mercenaries leave after your mission is done, and the harder things get the more likely the recruit will just be tagging along in the back until their passive experience gains are enough to make them more useful.

Characters have ten levels, and the first forces a choice of which class they'll be. There are six to start, with more to unlock. The classes are actually one of the highlights of the game, as is levelling. Different classes have different specialities: taking hits and firing at targets that fired at comrades, efficient and accurate sniper fire, clearing cover, or firing wildly into big groups. Each level up allows two points of allocation into statistics which up hit points, walking speed, initiative, cover use, reaction chance to varying degrees, as well as a track that increases class abilities. There seem to be better choices, such as increasing hit points to the degree where a perk lets you regenerate every turn, though we tried all sorts of builds, some skipping hit-point builds entirely, and most of them worked well enough. Once characters reach level 10 they feel a bit flatter, and we were often tempted to rotate them out despite their effectiveness.

The repetitive feeling is what was dragging us down, causing our eyes to roll when we saw a larger map, choosing the skip option in more and more encounter nodes, grumbling when we tripped the alarm in a room after killing all the enemies and having to go through another battle sequence to clear the room lest even the stationary turrets get a turn in battle to do nothing despite our leaving them behind. Having to navigate your way out of an incomplete maze when you've got what you've come for and don't want to risk/plod through more encounters you have to either give individual commands to each squad member to get them to the exit, or use a follow-the-leader mode which usually works to speed things up slightly but seems a poor replacement for a get-out button if no enemies are pursuing. There is not enough variance to the maps, scenarios, node interaction, and noncombat events to help make it feel less like a struggle than it should be. Add to this the sometimes fiddly UI with the potential to misclick on buttons and move characters southward on the map, possibly into danger, sometimes unclear borders that obscure when your character might use both actions up on a move, a save system that remembers your last completed scenario that you can manipulate to reset supposed permadeath but doesn't save battle progress and may roll differently for node encounters when you reload, and elements you can activate when you shouldn't be able to at the end of a character's turn if you click fast enough, such as doors. We also experienced slowdowns and a few crashes when encountering late-game drone enemies.

The breadth of equipment choices is fun, and depending on what's dropped you might have some interesting combinations that you want to keep going as long as you can. The art is fanatically detailed, with different damage states for room objects, portrait changes based on equipment and sometimes class, and individual weapons and armour can be seen on characters on the map, as well as an idling animation and crouching behind cover. While overall the game can feel like a grind, there are still individual moments when health is low and you really concentrate to keep your people alive that can still perk one up. But the main story just sort of ends, and the post-plot gameplay is just more scenarios with your existing team or new team members that you can swap in and level, submarines to unlock if you haven't already, classes and the like - all are just a collection of things that can be used on more scenarios, but ultimately it's there for completionists and people who occasionally want to return to the game if you found something to enjoy the first time. It's difficult to imagine, though, many players enjoying Depths of Extinction for long stretches of time. Whether this will change with upcoming patches it's hard to say, but it's difficult to be more enthusiastic for a game that, in the large scale, is more monotonic than entertainment should be.