LifeisXbox’s The Persistence Enhanced review | You are a clone of yourself and revived by the onboard AI, who has the memories of a crew member. You are stuck with your ship next to a black hole. While you are being revived, something went wrong with the last jump and you need to fix your ship before you can take off. Only issue is that infected humans are blocking your way to get there. When I saw the trailer for the game, I was like, this looks easy. A game in space while trying to solve objectives and killing alien infected humans. I’m going full Rambo on this and it’s done. I really thought it was going to be a breeze to finish this game. Ooh boy was I wrong!! This game is hard. I tried the sneaky part and found out I died way more this way. Then trying to speedrun it. But even then, I still managed to fail. This game is hard to compare with other games. It’s like Dark Souls meets Dead Space and Alien (Isolation). Everything is trying to kill you. You don’t get that many explanations how things work. You need to figure it out. It is a learning curve. I must say that after dying so many times, I was getting better at it.
What we liked!
- The game in general is a solid game | It is well thought off. It is a hard game even on NORMAL. I wonder how it is on hard?? Every time you die, the decks get shuffled. You will never run the same way twice. This can be frustrating at moments. One of the reasons this game is so hard. You might have to run a long way or a short way. If you want, you can go guns blazing in this game, but the guns you fabricate or find have limited ammo. You can fabricate specific weapons on specific fabricators points, but the locations may vary. You can fabricate weapons, but it costs and you need to wait a long time before it recharges. Even then, if you enter a room with the wrong weapon in hand, you are dead. I’m not kidding here! My favorite weapon is the peace keeper!
- Atmosphere | This game gave me so much jump scares. The setting of this game is brilliant. I really felt scared a times, because the suspense was intense. When you finally arrive at the place you need to be and then suddenly you have strong opponents in front of you and not the right tools to defeat them. You have 2 choices, double back and try to get the weapon you need or try and sneak passed them. It’s for you to decide, I know I made the wrong choices a lot. Things also might happen when you run around, like suddenly vents that starts to blow poison gas. You can also hear the enemies in the rooms next to you, that is why you scan the rooms before you go in.
- Character | You can upgrade you character to with better stats for al sorts points. Armor for better loot, stealth, health and many more. You have to choose wisely on what you want to use or what you need. I choose for extra loot and drops. Because it is useful. You might go completely in the other direction. You can also upgrade your health, stealth, melee and dark matter points. You are going to need to upgrade this too. I’m not going to spoil anything, so just keep this in mind. Also, while you are exploring the decks, you will find bodies of your team. Sadly though, they are dead, but you can revive in their bodies. Those bodies have also different stats. You can really mix and match how you want to configure your character and use it in the game.
- Enemies |There is enough variation on enemies, the higher you go on decks. Almost every enemy has a unique way of taking them down. You can try and kill them with your ‘stem cell’ gun, but some enemies are like, why are you tickling me and you die. The Gravity gun is also really fun to use and very useful to use on certain enemies, but as I said before LIMITED in use. Not only the enemies try the kill you, the loot also.
Somewhere between
- Ray tracing | I don’t know why, is it because my tv is a LED 1080p or do I need a 4K tv, but the game was acting strange when all the setting were turned on. Everything started slowing down when I entered a room. It was awful experience. You have the option to turn it off or down. I tried a couple of setting, which suited me the best. Basic ray tracing was best solution for me. I don’t want to go to deep in this, but disable the ray-tracing reflections. Then the game runs smooth. If you decide to turn it off completely, well then, the game is really dark, but it will increase your experience about running in the dark.
- More Graphics | While I was playing the game, I had some weird experiences, maybe it is by design, because it is a horror survival game. At the fabricators the wall would vibrate, or when you scanned a room, some static would pass on my screen. Maybe it was intended, but I didn’t like it personally.
- Looting | You need to loot everything in every room! For looting stuff, opening doors or picking up stuff you just need to look a it. If you are accustomed from other looting games, you press X and you pick up stuff, like in borderlands 3. Here you just look at it and you pick it up. I sometimes wished it would be faster, or you might change it in an option so you can decrease this. But again, it is my personal opinion.
- Weapons menu | This one you will have to experience. But the D-pad to change weapons is slow or skips a gun or selects the wrong one. I found out the best way to select your weapon is just to select your loot menu and select the weapon you want, also it pauses what is happening and you have better control.
What we disliked
- Game save |I didn’t like the fact that you could save your progress. Yes, it saved your progress on the objectives you were currently completing, but I mean you turn the game of to play another game or you wanted to save, because have good loot for the moment and you want to continue. Well unlucky, it’s all gone and you start from base deck again. I’m totally fine with running all the way back to the start to save my character progress and then continue the day after, but that wasn’t possible. Also, when you died and you didn’t unlock the transporter to Deck 3. (I’m not going to tell you how this works, for you to find out.) You had to run through Deck 1 back to Deck 2 to get to Deck 3. You lose a lot of time.
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