I did like a few things about this game. for one the revival feature. It's actually pretty easy to revive your teammates if one dies before you can revive them you can press H and revive them. But doing so results in a horde being called to you. I think that definitely makes the game much more of a challenge but it's unique and fun. I especially liked the variety of equipment, the grenades, and other items are really fun to play with. Tossing a goo grenade down in front of the enemies and blasting them away is satisfying as all hell. Or taking a turret to a defense fight and watching it wreck monsters all around is very nice. There's also the perk card system that allows you to do a lot of special things. I liked the perk I got where I could use goo grenades to heal myself and my teammates while slowing enemies. There's a bunch of other perks as well I have yet to discover.

The Anacrusis is currently in Early Access so there are obviously some flaws. When you jump into the game you'll be put in a room with weapons and a door. You aren't given clear instructions on how to leave. that's a big problem with this game, you aren't given instruction practically at all. One of my teammates had to let me out of the room because I couldn't figure it out. After that, you are just walking around trying to find the objective and looting rooms. From the very start, it's random what you will come across, The flasher enemy could come out and summon a huge horde on you and kill you almost immediately. This will happen to you over and over again and if you run out of ammo you will be forced to switch to your pistol and pray to God you can kill all of them. The entire game becomes spray and prey and it's not very fun to do that.

One thing ill gives it is the level design is very pretty. You can walk around and explore quite large areas and find different equipment. There are lots of little things to look at so it's clear they spent a lot of time making the ship look pretty. And surprisingly even will all these nice graphics the game runs quite smoothly. I run an RTX 3070 and 9900K and due to some motherboard throttling sometimes suffer frame drops in a few games. This one with a mix of ultra and high settings plus DLSS on auto ran quite smooth with a few little hiccups and bumps. But otherwise very very smooth performance.

However, I was not very happy with the story. As in there really isn't any story at all. You get a small intro cutscene that shows some gameplay and it has characters talking but after that, you are thrown in the game. You never have any idea what is happening and that was apparent to me on the 3rd level of the first episode where i was thrown into an area and told to go to an elevator. Unless i missed it there was no mention of going up or going to an elevator on the 2nd level.

Also, there isn't any tutorial or way to learn the game's controls or details. You will likely make the same mistake I did at the start by trying to sprint but find that you instead let out some shockwave when you press the sprint button. The enemy types can be confusing and you won't know what to do sometimes. I imagine if someone has never played L4D or B4B they wouldn't understand how to play this game.


Overall? I believe the game has extreme potential but it was released way too early. It has the love put into it I can 100% tell but the mechanics of the game are usually executed poorly. The AI system that was somewhat taken from L4D's director mechanic can make the game extremely hard off the bat. and like I said if someone had never played L4D or B4B they wouldn't know how to play this game well. I think they need to improve upon things like a variety of everything. More variates of weapons more variates of enemies such and such. And they need to pace this all out so the game doesn't throw everything at you at once and right from the start like it currently does. However, the game is in early access and so alot of these problems I can understand. I feel like if given the proper updates this game could turn into a really really fun game.

The Anacrusis is available right now in early access on Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, And PC on the Microsoft Store and Steam.