It Can’t Get Any Worse Than This
In Abiotic Factor, you don’t play as the hero. You take on the role of a scientist in a research facility where everything has gone wrong. Interdimensional monsters roam the hallways and offices, the military has orders to shoot survivors on sight, and every dark secret and entity in the facility is loose. You scavenge everyday office supplies and craft them into tools of survival. A kitchen knife, standing lamp, and duct-tape can become a lethal spear. Harvest these resources and everything natural and unnatural you can get your sciency hands on to survive and escape the facility.
Playing Abiotic Factor is a joy. Assuming the role of one of the scientists from Half-Life during the resonance cascade event is a very driven premise to adapt into a survival game. Almost every mechanic feeds back to this initial premise of being a scientist that makes Abiotic Factor unique from every other survival game. This premise is only heightened with friends and the simple inclusion of proximity chat. With that said however, at about 3/4ths of the way through the game’s story, Abiotic Factor takes a turn for the worse. The game begins to feel rushed and imbalanced, concluding with a disappointing ending, capping the experience. But first, the good!
Wha– What’s He Doing in There?
Exploring the facility is tense. Enemies are deadly, hazards are prominent, and night is ever encroaching. At 9:00 every day, the facility’s power shuts down, leaving you blind without a flashlight. Security robots meant to protect the staff leave their stations and attack anything they see. It is dangerous, but exploration is the biggest strength of Abiotic Factor. Chances are because of the danger, your early game is going to be a slow, decisive crawl through the office sector, picking off enemies and scavenging resources.
He’s a Highly Trained Professional
My biggest shock playing Abiotic Factor is how good the crafting is. Like every crafting system, if you have the correct materials you can make the object. Abiotic Factor’s crafting excels at both feeling like the materials you’re using become a part of the final product, and more importantly, not being grindy. As long as you keep an eye out for materials, you will never be wanting. You get new crafting recipes at a consistent rate and the results of these recipes are always exciting. It feels like you’re getting new toys to play with.
Don’t Shoot! I’m With the Science Team!
Combat may be the worst part of Abiotic Factor. It is not bad by any means, but it isn’t as satisfying or well developed as the rest of the game. Its presence heightens the experience, making exploration and crafting feel earned by being legitimately dangerous, though the act of fighting itself feels strange and inconsistent. Enemies of the same type have wildly variable health, sometimes dying quickly, other times being a tank all on their own. Incoming damage isn’t telegraphed clearly, often leaving you scratching your head trying to determine the source of the danger. It’s awkward and might benefit from some fine tuning but these issues are pretty minor. The enjoyment of combat comes from your skills, which progress like Runescape. The more you do something, the better you are at it, which incentivizes specializing in either sharp, blunt, or ranged combat.
My God, What Are You Doing?
When you reach the reactor area about 3/4ths of the way through Abiotic Factor, the high quality and satisfaction of the crafting system worsens dramatically. Resource collection becomes grindy and cool recipes are discovered less often. It’s a sharp decrease in quality that never recovers for the rest of the game’s runtime. In fact, every aspect of the game seems to worsen at this stage. Crafting gets grindy and stale, combat becomes a slog as enemies become spongy, and exploration yields less surprises as most players are beelining for the end.
Do You Still Say There’s Nothing to Chaos Theory?
It’s a real shame as Abiotic Factor would be nearly flawless without the decrease in quality of the latter fourth of the game. Without that blemish, I would wholeheartedly recommend Abiotic Factor to anyone who enjoys survival games. I do recommend the game still, but suggest you wait for some updates. The developers have announced that they are going to continue updating the game for the foreseeable future, and while the contents of these updates have not been shared, I suspect they will iron out the late game. If they do fix it, Abiotic Factor will be a comfortable 9/10. As it is however, Abiotic Factor can’t be scored that high.
7/10
Abiotic Factor is available on Xbox, Playstation, and PC.
Also check out Emmas: The Favorites Review
Graphic by Dialma Quiroz
Edits by Bentley Bramhall
