Shadowgrounds: Survivor
I recently finished Shadowgrounds: Survivor, the follow up to Shadowgrounds (a good $10 game). While I happily recommend Shadowgrounds to people who like shooters, I wasn’t impressed with Survivor. It had a feature set that sounded like it was aimed at me, but none of those features worked out well in practice.
Character development was foremost among the features that just didn’t work. In the original, you have an arsenal of guns and you earn a variety of upgrades throughout the game. They retained that in Shadowgrounds, but they split the weapons between three separate characters. That means the arsenal was cut into small, unsatisfying chunks that forced a specific style of gameplay. The addition of some minor stat improvement for the individual characters didn’t even come close to making up for the loss of guns.
Difficulty is one of the things that really made Shadowgrounds fun. It was challenging and I frequently teetered on the edge of death, but I rarely died. Often, it felt like a scene from Aliens, where I was desperately fighting against an overwhelming and dangerous foe. That’s gone in Survivor. The game was trivially easy, even starting on the highest difficulty. I was never in danger of dying, and it was rare to even take damage.
So, I recommend trying Shadowgrounds but not the sequel. You can find it (or the demo) on Steam or Totalgaming.net, although the demo doesn’t deliver any pitched fights.