This job we are working, the stuff we are going through is a typical day of retail for me
Lethal Company is an early-access game that has been popular recently, so I checked it out after hearing positive feedback from my friends. After playing it, I will say that the game is quite fun. It’s a black comedy horror game that has procedurally generated moons that you explore. However, I should mention that at the time of me writing this review, the game is in early access, so anything I mention could be changed in a future update of the game.
Pros and Cons
Pros
Fun multiplayer-based game
Lots of different scrap items to collect, with some being very odd
Many different Entities for you to encounter and hazards
Lots of mods available to install to enhance your experience
Nice retro graphical feel that can be very creepy
Cons
Gameplay can get repetitive
Gameplay
Lethal Company will task the player to team up with three other people, preferably friends, to collect scrap on seven different moons. Each moon has a certain difficulty level to them, where you can encounter different hazards or monsters. Although, it should be mentioned that the last three moons are the hardest in the game. These moons cost credits to go to and the price is paid once per chance of orbit. This also means that if employees land on the same moon back-to-back, they don’t have to pay the cost to go on there again. There are also weather effects in the game that will hinder the progression. Each moon also has a certain size and certain quota to be made.
There are a lot of different items for you to collect, you will start each mission off with sixty pieces of scrap and you have the option to buy some helpful items. These can be flashlights to help you see in the dark (the game gets difficult to see in certain areas), a weapon like a shovel, or a trusty shotgun that you can find from this one enemy, called The Nutcracker.
There are many mods available to customize your experience as well. You can change the design of the scrap you collect as well as change the character appearances. There is a nice variety of mods in this area allowing you to change the looks of some scrap to appear like plushies from different shows, games, or anime. One of them can be Frieren from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End!
There is a certain quota you need to meet for you to complete your mission, with a set number of days. If you fail to meet that quota, it will be a game over for you and your teammates. You can sell your dead teammates if they do fall and die but they are only worth five dollars. This goes to show the Lethal Company is just a game that shows us typical retail days of working on the job.
Now, if you do go on the dangerous moons, you can obtain higher amounts of scrap as well as encounter more dangerous monsters. This opposite is true for easier moons where you will get fewer amounts of scrap and less powerful monsters. However, I should mention that this game is meant to be a black-comedy-based game., so there will be of course some funny moments of horror in the game.
As you explore the moons, you will encounter entities in the basements of the buildings and sometimes depending on the time of day can come across monsters outside as well.
Each time you land on a moon, you will always arrive at 8 AM, and when it hits at least 5 PM, certain entities will spawn. During an Eclipse they will spawn any time of the day, but the spawn rate can be changed for these specific entities. When walking around in a basement on a moon, there can be a chance that a certain entity will spawn, and it can be a hazard or a nuisance to the players. These hazards can either be the weather patterns, land mines, or turrets, so be careful when walking around.
One of the most fun aspects of Lethal Company is the mods you can install as they enhance the experience completely and what really made the game fun for me. The game supports up to four players mainly but there is a mod to increase the player count. This is a mod I highly recommend you download in case you have that fifth friend who wants to play. There are also cosmetic mods like I mentioned above where changing the appearances of your character and entities can help to keep the game feeling fresh and entertaining. The variety is there, so if the base game is beginning to feel stale, then mods will greatly help to keep the game fun.
The only issue I have with Lethal Company is that the gameplay remains the same throughout. Nothing is really added to it and by that, you just go and collect scrap and that’s really it, although this may not be a problem for fans of this genre, it is still worth mentioning as some may get easily bored with this rinse and repeat style of gameplay.
Graphics and Performance
The graphics for the game have this old horror theme to them that makes the planets you visit creepy. I tested the game on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, AMD Ryzen 5 1500X Quad-Core Processor 3.50, and 16 GB of RAM, I had no issues while playing and low-end PCs should be able to run this game perfectly.
Final Verdict
Lethal Company is an incredibly fun game that was honestly a surprise for me, with a unique style that I really enjoyed. Although, as I mentioned before, I do recommend you look at the available game mods as this enhances the experience and was one of the key factors that kept me enjoying the game. Not saying you can’t enjoy the base game by itself, but I do think mods will help make it more fun and prevent the gameplay loop from feeling stale.