Stealth is one of the most difficult video game genres to nail. Art, coding of AI, and the profound sense of wonder within a lifelike puzzle come together to make something entirely unique. Whole triple A teams can often fold under the pressure of creating the next stealth hit. So there’s a bit of surprise when a small team like that of Deep Fried Enterprises (developer) crafted a game with a decent amount of prowess. Root is a first person shooter/stealth game with a very futuristic Minecraft aesthetic. It encompasses ten levels within its current build, all of which have multiple routes and secretive vents. Root even includes a quite giggle inducing narrator who never actually speaks. This narrator guides you through hacking an evil corporation (which explains the Tron look) with your smarts and weapons to assist. The roller coaster starts slow and builds to puzzles that feel almost impossible at times, but are always challenging the player to think their strategies through.
Looking at the style of Root it is easy to mistake it for a Minecraft mod. Blocks build the surroundings in which you and your enemies reside. Extremely solid blues, greens, and yellows make for a dull color palette. This bland style is uniform throughout the game, and is a big reason why I took breaks often. At some points I felt like anything in my house would be more visually pleasing than what I saw on the screen. The fact that solid blue was the only color I held synonymous to Root is a very bad thing.
Yes this is a pure refined stealth game.
Yes I realize this is a small team and so some aspects are more focused on than others, but this serves for no valid justification of the dull backdrop. If the hook for Root was to keep the player returning to set faster times, then more enhanced graphics would sharpen that hook. Other than this, animations and character models are a bit better (but still don’t match any expectations). Some rough item pick up animations are crude and get in the way though.
Audio thankfully raises the bar. Although sounds are repetitive they are effective. The pitter patter of a guard’s boots, the sound of a crawling drone, or the alarming noises of gunfire all kept me on my toes. I often found myself using sounds within Root to base strategies upon. Enemies also became coherently more fear inducing. Hearing a robot move while you are holding on by a thread, with ten health, is a very eerie feeling. The music and ambient beats also fabricated a part of my imagination that never before existed, in which I became a world class spy behind enemy lines. Hugging walls and creeping from corners really fit this soft electro track and I loved every bit of it.
My time with Root made me concentrate more on game play. It is obvious that Deep Fried Enterprises wanted the focus to be on said gameplay the whole way through. Stripped down to the bare Roots (last time I promise) this game is meant to feel like stealth and sometimes shooter focused and nothing else. Stealth relies on crouching. Doing so gives no penalty except slow movement. Crouching will allow you to stay unheard but not unseen, so in response you can lean. Crouching and pressing Q or E will allow the player to peer behind a corner looking for any unsuspecting victims. This became useful for sharp hallways and situations when I had to conserve health the best I could.
Unlike other stealth games stabbing or silently taking down enemies has been over simplified and less human like in Root. Crouching your way to a stationary enemy and then standing, you gain the option to hit them in a soft spot on the neck. Other games tend to include a mechanic much like this but do it in a more visually interesting way. I find this trend duplicating as I dig deeper into Root. Inhuman animations and certain movements just aren’t organic. In this instance you have to stand up and hit the mark exactly the same every time. The whole situation feels almost robotic and I lose immersion immediately. Other things like your characters ability to kick directly straight in any direction under any circumstance just plain out make me laugh, and not in the good way. These problems overall get in the way of making Root feel like a stealthy mission impossible and less in the way of being a three dimensional puzzle game.
Unbelievably there’s more problematic decisions put into the current build of the game. This one is something developers have to hit home runs with in a stealth game; the AI. The enemies within Root are all in a sense simple and extremely inconsistent. In one section of the game I moved around a couple of cardboard boxes to uncover a hidden vent. The enemy within the next room heard this and attacked. I thought “hey nothing wrong with that, maybe there was heavy stuff in that box”. I did have a problem however in the next level, in which I jumped directly behind an enemy character and my controlled character let out a roaring “oooof”; yet the enemy just sat there. How could such a mistake be implicated in a game made to think about stealth, unacceptable. In other cases enemies could shoot you from a football field’s distance but not from three feet. Lastly guards felt like they were responding with almost a god like mind. They knew what happened and when and where to look right away. Other bugs and stutters ripped me from the experience though they were rare. With all this there were a few cool enemy concepts which switched up my perception of the level I was on (even though some characters were just out of place in the world). All in all I wish AI was worked on a little harder so that the game could feel more human than machine.
Even with these quirks and undesirable problems Root does something a lot of games nowadays don’t do, which is kick your butt. This is the modern stealth version of Bloodborne or Dark Souls. My computer desk still flinches at me every time I raise my fists because of this intense unrelenting experience. I would go into an area of the game only to get pummeled by the enemies waiting for me there. After minutes and minutes of yelling like a baby, I would finally come up with a strategic plan so complex you would think I was the director of the CIA. After trying to execute that plan over and over I would quickly revert to a new one. Then the moment comes, when you’re staring that final vault door in the face and you are on the road to victory. That rush can only be matched by so few gaming experiences and that is something that I praise Root for. Every victory felt like just that, an actual earned victory that took blood, sweat, and tears to reach.
On the side of replay ability not much is given. With only ten courses the amount of time spent on Root is up entirely to the skill and interest of the player. While there are many different paths to embark on inside of these ten levels, they don’t give you much. All the alternate paths do is create opportunities to reach the finish line and nothing more. Inclusion of in game collectibles or even money to upgrade weapons or character abilities would’ve been a great time extender. There are however par times to beat so if you are a hardcore stealth enthusiast then that is there for you. Although personally I won’t be heading back into Root I could easily see how someone could.
Root is a game with many technical flaws. The graphical pitfall of the game is the over simplistic, often boring color choices. These choices do not stop when hitting upon character or menu’s either these all stay pretty bland. Bad choices even roll over into the enemy AI and behavior too. Enemies snap into place exactly when prompted to like know it all super men, are inconsistent in attacking, and even hit down right sad for a stealth game. Deep Fried Enterprises makes up for these mistakes though. They created great audio beats and little sounds to stand behind a thrilling heart pounding exercise of intellectual problem solving. Root isn’t a game that will hold your hand either. It’s one of the more hardcore stealth experiences and I praise it for that. Deep insertions beyond where you ventured before give great insights upon what secret agents probably feel when they are trying to break into a high tech evil agency. Root is bad at some things and great at others, and while I wouldn’t recommend it to the common console player, I would give this game a thumbs up to any stealth junkie on the hunt for their next fix.
A PC code of Root was provided by Deep Fried Enterprises for the purpose of this review