dEskape

Cool idea for a game, but it severely lacks quality of life. Sadly I have found too many annoyances in the very first 15 minutes of playtime too enjoy it.

Settings are utterly terrible:
- No options for gamma which should be quite important in case of a dark game
- lacking any options for GUI / font scale
- Instead of slider for audio you get a button to set it to different value that changes brightness on click so if you are used to having games set for 5/10/15% of loudness or similar then you are quite screwed.

Depending on screen settings it might be much darker compared to what is shown on trailer and without proper options it just hurts your eyes. It does not make sense to change your global settings for game that is supposed to be a part of your background.

Interactions are a bit clunky - there is a long animation lock when clicking a manual gather option (even if there is nothing to gather), initial shooting speed and range are really low so it requires extra effort to hit a basic, passive monster. (You can even see the developer missing multiple times on trailer while shooting the flying bat).

Building menu is not too intuitive - while playing games if I see a price of a building colored in red then I will automatically assume that I don't have enough of it. Here it is red, because it is red.

Yeah, uhm. This game was not ready for release.

This game is suffering from stutters every "day" as it handles the occasional tick of creature spawns, even early on when usually nothing spawns anyway.

This game says it wants dedicated graphics. However, this game is basically just a bunch of Javascript running in a Chromium process, and there isn't a "--type=gpu-process" child process on this game. In less techno-speak - this is a game that runs in Chrome (a notorious memory hog) and is using your CPU to render the admittedly simple graphics instead of the GPU that the game is demanding. Everyone complaining that the game is taking up CPU, that's your cause - the CPU is busy pushing pixels to the screen, rather than letting the dedicated hardware handle that.

This game *allegedly* is something that should just exist, taking up a portion of your screen as you do other things. But because it sucks back so much CPU, the other processes on the machine start having their own issues as well. I have this running alongside Cell to Singularity, an idle Unity game (I have a problem, I admit) that is more graphically complex than dEskape, by virtue of having actual 3D models that need to be rendered. Cell to Singularity uses roughly 3% of my Intel Core i9 12900K, and roughly 2% of my RTX 3080 Ti. dEskape is gobbling down anywhere from 15 to 20% of my CPU and 8% of my GPU (likely in trying to copy video data from CPU to GPU). This "browser" game is woefully unoptimized.

And all of the above are just the performance issues, nothing to do with the *gameplay*.

Dealing with the enemy is like playing whack-a-mole, hurriedly rushing from one end of your camp to the other, trying to shoot down the hives before they grow far too strong. Heck, in writing this review, a hive spawned and *grew to level 6* - removing these is a relatively urgent threat, even in "low" where they don't send attack parties.

Both of the starting weapons - the rifle and the shotspray - are *awful* to use. You're locked into shooting your shot for roughly a second - no more shots, no moving. I can forgive the shotgun for having a poor firerate, but the "rifle" is basically a distinct *downgrade* from that. You get maybe 2.5x the range on the rifle than you do the shotspray, but at that point you're frequently just firing into the dark anyway. The unlocked weapon pattern, the sprayer, mitigates most of the issues I have with combat... but *it suffers from accuracy issues*, and I'm not simply talking about how it fires randomly in a cone. Your cursor dictates one edge of that cone, rather than the center, so you're either shooting too high aiming left, or too low aiming right. If you pay close attention at around the 27 second mark in the trailer, you can see the person has to explicitly aim low in order to shoot correctly.

Oh, and the default weapon shots travel at a *glacial* speed, requiring you to lead your shots when taking down the bat that flies around. I feel like it takes far too much effort trying to get that thing, even having to chase it down outside my base.

Also, it's a good thing I've played Desktopia, because I remembered how the "main gameplay window" was locked to the bottom of the primary screen, but you could move it around by dragging the bottom left corner, and allow resizing by hitting F1. WHERE WAS THAT CONTROL HINT? Desktopia's help menu was far more useful than the Journal we've got here. Also, god forbid you want to shrink it vertically - the resource readout on the left expects you to have a specific height of window. Any less, and it starts flowing off the bottom. And while I'm on the topic of resizing - the game itself is expecting a specific ratio already; it looks like it was designed to be played on ultrawide monitors (judging from the photos provided by Evergloom at the top of the page). If you happen to have a "normal" 16:9 monitor, well you're gonna get letterboxed. Heck, it looks like it's intended for a 3440x1440 monitor *specifically*, because moving it to my secondary 2560x1080 monitor (still 21:9 ultrawide!) has it letterboxing, just because of the earlier-mentioned specific-size resource readout!

I just have one final thing to say. Evergloom, did you ACTUALLY PLAY THE GAME before releasing it? Did you try it on other machines? Did you not look at the resource usage at all?

I was looking forward to this game. I wanted a sci-fi settlement building idle game. I'd played Desktopia and found it playable. The adjustable interface layout with the extra windows intrigued me. But dEskape's implementation is particularly lacking.

This game is in Alpha right now with unplayable fps past early game....which takes you several hours to realize and by that time it's too late for a refund. STAY AWAY UNTIL FPS IS RESOLVED - IF EVER. sad but true