Developer: Kerberos Productions
Publisher: Kerberos Productions
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
The Pit: Infinity – Review
The trick behind creating the perfect cocktail is to mix the right ingredients in the correct proportions. Mixing game genres is like mixing cocktails, it might become liquid gold, utter garbage or somewhere in between. The good thing about games is that you can still send out patches afterward.
Story
The story of The Pit: Infinity is a rather simple one. To find the cure to the plague that is threatening your existence and that of everyone you know, you must descend down to floor 30 of a facility overrun with strange creatures. The story is explained in a short video with scrolling text at the beginning of the game. Exploring the facility might yield more questions than answers. The story is more of an accessory to the game and that’s fine, not all games need an elaborate story. If you feel like you do need that in order to get attached to a game to keep playing then this might be a deal-breaker for you.
Graphics
At first, the graphics look great, you get a bit of a cartoony Team Fortress 2 vibe. Exploring the first piece of the game, which takes place outside the facility, unveiled a hole in the map which causes you to fall off the map. This does not kill you, you just keep on falling forever or until you quit the game yourself. When you enter the facility, the atmosphere is great, it’s dark and everything looks like a mess, giving you a feeling of unease. Sadly, the different floors do look alike a bit too much and start to become boring. A little more variety would have been great and would have given the place a more believable feel. The same goes for the enemies. There is a variety of different creatures like snakes, scorpions and killer robots, but there isn’t enough variety to last you 30 floors.
Sound
The game features an electronic soundtrack. It is rather unintrusive but does add to the atmosphere. It may or may not be deliberate to keep the sound on the down-low but it works as you are exploring an abandoned facility overrun with strange creatures. The sound effects are okay but never great. They help you assess the situation and might warn you of incoming danger.
Gameplay
The Pit: Infinity is a roguelike shooter. If you’re not familiar with roguelike games, the genre is defined as follows. “Roguelike is a subgenre of role-playing video game characterized by a dungeon crawl through procedurally generated levels, turn-based gameplay, tile-based graphics, and permanent death of the player character.” The genre is usually related to RPGs and not shooters but the mechanics can apply to any game genre.
At first glance, the game plays like a regular first-person shooter but you’ll quickly realize that the perfectly aimed headshot doesn’t do as much damage as you would have expected and that is due to the RPG elements in the game. The damage you deal depends largely on the attributes of your character and much less on your aim. Also, the first time you bite the bullet, you’ll be slapped it the face with your current score and sent straight back to the main menu. That is permadeath for you right there as your character perished and you will need to create a new one and start from scratch. These are some of the gameplay-related topics you should be aware of before trying the game as they will certainly turn some people off.
Creating a character is easy, you can pick one of three classes to play, Engineer, Soldier or Scout. While in most shooters this would only imply a different set of starting weapons, in The Pit: Infinity your class also comes with a set of primary attributes being Might, Finesse, and Brains. Each class has a clear preference for a specific main attribute. If you ever played an RPG, these attributes relate to the primary stats mostly used in RPGs, Strength, Agility, and Intellect. These will influence your melee damage, speed, stamina, health pool and ability to handle electronic devices. Nothing too complex just yet. However, each of these primary attributes has several skills linked to them. This is where things become interesting as you will now need to decide whether you are going to specialize your character or attempt to create a healthy balance. In the single-player mode, it might be needed to balance while in multiplayer you can focus on specific skills.
Each of these skills makes you better at certain tasks and they will provide an estimated percentage of how successful you’ll be at any given task. This means everything has a chance to fail, from opening a jammed locker to disarming traps to repairing a stove to cook food on, as well as the actual cooking. Failing at disarming a trap might cost you a good chunk of your health. As a side effect, this makes you often play at a slower pace and think things over. Is it worth attempting to disarm this trap that guards a box that I might fail to open, that might be empty?
The endgame is to reach floor 30, but it will require a good deal of skill and mostly luck to reach it. The game will throw an array of creatures at you that seems to only want one thing; to kill you as quickly as possible. There is only a small variety of enemies, scorpions, snakes, bats, robots, and humanoids. They don’t seem to interact with each other and not a lot of explanation is given to how and why they are there. You will see them on all floors. While the variety of different enemies is low, they do pack a wide toolkit of ways to kill you from biting, to poison, to melee and using conventional firearms. A non-lethal attack some of the enemies posses is ‘blind’. When they manage to blind you, your chances of survival drop exponentially. Getting hit by this status effect will even cover your user interface and you’ll literally be blind. Waiting for the effect to wear off seems to be the safest option but will cause you to spend a lot of time just standing still and waiting for the effect to wear off. If it happens mid-combat you might as well roll over and die.
Another seemingly random stat is hunger. If there weren’t already enough ways to get killed, you can also starve to death. While you start the game off with some rations, it is not really explained that you might need to find something to eat and even then you’ll be bound by some rules. Food needs to be cooked first, but you’ll also need to repair the stove that it needs to be cooked on, which might go horribly wrong.
Conclusion
The Pit: Infinity boldly went where not many games dare to go but didn’t quite make it all the way. It features pretty unique ideas and combinations of genres but is hindered by the lack of story and repetition of enemies and floors. You might get more fun out of the multiplayer as it increases your chances of survival and somewhat negates the lack of story and repetition. If you do manage to reach the end of floor 30, you will have certainly earned bragging rights.
The Pit: Infinity - Review,
No Comments