Altrus
Coastermaker
Firstly, "Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason" is a first-person survival horror shooter created by Action Forms, a developer based in Russia, and published by 1C Company, a likewise Russian-based publisher. Had to give credit where credit is due.
The Story
You are Alexander Nesterov, a meteorologist. It is the year 1981, and the nuclear ice breaker "Northwind" has shipwrecked on an iceberg near the Arctic Circle, and you are there to investigate. That is about all this game gives you in the story. The rest has to be pieced together through an ability called Mental Echo, which allows you to see the events that happened in a certain area of the ship or the events that happened right before a person died and save them from the untimely demise.
The story arc is a lot like walking down a set of stairs with a cliff at the end. The game starts off rather normal, with you taking refuge inside the ship after crashing your dog sled. About five minutes into the game you'll hit the first step were events start to stray away from normal. This first step is easily the largest of all of them, you'll spend most of the game wandering around the ship with things just slightly abnormal. A little over halfway into the game you'll hit the second step, where the story becomes completely estranged. This is the point were the game really starts to mess with your head. The creatures on the ship begin to look more original, straying from the ice zombie theme that stretched through the first step. The third step is easily the smallest, lasting about five minutes. It begins to show you why the ship is how it is, but just as things begin to make some form of sense, the narrator kicks you off the step into the slow free fall that is the last 30 minutes of the game.
In the end this game is very unforgiving with its story, it tells you very little and expects you to piece together what happened and to fill in the blank, the game has an attitude of "Here is what happened, why should I be bothered to tell you why?" But that's not a bad thing, it works pretty well for this game.
Sound:
Very good. Wind sounds like wind, guns sound like guns, and a can falling off a ledge sound like a maniac behind me with a machete, as I jumped out of my seat. The voice acting was also rather good, with a believable Russian accent, although the subtitles where off from the speech A LOT.
Graphics
The graphics are good, but nothing stellar. Not much to talk about either, room after room of dark greys, blacks, and browns, broken occasionally by the blinding white of a snow storm or sheet of ice...
...and then there's the PhysX. Is it needed, no, but is it required? Heck Yes!!! It's a lot like voice actors. We don't need them in video games, but they just make everything that much better ((Well, most of the time)). There's something just simply beautiful about realistic water pouring across a surface or an enemy bursting through a stream of water and seeing the shimmering specks scatter out across the room.
Performance
The performance was pretty poor. My game would black screen every twenty minutes or so and in some cases crash entirely. Also, a few times during the game my fps would just suddenly plummet and nothing but restarting the game would fix it. While I was able to suffer through these I doubt many others would take the time to continually fix the game.
The Gameplay
Your basic FPS gameplay, except slower. Your character is a meteorologist, not a soldier, meaning, your attacks are clumsy and you by no means know how to load a gun quickly. However, there are a few small differences between this system and other games.
One of these small differences is fist fighting. Although it isn't much, I enjoyed the fact that moving to the right causes your character to perform a right hook, moving to the left a left hook, forward is a straight punch, backwards is an uppercut, and holding down two of these buttons at a time performs a combo. The only problem being that you fight about five enemies before punching becomes useless against the axe wielding Tommy-gun shooting enemies that populate the rest of the game. Every time you do anything it will effect your camera.
Shooting, melee attacks, getting hit, being shot, etc. All of it effects the camera. While this works fine most of the time, it's overdone in some areas. Two areas that it really shows is while wielding an axe or taking a hit from a melee enemy. Your camera jerks around while striking with an axe to an extent that makes me think Alex's head can bend to unGodly angles, and if some of the stronger melee enemies get close enough to attack it appears as if your getting thrown around the room.
Using heat as your health was an interesting idea. Your max health is determined by how warm it is near a heat source. For example, a stove will give you near max hp while a desk lamp will only give you near half. Your health will continuously go down when away from a warm room, and the colder the room the faster your health goes down, in some instances you can even die from heat lose. While annoying at times this effect really helps to press in the fact that it is hellishly cold and your character doesn't like it to much.
All in all, the combat doesn't do much new, but other than that, it doesn't do much wrong either. It is unforgiving, missing just once killed me a few times, and the absence of cross-hairs made me miss quiet a few times. ((Iron sights was a just a bit too slow during some of the encounters)).
Extra thought
I might have added a few screen shots but I can't for the life of me figure out how to and if I was doing it right where the shots went on my comp.
The Story
You are Alexander Nesterov, a meteorologist. It is the year 1981, and the nuclear ice breaker "Northwind" has shipwrecked on an iceberg near the Arctic Circle, and you are there to investigate. That is about all this game gives you in the story. The rest has to be pieced together through an ability called Mental Echo, which allows you to see the events that happened in a certain area of the ship or the events that happened right before a person died and save them from the untimely demise.
The story arc is a lot like walking down a set of stairs with a cliff at the end. The game starts off rather normal, with you taking refuge inside the ship after crashing your dog sled. About five minutes into the game you'll hit the first step were events start to stray away from normal. This first step is easily the largest of all of them, you'll spend most of the game wandering around the ship with things just slightly abnormal. A little over halfway into the game you'll hit the second step, where the story becomes completely estranged. This is the point were the game really starts to mess with your head. The creatures on the ship begin to look more original, straying from the ice zombie theme that stretched through the first step. The third step is easily the smallest, lasting about five minutes. It begins to show you why the ship is how it is, but just as things begin to make some form of sense, the narrator kicks you off the step into the slow free fall that is the last 30 minutes of the game.
In the end this game is very unforgiving with its story, it tells you very little and expects you to piece together what happened and to fill in the blank, the game has an attitude of "Here is what happened, why should I be bothered to tell you why?" But that's not a bad thing, it works pretty well for this game.
Sound:
Very good. Wind sounds like wind, guns sound like guns, and a can falling off a ledge sound like a maniac behind me with a machete, as I jumped out of my seat. The voice acting was also rather good, with a believable Russian accent, although the subtitles where off from the speech A LOT.
Graphics
The graphics are good, but nothing stellar. Not much to talk about either, room after room of dark greys, blacks, and browns, broken occasionally by the blinding white of a snow storm or sheet of ice...
...and then there's the PhysX. Is it needed, no, but is it required? Heck Yes!!! It's a lot like voice actors. We don't need them in video games, but they just make everything that much better ((Well, most of the time)). There's something just simply beautiful about realistic water pouring across a surface or an enemy bursting through a stream of water and seeing the shimmering specks scatter out across the room.
Performance
The performance was pretty poor. My game would black screen every twenty minutes or so and in some cases crash entirely. Also, a few times during the game my fps would just suddenly plummet and nothing but restarting the game would fix it. While I was able to suffer through these I doubt many others would take the time to continually fix the game.
The Gameplay
Your basic FPS gameplay, except slower. Your character is a meteorologist, not a soldier, meaning, your attacks are clumsy and you by no means know how to load a gun quickly. However, there are a few small differences between this system and other games.
One of these small differences is fist fighting. Although it isn't much, I enjoyed the fact that moving to the right causes your character to perform a right hook, moving to the left a left hook, forward is a straight punch, backwards is an uppercut, and holding down two of these buttons at a time performs a combo. The only problem being that you fight about five enemies before punching becomes useless against the axe wielding Tommy-gun shooting enemies that populate the rest of the game. Every time you do anything it will effect your camera.
Shooting, melee attacks, getting hit, being shot, etc. All of it effects the camera. While this works fine most of the time, it's overdone in some areas. Two areas that it really shows is while wielding an axe or taking a hit from a melee enemy. Your camera jerks around while striking with an axe to an extent that makes me think Alex's head can bend to unGodly angles, and if some of the stronger melee enemies get close enough to attack it appears as if your getting thrown around the room.
Using heat as your health was an interesting idea. Your max health is determined by how warm it is near a heat source. For example, a stove will give you near max hp while a desk lamp will only give you near half. Your health will continuously go down when away from a warm room, and the colder the room the faster your health goes down, in some instances you can even die from heat lose. While annoying at times this effect really helps to press in the fact that it is hellishly cold and your character doesn't like it to much.
All in all, the combat doesn't do much new, but other than that, it doesn't do much wrong either. It is unforgiving, missing just once killed me a few times, and the absence of cross-hairs made me miss quiet a few times. ((Iron sights was a just a bit too slow during some of the encounters)).
Extra thought
I might have added a few screen shots but I can't for the life of me figure out how to and if I was doing it right where the shots went on my comp.
