A Tactical Descent into Bullet Heaven
You know how sometimes in action movies the characters will do something that leaves you scratching your head asking why? That feeling is prevalent through Survivor Mercs.
Ironically, Survivor Mercs does replicate an action movie in that it’s fun to watch and think about. Unfortunately though, that illusion is broken as soon as you pick up the controller as the gameplay quickly lets it down.
Survivor Mercs is a Survivor-like bullet heaven where you play as a clone of a commander that is dropped into battlegrounds with varying objectives. After each mission you’ll have the choice to progress along a pass to the final boss or you can return to base to deposit your loot which is used for upgrades, or push ahead with the risk of losing some if you die. Each battle progresses along a path to the final boss which, after you beat them, allows the opportunity to move to the next area and repeat the process.
A Slow Burn That Never Catches Fire
During this process, rather than feeling like an action hero though, you resemble more of a child with an Airsoft gun. You move slowly, and while you have dashes, they don’t move you far and take a long time to recharge. Worst of all for a military action game, the action is incredibly boring. Using your weapon feels like nothing. No feedback from the character or controller. No flashy effects. Just some pixels that shoot out and deal an embarrassingly low number of damage to the enemies. It’s a good thing you can recruit ally Mercs while on the run since their attacks seem to do real damage, even in the beginning, unlike the commander character you play as. That is a shame since there are lots of interesting weapons ranging from handguns to leafblowers. But it’s better to use them as a means to shove enemies and let your allies finish them.
There are some settings which kind of circumvent this by changing it to be auto firing and various target settings too which allows for the player to just focus on moving. But it’s not a good sign that it can be recommended to not play a big part of the game.
The most enjoyable part of the gameplay are the boss fights. By this point your merc partners are probably strong enough to do enough damage while you evade the attacks and try to deal with the smaller enemies spawning. While you still have to contend with the slow movement and dashing mechanic, it does turn it more akin to a MMO battle where you just draw aggro and kite the boss in the hope that you can survive long enough for your allies to kill them.
However, lots of games start like this. Then as you gain new powers, partners, and stats you eventually grow to feel all powerful. For Survivor Mercs, this is half true. You will be gaining lots of stats, yet none of which feel like they make a difference. Part of this problem is the stats page is a nightmare to navigate and understand. The stats constantly scroll making it difficult to read as well as to know what and how they interact with all the other various elements. Furthermore the reliance on RNG for stats makes this more confounding than complex as there do not seem to be any builds of note to aim for.
RNG Nightmare
Whether you retreat, beat the boss, or die, you return to the base where you can level up and build new rooms to help you in future runs. But even this element is frustrating in its design. There is a wall you hit where you can no longer level these without moving ahead in the game and having access to characters or items that are required to progress. This is a problem due to the fact that there isn’t much skill involved that you can use to progress.
Further compounding this problem is Survivor Mercs’ reliance on RNG. Not only is this a core component to the gameplay when leveling up, but in character generation once you unlock a specific room. This is problematic, as you have to unlock these genes with only their description to have an idea what they will do; a description that doesn’t always make sense, such as one called “Thick Skin” which gives the player extra armour at the cost of experience gained and their technology stat. However the description gives no indication it’ll have those negatives.
Even if you unlock only the beneficial ones, it’s also random for which three you will get when generating your commander clone until you manage to progress far enough to choose what seems to be something you should have gotten from the beginning.
This is just another example of an interesting system or a way to make progress that trips over itself, rather than helping.
While the gameplay is lacklustre, the presentation is quite fun. The music is a high energy rocking soundtrack. And when there are cutscenes or character portraits introducing them, they show a high degree of polish and creativity. Similar to the rest of the elements, this also seems to vanish in the gameplay itself. Other than the bosses and mini bosses, you’ll be surrounded by hordes of generally nondescript soldiers ranging from small, medium, and large. Even the times when you run into some special enemies, such as those who charge at you, everything feels similar. If it wasn’t for their attack being telegraphed by a long yellow bar I would have no idea they were even there. While you may think this lack of fidelity would lead to better performance, Survivor Mercs does suffer from stutters fairly frequently.
Surviving, Not Thriving
Survivor Mercs feels like a gift from well-meaning grandparents. It’s well wrapped and you can tell there’s good intentions, but once you start digging into it you realize it isn’t what you asked for. When there are so many Survivor-like games already available, Survivor Mercs’ ideas cannot save it from the boring gameplay and convoluted systems which make it just another casualty.
Important Links
The Squad-Based Chaos Of Survivor Mercs Is Now Available – https://www.thexboxhub.com/the-squad-based-chaos-of-survivor-mercs-is-now-available/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/survivor-mercs/9PP3694JRCFJ/0010
