This game is not without its frustrating parts, mainly respawning enemies, framerate drops and the issue of getting stuck inside geometry. While all of these make the limited save system more frustrating than it need be, the saves are still far less limited than you might think, and I ended up with a stockpile of six save disks by the end. I made the game more difficult and frustrating than it needed to be, as usual.

Frustration aside, this game is just very fun. It reinforces my belief that survival horror games and dungeon crawlers are secretly part of the same exact genre. This game is quite restrictive with ammunition in particular, moreso than any survival horror game I have played, and it makes for quite a thrilling experience. Finding boxes of ammunition hidden around the levels was always exciting.

At first, I thought that the balance of the game might be unfairly skewed towards melee builds because enemies respawned, but ammunition did not. However, when I revisited previous levels, I always seemed to find at least a little ammunition in some very obvious spots. Furthermore, the items in those spots were different when I reloaded the game. This leads me to believe that ammo does actually restock, ensuring that you are always just shy of running dry.

The graphics and sound in this game are really well done. For such an eccentric visual style, they truly managed to nail the feeling of satisfying gunplay. Exploding enemies into bits felt rewarding throughout.

Overall, you see what you get with this game, really. I have always been a defender of tank controls, and an opponent of the idea of 'outdated' game design, so this game was quite a treat.

Speciall shoutout to the final boss. Imsims are notoriously terrible at having boss fights, but the final part of Sonar Shock tells me that the developer understood what they were going for with the clunky UI, as it's a test of your multitasking abilities, rather than a damage sponge.

This game has some bugs that made it really frustrating, and the combat is bad enough to be unfun.