Serum | Worth Your Time and Money (Overview)

Serum is the new game we are looking at today with a Review of what it is and how its gameplay plays. First we will review the need to know basics of Serum before jumping into deeper gameplay impressions. Dive into a thrilling survival adventure where an unknown liquid takes control of your life. Extract Serum to stay alive, battle dangerous creatures, solve puzzles, and uncover clues about past events.
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[@Myaora]

I was very interested in the concept but you're 100% on the money with this one. A lot of the design choices are very frustrating. Issues similar games have solved years ago, missing QoL features and the time pressure, while an interesting concept, just means I beeline for the objective and forgo exploring and gathering because that takes precious time. The choice to have chests cost time to open is also a wild one. With the starting serum, you get 3 doses of 5 minutes each - meaning 17 minutes including your starting 2 minutes - that's not a lot of time to explore, fight, complete your objective AND return to your base. I guess I just won't be opening that chest then because that takes 2 minutes of my time away - not including the time to do the puzzle that they make you do to open the chest.
The pressure I feel is constant and while I like games to put pressure on me I also want some moments of peace. Serum's constantly ticking timer means your only moments of rest are inside your base. You can't even pause the game. The timer keeps running and enemies can attack you. I understand the devs eventually mean to add multiplayer to the game but I should really be able to pause in single player. It's a bloody mystery to me why devs keep doing this to games.
Combat is clunky and I usually just end up running away from the health sponges while other enemies appear in packs and chase you down relentlessly. Mind you, each fight takes time which is a very precious resource. When you do choose to engage in combat, I find that simply strafing around the enemy means they can't hit you and you can just stunlock them until you run out of stamina - which you can recover while strafing around the enemy.
If you do end up dying to a lack of time or because you got swarmed by enemies the games has you drop your loot - which you then have to go retrieve. Which means you need to serum up again, run back to your loot - hope the enemies aren't still there - and then go back to the base to secure the loot. They did patch the moving one item to your box at a time thing, now you can move stacks. It's still clunky, though.
One of the very first missions has you go out only to discover a mist you can't pass without the right Serum - whelp, I'm low on time so better go back to my base to reset the infection meter and make more Serum before I fight the enemy they instruct me to fight. When you beat the enemy you have to make a new Serum which means, you guessed it, another trip back to the base before I can finally make the trip once more to pass the mist. 3 trips back and forward - more if you end up dying - to do a single quest in the early stages of the game. For a game so focused on time, the devs clearly don't respect mine and I don't respect them in return.

[@ShahabSheikhzadeh]

There should be a rule to have a certain sensitivity when doing a recording. Watching the jerky way of turning and the speed at which you do it is a little jarring/much. Maybe it's too early for me. Hah.

[@OrbitalShell]

I can't play a gae that forces me to do something to not die. That just does not sound even as a mechanic - no time to get lost in the world if i'm going to be keeping my eye on a timer.