Platform: PC (Steam)

Developer: Wave Interactive

Release: 18th March 2017

Price: 14.99

Review Key provided by Wave Interactive

 

We play as Buck, someone who left his home and everything he has behind to find a girl named Jodie. Our stepdad taught us to fight and survive in this post apocalyptic world, so we start to embark on a journey through the wasteland, soon realizing that we will need to use these skills soon. 

We play as Buck, someone who left his home and everything he has behind to find a girl named Jodie. Our stepdad taught us to fight and survive in this post apocalyptic world, so we start to embark on a journey through the wasteland, soon realizing that we will need to use these skills soon.

At its current state Buck only contains the first half of the first half, so I can´t say how this story will develop, so just be aware of the fact that it won´t offer a “Complete” experience yet. However from what I´ve played, Buck does a pretty good job at telling its story. The levels are all have some narration parts by Gritt, which´s voice acting fits really good into the dark and hopeless atmosphere. Additionally the dialogues are all well written, every NPC has its own way of talking etc. Additionally you can influence these dialogues with different answers, unfortunately they never seem that significant, since they won´t influence much more than the next few lines of the NPCs. That´s especially important because no character really develops a “real” personality, not even Buck, everyone just functions as Quest vendors and the dialogues can´t add quite enough “depth” to them. 

The quests in Buck all follow the same scheme: Talk to a NPC, accept Quest and get a new level marked at your map, drive to it and complete it. So combat is a pretty big part of Buck. You have a light and heavy attack, dodge, shoot with a shotgun and/or dual pistols and everything can be connected through combos. But to be honest, I don´t really like it. In my opinion Buck´s combat has two major issues:

On one hand the pacing of the combat doesn´t quite work. Buck´s animations are quite slow, if you want to fire your gun, he has to first grab it form his back before he can shoot, adding ~1-2s delay in your actions. This wouldn´t be a huge problem if BUCK would be a slower paced game, which it isn´t, due to the enemies’ animations. While Buck always needs some Milliseconds or seconds to execute your input, the enemies don´t work with this speed. A combat system like this needs enemies that can be predictable, you have to see when they will attack, to plan your actions accordingly and BUCK simply can´t deliver that.

Every attack animation of your enemies is fast, letting you only some short moments to react to it, in a best case scenario. Especially the enemies with a shotgun don´t even let you half a second before they shoot, considering that there are only 3 types of enemies at the moment you will have to deal with them a lot, making it even more frustrating. A sound effect or a symbol, to show when an enemy will attack would fix this but at the moment it just doesn´t work.

This issue gets even worse in combination with the second problem, BUCK´s stunlock mechanic. Every punch will stunlock you, the harder the longer, while a shotgun will simply pull you out of your feet. So, as soon as an enemy hits you you´re stunlocked for ~1-2s, now imagine your against multiple enemies, which will often be the case: If you get stunlocked one time, by a shotgun-hit or a punch, you´re basically dead, since every new hit will add up to the stunlock. Especially since the enemies deal an insane amount of damage alone, with full health you can only take ~4-5 hits. In combination with the off pacing every encounter with more than one enemy or enemy type will be a guessing game, when an enemy will attack. And the one who gets stunlocked first normally wins. 

These two problems make BUCK an awfully hard but not fair game at some points. The whole point of BUCK´s combat is basically to stunlock the enemy, while not being hit once. I often came into a situation where enemies shot at me as soon as they entered the screen, stunlocking me and killing me in an instant. Luckily BUCK´s savepoints are often very fair and you don´t have to repeat a lot. But Situations like these are not fair, they just reward the one with faster reflexes, which is the AI. I´m glad BUCK is in a state where things like these can be fixed, slowing the enemies animation down or adding a sound/symbol, when they´re about to attack should solve this issue but at the moment I never really enjoyed the combat.

Aside from this BUCK does a lot right concerning its level design. A lot areas you will visit have multiple paths and are never really linear. If you take the extra risk to explore what´s on the way above you, you will recieve a reward like a chest, a shortcut or simply a new way to your goal. Giving you more materials to craft healing items, ammunition or upgrades for your weapons. RPG-elements like these are not particularly new but work really well with this post-apocalyptic theme. This non-linear level design works really well along with the rewarding results. The only issue I had with the levels were its unlogical construction, that comes with this design, it´s not really immersive if you walk over a bunch of floating metal pieces, like in the Junkyard.

As hinted before, BUCK has an amazing atmosphere, even tho its a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by dogs and animals its by far not a happy game. It takes this concept seen in a lot child films and puts it into a ruthless, dying world where everyone fights for their survival. Combined with the artstyle, which looks simply amazing, it became one of my favourite post-apocalyptic world in video games. Alone the details in every frame, the backgrounds and the overall love with which all this was drawn simply blew me away.

On top of this really fantastic visuals comes a excellent technical execution for an Early-Access game. It never crashed for me, it doesn´t need huge amounts of Vram, has very short loading times and never had any frame drops creating a very fluent experience not seen in a lot EA games.

Verdict

BUCK achieves something I didn´t quite expected from it, creating a believable post-apocalyptic world. The artstyle, the dialogues and narration create a beautiful game that doesn´t let much wishes open concerning its presentation and atmosphere. All elements already work well together and build a solid base for future updates and improvements. The only things making BUCK hard to recommend is its unfair and unresponsive combat system and overall content, since its still in an early phase of development, offering nothing near to a complete experience.

7/10

 

 

Once major updates get released for BUCK I´ll update my Review accordingly and give my impressions on them, which will be linked here as well!