Probably the best horror-SF TT RPG!
I Knew Cold & Dark for a long time but, actually, I am mastering some Resident Evil with a friend, then I thought about horror SF. We have plently of horror in modern age ( World of Darkness, Kult, Call of Cthlhu) and in med-fan ( Warhammer, Shadow of the demon lord, Ravenlof) but almost nothing for SF except Alien.
The thing is that the author loves horror movie, loves video games and tabletop roleplaying games. That counts.A lot.
As examples, his first inspirations are Alien, Event Horizon and Dead Space, but in these universe, you have no hope.
So he took all the univere he liked, tweaked them to let your PC to have a chance to live and have some kind of future and put them togethe. That's a feat of intelligence.
The system is simple, almost forgettable, you simply do D8 dices pool and must do 7 or 8 to do successes. In combat, the defense becomes a minus while some specific tools or situations give you bonuses.
To create your PC, you simply take an archetype while very, very clever bonus ( as example, an operative can never botch stealth or security check and have +1 Dice to these checks!). Then you have freebies like in World of Darkness.
The book is quite complete, you have almost 20 planets to visit, spaceship rules, high tech armor from Crysis ect.
The detail on the universe is great, like for many ennemies and factions. That's great.
The art is gorgeous! Some monsters or stuff are eye candy
To summary, the game does well what it proposes and that's pretty all but also, pretty great!
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