- Reviewed On PC
- Review Key Supplied By Developer
- PC Exclusive
While Wrack: Exoverse is to be considered a spin-off, its really the studio’s second shot at an old-school inspired FPS. Playing the original Wrack after all of the patches, I thought it was alright. I enjoyed the gunplay very much, making each of the weapons feel like they’ve got weight on their firing. The art style is of course something to admire, looking like XIII in space.
Now, level design I felt was a mixed bag of interesting exploration and dated concepts like enemies spawning right up close to you or unseen behind a close door. Speaking of which, the creatures you’d be fighting where not all that exciting, especially the boss fights, which are really only challenging through cheap tactics, otherwise anything but. I mention these complaints because while they’re still there in Wrack: Exoverse, its masked by the format of a base defense strategy game.
If you’ve played a rogue-like or rogue-lite before and a tower/base defense title, you will mostly feel right at home with how Wrack: Exoverse plays out. There will be a couple of waves where you’ll need to defend from incoming invaders, between moments of building your maze of death. Like any rogue-like indie, there’s some procedural-generated challenges and permadeath upon failure.
For those who are sick of rogue-likes in general, I don’t think this will change your mind, but there is a decent amount of items to permanently unlock for use/purchase on the next run. Your arsenal choice is between for guns, one hand weapon, one assault weapon, one shotgun or sniper-type weapon and one power weapon. There is a level of power in each of these gun types, labeled by color (of course stats as well).
You’ll get high level gear quick, so from that point on, its just surviving the waves and building up your defenses. Like your arsenal, the building options retain to only four slots and one of each type, which like the guns, can always be changed for higher-level gear. You’ve only got one turret to use, which may make the building part seem mundane, but the other slots are used for various crowd control traps you can set.
How you go about setting up your fortress is up to strategy of managing your funds. You obviously get more money as you kill, even from bonuses like surviving waves with no health loss or tower health loss, but you still have a limit to where you can’t just spam defenses or purchase everything in the store. Everything is at a cost on the same currency, so you’ll have to decide what you want to buy between levels and what to save while you go into the next stage.
The later the stages, the more money you are asked to put down in order to fend off against the hordes in a much less stressful way. There will be obstacles though, such as explosive dinos that will target structures, so you will want to repair damages for a small fee. Just like the gunplay, the tower-building mechanics are excellent, especially when you can choose an overhead view to quickly get to your structures and plan the layouts.
However, the same issues I had with the original Wrack persist here. The enemies are really only a challenge by how some take up more bullets than the others and that there’s a progressively large horde. Otherwise, they are dumb as bricks and there were even times I’ve caught an enemy or two stuck in the environment. Pretty much the biggest challenge is whether or not your fort is big enough to handle the numbers.
The boss fights are probably the worst of what this game has to offer. I like that there is a small twist, like one can recover their health through spawning towers that you’ll have to take out, but none make much sense in context. You have to defend your tower, while making your way over to where the boss is at and take them down. Sometimes, I’ll spend several in-game dollars, fortifying my base, only to take down a boss fight before the horde even spawns.
Two out of the three that I’ve encountered feel like the game is asking you to juggle between two tasks, in which there’s a random chance on if you’ll have to worry about one of them. The one that actually feels like its apart of the base defense mechanics is a floating squid that will destroy you in one go if you don’t manage to spam the whole hallways with turrets and traps, while continuously firing at the boss.
The difficulty in both Wrack games always seem like they are all over the place, regardless of what setting you pick. On normal, its either a cakewalk or punishingly hard, without explanation. Its really unfortunate because I see what these developers are trying to accomplish and I still enjoyed Wrack: Exoverse, just not as much as I’d like.
At least, when you unlock a new gun, armor piece and booster, that stays with you for the next run. 8 hours in though, you pretty much unlock most, if not all the items you can, which just leaves you with the level of satisfaction you get out of the gameplay. I’d say, for as fun as the general combat is, the fun does last with the enemies and boss encounters.
While I don’t mind the four-item inventory, I can see some people looking at the base defense as “too simple and restrictive”, but I see it as a way to tell you to think better…except for the moments where you are supposed to build one way. Wrack: Exoverse is a step in the right direction, but not quite there yet to excellence. Still, I’m rooting for this team if they decide to make a third Wrack title.
Pond's Press 