Enemy is a beautiful $30.00 game masquarading as a $15.00 still slightly buggy one. I suspect the lack of more formal reviews from websites at this time is due to a couple of factors including the odd pricing making it difficult to evaluate the dollar to entertainment ratio and the need for a little bit more spit polish. Given that the game is a week old and the creator's obvious passion for it, I'm not worried about the later.
I'm assuming if you're reading about Enemy you're already familiar with squad based tactics and roguelikes. (If you're not, I'd check out other reviews) For purposes of figuring out where this reviewer's familiarity with the genres, I can ironman the new XCOM on normal difficulty with pretty much no squad deaths (but will still get squished on ironman hard mode), and have pounded through T.O.M.E. on the default difficulty but get murdered on higher difficulties. Which is to say I consider myself a somewhat competent and disciplined player in the genres, but not an exceptional one by any means.
The unique aspects of the game include the destructable environment, the 80's video game idiom, and a good level of squad customization. And of course, the combining of the squad turn based tactics and elements of the roguelike genre such as permadeath, no ability to reload saves, and procedural generation so that each game is unique.
The deliciousness of the voxel-based fully destructable world cannot be underestimated. Watching a a walking bomb blow up a house, grenading a section of the castle ceiling on someone, or debris smack your players around are all deeply satisfying. The individual biomes so far have reasonable variety, though the Action and Adventure biomes could use a bit more distinction in terms of the enemies they have there.
The unit customization is fun to mess with, and allows for a good variety of squaddies. You can have troops that react quickly to incoming enemies, ones that can see far and keep calm in difficult situations, ones that can move farther and jump higher when they need to, and ones that just don't die as quickly.
On the weapons of choice, in addition to ranged and melee you have bombs (throwing grenades for the most part, though you have land mines, tear gas, time bombs and staves) and Throwing. Throwing is a bit of an odd duck in some aspects-it's definitely the skill I'm most likely to injure my squad mates with, but picking up chunks of castle and chucking them provides for deeply satisfying moments. It also requires a bit more set up as you're constantly scavenging for the best things to throw at people and/or relying on other units for damage as much as you can.
The really neat thing is that, say, unlike X-COM, you have near complete customization when it comes to character growth. While the supporting troops you get are from a set of random archetypes, over time you will be able to mold them into the troops you want.
There's also fun to be had dressing them up in mix and match outfits from the different genres. My bandana wearing sports bra and camo pants princess does in fact, bring all the boys to the yard. By throwing them.
In terms of unique game mechanics for squad based tactics, the two major additions are mental damage and reaction fire. Mental damage is taken when your troops are hit or nearly hit, set on fire, or other various phenonama occurs. When it hits zero, your character will either go beserk, attacking the nearest enemy, or panic. I haven't seen this occur much in my own troops (I make the Mind stat a priority) but deliberately initiating it in the enemy is good fun. Firing shots with little to no chance of success becomes a valid tactic, and I've panicked more than one enemy by throwing bridge sections at it.
A high reaction stat allows you to interrupt movement and actions by enemies. And if you have low reaction they will at times interrupt your actions. Multiple interrupts a turn can happen, especially if you're moving your chaacters cautiously. Doing so and leaving extra time units with them will add a great deal of longevity to them. It's not just reaction fire too-being able to step a few steps back or forward can be more than enough to turn a sudden enemy into a managable experience. While I haven't fully considered the ramifactions of this system, I do find it to be a quite enjoyable addition to the game.
I have seen small complaints about the game on the forums including the need for more healing, no suppression fire, to be able to sell items, and the notion of a 'cover bonus'. I think that the developer has put in more thought than is often appreciated (and for the record, suppression fire and cover bonuses do exist in the game, just not perhaps in a form people realize at first blush).
Other complaints I think are reflective of the lack of a tutorial. It took me an embarassingly long time to realize that once I cleared a region, I could move back to it from any other cleared region, or that I can unload weapons with ammunition by simply right-clicking it. The game mechanics are not that readily apparent to the player, especially one unfamiliar with squad based tactics norms, and I think, rightly or wrongly, that the developer is relying on player familiarity with the genre to a certain extent until a proper tutorial system is set up. Given that many people may be drawn to it for the nostalgia factor, I suspect that the relatively unforgiving mechanics are a bit of a rude awakening.
And finally, the game does have a few bugs, which I find much more forgiveable in this day and age when even Triple A game studios suffer the same problems. The only real bug I dealt with was the inability to use the mouse in the beginning-I don't mean to excuse the severity of a game stopping bug such as this, but by exiting out and continuing the save game it went away, never to return for that save file.
This game does beg for a few adjustments. The biggest one that comes to mind (after having a more comprehensive tutorial, explaining more game mechanics to the player, and some bug squashing) is the need for an easy mode and a hard mode. I think the easy mode can be done with little effort-probably the best thing for players unfamiliar with the genre is to treat healing as a right, rather than a privilege to some extent, and to dial back the grenade and melee damage a tad.
Hard mode, to me at least, would involve making the enemies keep a bit closer together, making noise more of a factor. Beating the game took me about 10 hours of experimentation, and one very cautious run. I had one squaddie death-stood too close to a brick wall at a bad time-, but once you get in full swing, there's not quite enough there to disrupt your progress.
I'd also work on having a reason to go through the maps a bit more quickly, perhaps by having enemies deliberately group together after coming across a dead friend or hearing noise. I think with these additions and a few others, a satisfactorily hard mode could be accomplished without the need to tweak that much in the way of stats or exp rates.
When I said that this is a 30 dollar game at heart, it is because I think it has excellent replayability potential and good bones. I do think it's a significant enough contribution to the genre that I'd like to see the developer able to focus on it for at least the next couple of years to come, his interest willing. With more enemies and a bit of more variety (I believe DLC should come in handy there) , difficulty modes and some touch up, I can see this as a game I come back to again and again.
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