Info about Barotrauma: Official game description: DISCORD ======= About the Game ============== **"Work together to explore and survive, and/or sabotage one another and let the ship go down in fire and flood."** \- Rock Paper Shotgun WELCOME TO EUROPA ----------------- Barotrauma is a 2D co-op survival horror submarine simulator, inspired by games like FTL: Faster Than Light, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress and Space Station 13. It’s a Sci-Fi game that combines ragdoll physics and alien sea monsters with teamwork and existential fear. EMBRACE THE ABYSS ----------------- In the not too distant future, humanity has fled to Jupiter’s moon. With its irradiated icy surface, life can only be found in the ocean below. Travel through a punishing underwater environment and make friends or rivals of the four factions of the world. Discover what lies in the depths of Europa. HELP YOUR CREW SUCCEED, OR MAKE SURE NO ONE DOES ------------------------------------------------ There are as many ways to enjoy Barotrauma as there are ways to die in it. Work together with your crew to achieve your goals, or brace for betrayal when you have a traitor on board. Play with friends, strangers, or your worst enemies. EXPLORE, OPERATE, COMMUNICATE ----------------------------- Navigate underwater, complete missions for the last remnants of humankind, explore the ruins of an alien civilization, flee or fight monsters. Operate complex on-board systems and devices like the sonar, nuclear reactor, weapons, engines and pumps. Communication is key! EXPERIMENT, CRAFT, CREATE ------------------------- Master the complex on-board wiring and the comprehensive crafting and medical systems. Create your own submarines and monsters with built-in editors to rival the standard ones. Even tap directly into our source code and mod away. Features -------- * Play with up to 16 players on board a submarine. Supplement your player count with bots as needed in either singleplayer or multiplayer game modes. * 6 player classes with different skills and tasks: Captain, Engineer, Mechanic, Medic, Security officer and Assistant. * Talent system: Gain experience and unlock talents to improve your character. Each class has three specialization talent trees to customize your playstyle. * Faction and reputation mechanics: Choose who to ally with, help their cause, reap the benefits or suffer the consequences. * Procedurally generated world and missions with multiple game modes for virtually endless replayability. * Comprehensive crafting system: gather materials, craft equipment, weapons, medicines and more to help your crew survive on Europa. * Built-in Submarine, Character and Procedural Animation editors. Share and discover mods directly via Steam Workshop. * Most game data exposed in .xml and the game’s source code publicly available on GitHub for modding. Release date: 13 Mar, 2023 Categories: Cooperative Multiplayer, Survival, Ship Management, Role-playing, Mod Support, Procedural Generation, Real-time Combat, Social Deduction - Hardware Profile: No data Feature extractions: - Community Price: No data - Playtime Metrics: No data - Time-to-fun: No data - Player Archetypes: No data Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category. Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews. What players like: - Engaging & Rewarding Core Gameplay (weight 1): Players consistently praise the game's core gameplay, finding it highly engaging, challenging, and deeply rewarding. Many highlight its unique blend of complexity and accessibility, leading to hundreds of hours of replayable fun, whether played solo or with friends. The game is frequently described as an 'absolute blast' and a 'masterpiece' that offers excellent value for its price. - Immersive & Terrifying Atmosphere (weight 0.56): The game excels in creating a unique, immersive, and often terrifying atmosphere. Players frequently mention the claustrophobic feeling of being in a submarine, the dread of the deep alien ocean, and the effective use of sound design to enhance the horror. The 2D graphics, while simple, are highly effective in conveying this oppressive and suspenseful environment. - Deep Submarine Simulation & Roles (weight 0.54): The game offers deep and realistic submarine simulation, allowing players to manage intricate systems like wiring, oxygen, and reactor temperatures. This is complemented by diverse and interdependent crew roles (e.g., engineer, medic, security), which foster teamwork and strategic thinking, making the multi-crew experience highly immersive and engaging. - Exceptional Multiplayer & Co-op (weight 0.43): Multiplayer is consistently highlighted as a core strength, significantly enhancing the game's fun and replayability. Players emphasize the chaotic, humorous, and memorable experiences that arise from teamwork (or lack thereof) with friends, leading to unique social interactions and emergent storytelling. The game is seen as an excellent test of friendships and a generator of shared, unforgettable moments. - Dynamic & Unpredictable Gameplay (weight 0.28): The game is lauded for its dynamic, unpredictable, and emergent gameplay, where every session feels fresh due to unexpected events, monster attacks, and player interactions. This creates a constant state of tension, requiring quick thinking, adaptability, and teamwork to manage crises. Players appreciate the unique blend of strategy, action, and the potential for chaotic, humorous scenarios. - Robust Modding & Customization (weight 0.24): The game boasts extensive and active modding support via the Steam Workshop, which significantly enhances replayability and customization. Players appreciate the ease of installing mods, ranging from quality-of-life tweaks to total overhauls, allowing them to tailor their experience and add hundreds of hours of new content. - Extensive Content & Active Development (weight 0.21): The game offers a substantial amount of content, providing hundreds of hours of gameplay even in its base form. Developers are consistently updating and improving the game, adding new features and content, which further extends its longevity and replayability. The game's depth is revealed gradually, keeping players engaged over long periods. - Engaging Lore & Story (weight 0.08): The game's lore and story narrative are considered interesting and engaging by players. While not always text-heavy, the background is rich, complex, and intelligently distributed, encouraging players to delve deeper into the game's universe and discover its secrets. Common complaints: - Poor Solo Play & Bot AI (weight 0.44): The single-player experience is widely criticized as tedious, frustrating, and unplayable due to incompetent and suicidal AI bots. Bots often fail to complete objectives, exhibit poor pathfinding, engage in friendly fire, and require excessive micromanagement, making solo play feel like an afterthought. - Unappealing Graphics & Visuals (weight 0.35): The game's 2D graphics, art style, and overall visual presentation are often described as unappealing, basic, or 'wonky,' deterring new players and making it difficult to recommend to friends. This also contributes to a perception of the game being 'half-baked' or lacking polish. - Severe Performance & Optimization Issues (weight 0.29): The game suffers from severe and persistent optimization issues, including low FPS, lag, and frequent crashes, even on powerful PCs. This is exacerbated by its reliance on single-core CPU processing and poor netcode, making the experience unstable and frustrating. - Repetitive & Boring Gameplay (weight 0.28): Players report that the game can become repetitive and boring after the initial immersion, especially in the late game or during solo play. This is attributed to monotonous plot progression, a lack of mission variety, and resource management becoming irrelevant. - Brutal & Unforgiving Difficulty (weight 0.27): The game is frequently described as brutal, unforgiving, and extremely difficult, even for experienced players. Mistakes are heavily penalized, leading to frequent deaths, resource depletion, and intense, stressful experiences. - High Price Point (weight 0.13): Many players find the game's price to be too high, especially given the need to purchase multiple copies for multiplayer and the perceived quality of the game. This high price point deters potential buyers and makes it difficult to convince friends to join. - Negative Public Multiplayer Experience (weight 0.09): Playing on public multiplayer servers is often a negative experience due to a prevalence of griefers, trolls, and chaotic players who intentionally sabotage games. It's difficult to find competent crews or well-moderated servers, making public lobbies unappealing for many. - Problematic Mod Support (weight 0.09): While the game heavily relies on mods for content and quality-of-life improvements, the modding experience itself is problematic. Players report limited mod support, poor compatibility, difficult updates, and frequent mod-breaking changes with official patches. - Disappointing Game Updates (weight 0.06): Recent game updates have been met with disappointment, with players reporting negative changes, persistent bugs, and a perceived lack of focus on core issues. Updates often introduce new content while neglecting existing problems, leading to a deteriorating game experience. - Multiplayer Technical Issues (weight 0.06): Multiplayer suffers from significant technical issues, including desync, lag, and frequent crashes, largely due to poor netcode and optimization. These problems make playing with friends or on public servers a frustrating and often unplayable experience. Gameplay feedback: - Submarine Operation and Survival (weight 0.54): The core gameplay revolves around operating and maintaining a submarine in a hostile underwater environment. Players must manage damage, flooding, and repairs while facing constant threats from creatures and environmental hazards that can breach the hull and sink the vessel. - Class-Based Crew and Teamwork (weight 0.39): The game features a robust class-based crew system, with roles like Captain, Engineer, Mechanic, Medic, and Security Officer. Effective teamwork and communication are crucial for managing the submarine's systems, handling crises, and ensuring the crew's survival, whether playing with friends or managing AI bots. - Campaign and Mission Progression (weight 0.17): The game offers a campaign mode with progression through different locations and increasing difficulty. Players undertake various missions, such as transporting cargo, mining, activating beacons, and fighting monsters, to earn money and reputation for upgrading their submarine and crew. - Detailed Medical and Drug System (weight 0.15): The medical system is detailed, requiring medics to manage various injuries, diseases, and medications. Players can administer a wide range of substances, including morphine and other narcotics, which can lead to both life-saving interventions and chaotic, often humorous, misuse or overdose. - Diverse Hostile Creatures (weight 0.12): The game features a diverse array of hostile creatures, ranging from small crawlers and hammerheads to massive leviathans and 'end worms'. These monsters pose a constant threat, attacking the submarine and its crew, often leading to intense combat and survival challenges. - Hostile Europa Setting (weight 0.12): The game is set on Europa, Jupiter's icy moon, featuring a dark, alien-infested underwater ocean. Players explore this hostile environment, encountering unique fauna, ancient ruins, and increasing radiation levels as they venture deeper into the mysterious 'Eye of Europa'. - Traitor and Faction Mechanics (weight 0.07): The game includes an optional traitor system in multiplayer, where players are secretly assigned objectives to sabotage the crew. This, combined with a faction system and reputation mechanics, adds elements of social deduction, betrayal, and political intrigue to the gameplay. - Varied Weaponry and Explosives (weight 0.06): Players have access to a variety of weaponry, both for the submarine and personal use, including railguns, coilguns, assault rifles, and harpoons. The game also features explosive options like C-4, frag grenades, and even nuclear weapons, allowing for destructive combat and potential self-sabotage. Performance notes: - Poor optimization causes performance issues (weight 0.1): Many players report significant performance issues, including low FPS and lag, especially in cities, during intense combat (like worm attacks), or in later game stages with many entities. This is often attributed to poor optimization, particularly the game's reliance on a single CPU thread, despite some players having powerful hardware. - Low system requirements for many (weight 0.03): Despite optimization concerns, a notable portion of the player base finds the game to be lightweight and not demanding on hardware, running well on a wide range of systems, including older or humble PCs, and even achieving high FPS on low-end graphics cards. - Dedicated servers improve multiplayer (weight 0.02): Dedicated servers are suggested as a way to alleviate connection issues in multiplayer, indicating that server hosting can improve the online experience, though some still report packet loss and stuttering. - Crashes with modded gameplay (weight 0.01): Frequent crashes and sudden exits are reported, particularly when playing with mods rather than the vanilla game, suggesting stability issues with modded gameplay. - Small game size, high RAM usage (weight 0.01): The game is noted for its small installation size (800 MBs) but can consume a surprisingly large amount of RAM (8 GBs), which is an unusual characteristic for its type. - Vanilla runs on single CPU core (weight 0): Vanilla gameplay is reported to run adequately even when limited to a single CPU core, which contrasts with general optimization complaints. Recommendations: - Highly Recommended Game (weight 0.44): The game receives overwhelmingly positive recommendations, with many players rating it highly (often 9/10 or 10/10). It's frequently described as an excellent, unforgettable, and highly enjoyable experience, especially when played with friends. - Best Played with Friends (weight 0.23): The game is strongly recommended for co-op play with friends, as this significantly enhances the experience. Playing solo or with random players is generally not advised, with many suggesting finding a dedicated group or joining community servers for the best enjoyment. - Niche Appeal & Genre Fit (weight 0.06): The game appeals to players who enjoy chaos, challenging survival, and deep-sea exploration. It's particularly recommended for fans of cooperative games, submarine simulations, and those who appreciate a unique blend of horror, management, and problem-solving. - Buy on Sale (weight 0.06): While many recommend buying the game, there's a strong consensus to purchase it during a sale. Players feel it offers good value, especially at a discounted price, making it a worthwhile investment. - Embrace Chaos & Trauma (weight 0.04): Players humorously recommend the game for its chaotic, often fatal, and sometimes absurd experiences. They express a desire to repeat scenarios involving crew deaths, submarine destruction, and other 'barotraumatic' events, highlighting the game's unique and memorable (if dark) humor. Other player notes: - Niche, cooperative, challenging experience (weight 0.1): The game is a niche, cooperative experience best enjoyed with friends, offering a challenging and often chaotic gameplay loop. It appeals to players who enjoy science fiction, unknown worlds, and a steep learning curve, often requiring a willingness to engage with complex systems. The community is generally helpful, but the game's difficulty can strain friendships. - Extensive playtime and replayability (weight 0.07): Players consistently report hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of playtime, indicating significant replayability and depth. This is further enhanced by active developer updates and a vast amount of community-created mod content, ensuring a fresh experience even after extensive play. - Miscellaneous low-quality feedback (weight 0.06): This summary is based on limited and low-quality feedback, including personal anecdotes, meme references, and specific content suggestions. While some players express excitement for future updates and modding, the overall signal is weak and not broadly representative of common player sentiment. - Toxic public server community (weight 0.04): The public server community can be toxic, with frequent griefing and sabotage, leading many players to recommend closed or private servers with friends. This toxicity often stems from players learning the game in private and then being banned from public servers, contributing to a mixed multiplayer experience. - Unique Europa setting (weight 0.02): The game is consistently set beneath the icy, treacherous surface of Europa, Jupiter's moon. This unique and dangerous setting is a core aspect of the game's identity and atmosphere, providing a distinct backdrop for the gameplay. Emotions: - Satisfaction (weight 0.27): Players feel satisfied by the game's deep content, high replayability, and extensive mod support, which allows for diverse and customizable gameplay experiences. Overcoming challenging but rewarding learning curves, mastering game mechanics, and achieving success, especially when playing cooperatively with friends, significantly contribute to this emotion. The game's immersive atmosphere, engaging emergent storytelling, and overall quality also enhance player satisfaction. - Excitement (weight 0.2): Excitement stems from the game's unique, chaotic, and unpredictable nature, particularly in multiplayer scenarios. Players are thrilled by intense combat, survival situations, and the constant threat of deadly sea monsters and unexpected events. The game's horror elements, deep lore, and the potential for emergent drama and stories also contribute to a captivating and energetic gameplay experience. - Amusement (weight 0.14): Amusement is primarily driven by the game's chaotic and absurd multiplayer interactions, often involving friends, leading to hilarious and memorable scenarios. Dark humor, unexpected deaths, and the freedom to engage in both constructive and destructive actions, including 'clowning around,' create a unique and entertaining experience. The emergent gameplay and the sheer absurdity of situations contribute to frequent laughter. - Frustration (weight 0.13): Frustration arises from various technical issues such as poor optimization, bugs, and multiplayer desync. Players also experience frustration due to incompetent bot AI, clunky controls, and the disruptive actions of griefers or uncooperative crewmates. The game's steep learning curve and the difficulty of solo play further contribute to this negative emotion. - Disappointment (weight 0.05): Disappointment is often linked to the game's price point, unfulfilled expectations regarding single-player content, and repetitive gameplay without mods. Players express dissatisfaction with unaddressed bugs, poor optimization, and a perceived lack of depth in certain game mechanics or story elements. The difficulty in gathering friends to play and the negative experiences with random players also contribute to this feeling. - Joy (weight 0.04): Joy is predominantly experienced through cooperative multiplayer, where playing with friends leads to chaotic, humorous, and memorable experiences. The freedom to prank teammates, the satisfaction of overcoming challenges together, and the overall fun and engaging gameplay contribute to a strong sense of enjoyment and camaraderie. - Enjoyment (weight 0.02): Enjoyment is derived from the game's engaging gameplay loop, immersive atmosphere, and the depth of its mechanics, including crafting and character progression. Playing with multiple people, especially friends, enhances this experience, allowing for cooperative play, crisis management, and memorable moments despite the inherent chaos. - Fear (weight 0.02): Fear is primarily caused by the game's terrifying monsters, the oppressive deep-sea environment, and the constant feeling of being hunted or facing unknown dangers. The Lovecraftian horror elements, stressful situations, and the threat of permadeath contribute to an intense and frightening atmosphere, often triggering thalassophobia. - Appreciation (weight 0.01): Players appreciate the game's unique atmosphere, intricate mechanics, and the dedication of its developers. The active modding community, creative tools like the submarine editor, and the game's overall design, including sound design and distinct class roles, are highly valued for enhancing the gameplay experience and extending its longevity. - Engagement (weight 0.01): Engagement stems from the game's complexity, high replayability, and the deep strategic planning required. Players are drawn in by intense role-playing, rich lore, and the challenging learning curve. The game's addictiveness and the wide range of activities, from missions to combat, keep players invested for hundreds of hours. - Confusion (weight 0.01): Confusion is mainly experienced by new players due to the game's initial complexity, steep learning curve, and lack of clear explanations for mechanics and modding. The challenging beginning and difficulty in understanding game systems contribute to this feeling. - Anger (weight 0.01): Anger arises from perceived developer incompetence, unaddressed bugs, and multiplayer issues. Players also express anger over disruptive players (griefers, saboteurs) and unfair in-game deaths caused by others. Game design choices that are seen as detrimental or a waste of potential can also provoke this emotion. - Surprise (weight 0.01): Surprise is triggered by unexpected in-game events, such as the sudden appearance of giant monsters or unforeseen sequences of events. Players are also surprised by the game's unexpected depth and complexity, often finding it better than their initial impressions. - Hope (weight 0.01): Hope is tied to the desire for future improvements, additions, and fixes, particularly regarding optimization and UI. Players express a belief in the game's potential for growth and continued developer support, often seeing mods as a necessary means for improvement. - Despair (weight 0.01): Despair is caused by the constant struggle, overwhelming situations, and the inevitability of death and failure in the harsh game environment. Being stranded, losing crew, and the futility of efforts in dire situations contribute to a sense of helplessness and impending doom. - Addiction (weight 0): Addiction is a result of the game's engaging and challenging nature, particularly when played cooperatively with others. The unique appeal and chaotic multiplayer experiences create a strong desire to keep playing, leading to significant playtime. - Boredom (weight 0): Boredom can set in due to slow pacing, unengaging tasks, and repetitive gameplay, especially in single-player mode. Long periods of AFK or routine activities during voyages and at outposts contribute to this feeling. - Caution (weight 0): Caution is advised due to the game's difficulty, potential bugs, and the necessity of playing with friends for an optimal experience. Players are warned about the single-player experience, the game's price, and the unpredictable behavior of the community, including the presence of husks. - Love (weight 0): Love for the game stems from its overall quality, depth, and unique atmosphere. Players develop a strong affection for its complexity, rogue-like elements, and the fun, often humorous, gameplay, especially when shared with friends and within the community. - Challenge (weight 0): The game's challenging nature, steep and unforgiving learning curve, and realistic mechanics contribute to this emotion. Players find the initial game pressure and the high requirement for cooperative play to be significant challenges.}