A.A.U Black Site

When it comes to games from the Balkan peninsula, it's interesting how we've mostly been in a “hit or miss” situation, where we've received some fantastic titles like Croteam's Serious Sam series and The Talos Principle, but also some less successful titles like the Serbian horror game Scorn, which received very mixed reviews. For this reason, I love to follow and support the local gaming scene, and when I heard that a new game similar to the famous F.E.A.R. was in development by Raspberry Studios, whose first title this is, I was intrigued and decided to check out what kind of game it actually is.

A.A.U is a first-person shooter set in Serbia, specifically in the village of Uzovnica. You play as an American secret agent sent on a special mission, during which you soon realize that nothing is as it seems. Namely, you and your team are attacked by a terrorist organization, leaving you alone, forced to fight for your life. The thing that positively surprised me from the start is the presentation. Visually, the game looks really impressive, the textures are beautiful and detailed, the gun models and animations are of high quality, and the lighting excellently creates an atmosphere at night. The sound design is also excellent, and far above the expected quality for an indie title. The voice acting is mostly provided by amateur actors and YouTubers like Nolifer, and their roles are quite decently done, although the dialogues are often not very well written and sound forced. The mostly electronic music nicely heightened the tension during the game's intense moments. The biggest problem with A.A.U's presentation at this stage is optimization. This title is made on the Unity engine, and the performance is quite poor. I played on a mid-range configuration with an RTX 3060 Ti graphics card, and at medium settings at Full HD resolution, I often experienced drops to 30FPS, which significantly affected my gaming experience. Of course, I expect this to be smoothed out over time, given that this is an early access title in a very early stage. Another very positive aspect is the atmosphere and world design. The rural setting of a village is excellently depicted, and the developers really made an effort to showcase it down to the smallest details. One part that I also really liked is the shooting. Before starting a mission, you choose the weapons you will take, and the selection is really large. I played with most of the guns, and all were interesting to use, providing that nice “punchy” feeling when shooting. The blood effects and limb dismemberment are excellent, and really make every shot feel impactful when hitting. Don’t expect some wildly intelligent enemies like those in F.E.A.R., but expect good and challenging fun during combat.

Unfortunately, A.A.U is far from a perfect game, and the biggest disappointment for me were the horror sections that seem to not understand what actually needs to instill fear in players. The game will scare you the most with jumpscares, which, although frightening, are often forced and overly sudden. One of the first scary scenes was when a scream so loud echoed from nowhere in a completely empty hallway that I had to lower the volume on my headphones because it was causing sound distortion. This is not quality horror, but cheap scares that just kill the immersion while playing. This game also has some pretty bizarre decisions when it comes to level design. For example, in one scene I had to start a bus to escape from an enemy. First, I approached the steering wheel and pressed the drive button that the tutorial taught me, but nothing happened. I assumed I needed to find a key or something similar, but no, for some reason it was necessary to place a brick on the gas pedal and let the bus drive itself. In one part, I encountered a wheat field that I had to pass through, but I was randomly killed by a scarecrow out of nowhere every time. I assumed it was a stealth section where I had to avoid light or making noise, especially since the surrounding tractors periodically turned on their lights, but no, the answer was completely opposite; the goal was to run through the field, passing exclusively through the lit areas. Such examples negatively impacted my experience with the game, but I think they are understandable, given that this is still the first title from this studio.

In short, A.A.U is a game that solidly promises. I don't expect that we will get a new successor to F.E.A.R. even in the full release, but I think it's a quality game, developed by talented developers out of love for gaming, so I certainly appreciate it as such.

A copy of the PC version of the game for review purposes was provided by the publisher IZilla Games