Livelock

Note: I played exclusively with the Hex chassis by myself. Your experience may vary if you play multiplayer.

Livelock starts slow, missing the destruction and hectic twinstick shooter action that the trailer seems to promise. Once the game settles in, however, it delivers with some extremely satisfying gameplay and pretty graphics. Awful controls almost made me ask for a refund, though.

One thing that sets Livelock apart from other twinsticks is its classes and progression. With 3 classes and a hoard of weapons and abilities to choose from, it caters to many different playstyles. This progression, however, is both a strength and a weakness. You're obviously underpowered at the start, missing some key pieces of your kit. You're even missing some stat upgrades (like crit rate or movement speed) that you unlock towards the end of the game. The first of the three acts of the game feels very slow as a result. But once your reach Act 2, you have access to most of your kit and things begin to feel very good. From Act 2 onwards, the environments and setpieces are really quite impressive, especially for this genre. Unfortunately, the game is a bit short, but has a good degree of replayability and a low price tag to compensate. There's 4 different difficulties and scoreboards to provide an extra challenge on subsequent playthroughs.

The story itself is utterly unremarkable. It does the job of giving me an excuse to shoot hoards of robots, but that's about it.

The controls are awful. Controller support is poor, and, if it weren't for Steam's controller API, my triggers never would have worked. In the end, I didn't even use a controller because there is absolutely no snapping to targets. It makes quickly lining up a target for a railgun shot incredibly difficult. I ended up using mouse and keyboard and could rebind everything, but it didn't actually change any of the on screen prompts, which just lead to confusion.

Livelock is a good sidetrack for an afternoon or two. I would recommend for fans of twinstick shooters or people looking to get into them. Be wary of the controls, though, and if they don't work for you then return it. It's not worth wrestling with them for the entire game.