Livelock is a neat Action RPG set in a destroyed world where you play one of three robots with a small range of skills and weapons in order to overthrow evil robots at the order of an AI overlord. I had fun with it, going through the whole thing almost with each class. I didn't try to go for high scores or find every collectible, but I still had a good time shooting tons of robots regardless.
I find the character system a bit weird, you create robots from three available classes - marksman, tank and some kind of support robot - and you can create more than one of each type which is weird, why would you need to create more than three characters? Why do you need to create characters, even? There are no permanent customization choices, so it's not like you could make 'wrong' decisions and needed to restart. The classes play differently enough, but they all have three weapons slots and three active skills. You can swap between two weapons for each slot, they have stats of dubious value and it's kinda hard to compare them, but they act differently so you'll pickup the one you prefer, and each class has a few skills with cooldowns and two specializations (so you can decide if your mines explore harder or longer) and a 'ultimate' skill that's very flashy. The skills were fine but a bit uneven and I felt like the choices you would make didn't impact much.
After selecting a mission from the lobby, you pick a difficulty and get to work. I'm not a big fan of the lobby system in place, you have to back out of missions to change your gear and skills and even if you play offline the game acts like if it needed 'ready' checks for everything. I wish you could change your loadout between missions (instead of having to see a screen all about 'points' for instance). Missions are mainly linear affairs about you getting from point A to point B, destroying everything in sight. Sometimes you have to destroy waves of things, sometimes you have to defend a thing while destroying things, it plays pretty well. My only issues with the actual gameplay are that it gets really difficult to understand what's going on once missiles, beams and particle effects start flying in all directions, and that's not helped by the blurry broken screen-like effect you get once you start taking damage.
Nonetheless, Livelock is a cool game and even with all my minor grips, it plays well and the core loop is fun and you always unlock new things. The three characters played differently enough to make mission replays feel like they're not exactly the same and the limited customization was enough for the scope of the game.
