Paranautical Activity Critic Reviews

An interesting FPS/roguelike hybrid, with a frantic and addictive gameplay and lots of contents. It's got some balancing issues and sometimes you feel luck counts more than skills, but for old school FPS lovers it's surely an advised buy.

An interesting roguelike FPS, which is hard and beautiful but with loose controls and awful sound.

What started as a mostly unpleasant experience, turned into one of the most fiendishly fun yet difficult games I've played in a very long time. When I got over my bad case of Gamers Ego, I learned to roll with the punches the game dealt me and tried harder. I discovered little exploits I could use to take down some harder monsters a bit easier. I learned how to use weapons properly and which items stack with each other to make powerful builds.

The soundtrack is the highlight of this mixed bag of good ideas and poor implementation and when all is said and done, it's a shame that the gameplay and visuals cannot live up to the scene set by the music.

Its lacklustre gameplay feels repetitive and provides little scope for strategy when you’re in a jam. The boring visuals of Paranautical Activity almost cry out that they’re unsure of themselves, leaving players with the idea that the developers just said “that’ll do”. For a fun-packed genre that is making a tremendous comeback, Paranautical Activity is unfortunately very forgettable.

I wanted to love Paranautical Activity a lot more than I did. I actually got addicted to Ziggurat and other titles using the same premise, at least for more than a handful of runs. Sadly, this title doesn’t bring anything new to the table, nor does it set itself apart outside of the visuals. The levels are boring and the enemies and shooting are not satisfying enough to keep it going.

Though the gameplay itself is fun, the lack of any balance to the difficulty at early stages of the game — even on the easiest difficulty — is maddening.

It’s simply too unforgiving to keep your attention. Menu issues, lack of story, and difficulty aside, it feels like the Xbox One port was almost an afterthought and done on a whim, resulting in a forgettable experience.

Apart from the graphics and premise of shooting aquatic paranormal creatures, there really isn’t much here. This is a shame because the concept is so unique that it just feels like a wasted opportunity.

It’s repetitive, unfairly difficult and nauseatingly ugly to the point that it’s hard to tolerate, never mind enjoy, making it one of the most unsatisfying experiences I’ve had in recent memory.