Breathedge - Launch Trailer - PS4 ,PS5 /2021/
7more than an immortal chicken for company, Breathedge is a survival-adventure game with an undeniably novel setup. Instead of punching trees, you'll navigate a three-dimensional, zero-gravity environment in order to snag supplies, craft tools, and avoid suffocation, all while trying to uncover the twisting plot behind the crash of the largest space liner in history – which happened with you on it. Despite the fresh setting, you'll only get a taste of some rudimentary survival gameplay before a scripted story takes over and drives you out of the survival mechanics entirely. The sense that another wondrous discovery is just around the corner is what drives these games... and Breathedge doesn't have it.
Breathedge is desperate to please with its jokes, slapstick humor, and goofy concepts like corpse-powered coffin robots. It's self-aware that it's a single-player, story-driven survival game and makes references to tropes of the genre (as well as other sci-fi games like Alien: Isolation and Mass Effect), including gags about shoehorned plot contrivances, artificially extended wait times, stale gameplay, and fetch quests. Unfortunately, Breathedge is guilty of the things it makes jokes about, full of the most tedious, repetitive kinds of survival game clichés. Even when I was laughing, its awareness of these issues doesn't make them any less of a problem, and humor isn’t a substitute for innovative gameplay.
Breathedge may launch survival games into the final frontier, but it brings some of the worst tropes of the genre along with it… before abandoning that genre entirely in favor of a linear story propelled by hit-and-miss humor. It's all style over substance, looking great on the surface without much of interest underneath that polish. Without much sense of progression or accomplishment and exploration hampered by an obnoxious oxygen system, it relies too heavily on the initial novelty of floating around and the occasional decent joke. Breathedge just isn't fun to play.