Okay G String is based on the Half-Life 2 source code, I’m so glad they released that to the public so people could build games with it. This is one of said games. In it you play as a Korean teenager named Myo, you’ll never see me use that name again because that’s about as often as her name comes up. You are in a dystopian future… where both nanny and sex robots are common things for people to own… wait this is a dystopia? Hmmm okay then.

You’ll notice how I didn’t talk about the story even slightly in the above, that’s because as long as this game is, the story doesn’t make any sense to me. I know at the start a bunch of revolutionaries took up a space ship to crash it into a giant military space base, and then you’re called in, so I assumed you were some sort of special soldier or something. You have telekinesis and psychokinesis, hence special. Then an AI goes out of control and the bots start killing people so you choose to go deal with that. Then you figure out you were a biological weapon test subject. You’re fighting the military throughout this, at first because they think you’re a robot even though you literally look nothing like one, then they want to kill you cause you have the special powers even though they knew you did from the start. All throughout you sometimes have weird dreams of this alien space that’s a giant mass of fleshy stuff, and conversations with people telepathically, then maybe you’re a clone. I… I don’t know what the fuck is going on in this game. It feels like the plot was a bunch of cool stuff that was just kind of haphazardly tossed together. It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s almost as if someone who had a really bad bought of ADHD wrote this, it’s hard to follow because it’s just hitting cool thought after cool thought without any meat to most of it and without any ends tying together for the most part.

The combat is amazing, as expected after all Half-Life 2 was awesome, and this game is just as good since it’s build upon it. The weapons are completely reskinned, they all look fairly good and match the environment. There’s not just a few weapons either, there’s a couple of nearly every type of gun, and they’re spaced fairly well throughout the game. Though some of them are hard to get your hands on sadly, namely sniper rifles, my beautiful, beautiful sniper rifles.

The actual environmental locations are fairly varied as well, there’s giant, shitty, seedy apartements, sewers, broken down buildings, factories, a giant lake of death, space ships (both normal and Zero-G moments), a giant military space base, city blocks, and more; just all sorts of places. I was really impressed with the sheer amount of places you could visit, but not only that But there’s alternate routes through most, maybe all, of the levels. The level of dedication the developer had with this is insane. Every level, I think, has at least two, who knows maybe more, different routes to get out of it in order to carry on. Sadly you can’t go through one route and then go back, the area behind you always somehow gets destroyed. Which is why I’ve played this almost five times now. I’m not entirely sure I’ve gone every route because, again, the game is fairly large.

There’s also some voice acting in this, you do meat some characters that talk to you, but you don’t talk back, and they note that, Myo can’t actually speak. Usually characters just act like you’ve spoken to them or act like you’re a dickhead for ignoring them, I like when they point out you must be a mute and don’t treat you lesser for it. Most of the other NPCs that you interact with in story element ways do talk to you over your coms or through the various TVs scattered around.

There’s a small selection of enemies, I’d love to see more but I understand why there isn’t. You have Nanny bots that just walk up to you and swing, I don’t remember seeing any sex bots to destroy off the top of my head, a few different types of soldier, the trusty turrets, and the flying sentinels which are all spinning blade ones, and these giant weird worm robot things. There’s also maybe mutant people, I know there were some enemies that crawled around rather quickly on all fours like apes and attacked, but I’m not really sure. Some of the areas clearly have some sort of contagion growing in them, but it’s never touched on so I don’t know what those people are.

Overall I rather enjoy the game, sadly the dev hasn’t gotten much love in the way of sales, which is really disheartening cause I really enjoy this and they’re still working on more and more improvements to it. The improvements are labeled… oddly, G String has nothing to do with anything in game as far as I know, it’s just named after the clothing item. The updates are the same, the first major update was called the A cup update, and right now it’s on the B cup update, and yes that’s exactly what it means. Usually I’d just sit here and be like “fucking seriously dude?” but for some reason with this game, it amuses me. However, the dev really needs to work more, significantly more on the story aspect, cause right now it’s a clusterfuck that doesn’t make any sense, at all, it’s a bunch of cool story elements that are just thrown at the wall with no connecting well anything. If you turn your brain off and just enjoy the game as a mindless thing, it’s really fun, put too much thought into trying to understand the story and you might not like it as much, at least that was what I found. While I might have enjoyed the combat and the environment, I am a story person, this game was trying to tell a story, and that story was a fucking tangled mess, so I can’t readily say I give it the seal, I still suggest the game though cause it was fun, but it fundamentally failed to tell it’s story to me and that hurt it quite significantly.

G String was developed by Eyaura.

Point of Sale: Steam.

Price: $18

A review copy of the game was provided by the dev.

darkmikasonfire does not award G String the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval, but does still suggest people try it out.