Without knowing what Disciple 1 or 2 was or reading any review or even bothering to look at the images on the Steam page I for whatever reason purchased this game.
As it turns out Disciple 3 Renaissance is a turn based 4x type game with turn based combat with middle earth (high elf) type armies.
In fact it’s not even remotely close to what I thought it might be (an RPG) it turns out to be a part of the one genre I can’t stand to play.
If this game is like one it is like the incredibly popular Heroes of Might and Magic series which as of writing this is on their sixth installment (over 30 years keep in mind).
So these games work like this. In an overworld you get resources to build up armies. Your armies move around the map taking over territories that will give more resources. You face off against in a hexablock based battlefield in which you need to use the roles of your units to beat out your opponent.
Each block can be hit from six directions. So it becomes important to create flanks and protect weaker heroes. As well there is a cover system in which your heroes will take reduced damage from ranged attacks if behind someone.
This kind of game features overworld magic in which you can use a magic resource to damage an enemy army before you engage them. This is used to give serious advantages in combat.
In the overworld management often you are building structures to help boost the gathering of some sort of resource or creating structures to build various units.
The game feature your leaders who often play some epic role like a rogue, warrior, healer, or mage leading a band of various class types. Each hero class unit gains experience which they can sink into attributes of their choice.
This game features four campaigns. A short tutorial campaign, an Empire (human) campaign, a dark lords type campaign, and an elven campaign. The four campaigns combined will amount to about 40 hours of gameplay, not too shabby.
On the plus side this series does have a fairly good story. Obviously if you hate high fantasy you will hate this. But it does make an effort to tell the events of a single story from three different view points. This is a very strong feature for this genre.
But like I said, I really don’t like this genre period.
I’m not entirely sure why this game was called “Renaissance” when it has little or nothing to do with the Renaissance period. There was nothing in this game to hook you in, it’s sort of just the same stuff.
Make sure to not add this game to your bucket list because it simply doesn’t do enough to attract people to this genre.
So upon loading up this game I get a little menu that pops up. I decide to click on input and see what the controls are:
Well it turns out they are blank…. this probably won’t go well.
Next on the list of OMFG THIS GAME SUCKS I get to see this:
How could I be so foolish, you ask. How could I not know this game was created by the single worst publisher on the face of the Earth, Paradox Interactive.
Paradox has their army of Euro nerds constantly defending them because some of their games are playable. My response is Sword of the Stars 2, Gettysburg: Armored Warfare,
But this game is developed by Pisces Interactive, a studio I have never heard about. So maybe I’ll give them one shot and then never play again. They also made a pretty sexy trailer for this game.
So after getting past this I get to a user login screen…
Now maybe someone can explain why a $10 game needs a user login screen to me. On top of that they want to register my email so they can send it off to all the hackers. More than likely it is for future Paradox product information that I have no interest in. AND they want me to confirm with a validation code. There is no copy and paste feature here so I have to alt tab constantly in order to get this thing inserted.
Okay so none of this has to do with core gameplay, it has to do with dodgey DRM related practices that make this whole process as obtuse for gamers as humanly possible, thanks Paradox.
You start off being prompted do you wish to play the tutorial, the answer for this kind of game is always, NO, I don’t… but I will anyway… in case it’s actually complicated… but it won’t be.
So upon clicking on tutorial it leads me to this screen:
Unfortunately all the buttons are greyed out and nothing can be selected…. I restart the game hoping I’ll actually get to play. So I load it up and it gets stuck on here:
And it gets stuck here. Yes Paradox we are aware you make shitty games.
So 30 minutes into gameplay and I haven’t played a game yet. It continues to freeze up at various phases.
So after this is all done I can finally play the game, yay.
So you control a fleet (one ship is a fleet!) of ships. Each ship when you click on it will display it weapons. Each weapon has an aiming direction. So the portside guns can only fire portside, the broadside guns only fire broadside, the forward guns only fire forward and the aft (rear) guns only fire behind you. This means that in combat you will need to rotate your ship around a bit to fire off multiple guns. Alternatively if your opponent moves around you, you will fire off guns.
The guns do fire off automatically and the only point in choosing what to fire upon might be so that you hit one ship over another. But since you are fire to a region instead of at a ship you are most likely almost always going to miss because except for AI, no one just sits in position… unless their rotor is down.
For funzies you’ve been given a force field you can deploy on one of the four flanks of your ship. It lasts one turn and can soak all the damage. It has a cooldown and can be used about every three turns, once again for funzies.
Other funzie features include invisible mines and stealth.
Navigation is controlled by dragging a green arrow to go forward or a orange arrow to go backwards.
Both players do their turns simultaneously. This can be compared to a turn based game like Civilization in which both players go one after the other. This format wouldn’t work well because it would mean whoever goes first gains a serious advantage… except they don’t since guns all fire automatically anyway. The downside is that the actual strategic elements of turn based combat get ruined and truthfully this game could have just been done in real time combat.
So the game has a 3 mission tutorial in which you go through the painstakingly simple gameplay and a 9-mission campaign.
The 9-mission campaign is really hard. I mean really really hard.
Turn based games are known for having insanely hard campaigns, but this one is super hard. It almost feels like you need a second player there because of how hard it is. Which you can do, co-op campaigns. Unfortunately just not enough people play this game to do this.
On the plus side the game is cross-platform between iOS, cellphones, and PC. On the downside the games actually take too long to be a very good iOS game. The multiplayer lobby must be confusing on the iOS side because any time I get in one I sit there with Ready clicked for about 30 minutes and then nothing ever happens.
Turn based combat just got sexy
There’s also something REALLY weird about the actual lobbies. I was able to start up no less than 14 lobbies simultaneously until I realized that I had to individually “Discard” each game. Once again I think this is something for the app side but it just doesn’t make sense on the PC side of things.
I think this is another terrible Paradox Interactive game and no one should buy it on the PC.
As for the tablet and smartphone.
I wanted to see if this game was available on Blackberry and it is in fact not. Overwhelmingly smart phone and tablet apps are super expensive for what you get. Angry Pigs (that’s all Blackberry has) cost about $10.
Unfortunately one of the odd features of the game is an always on DRM. This normally doesn’t have any effect on me because I have great Internet but I could see how this might be a problem for tablet and cellphone owners who pay tooth and nail for bandwidth.
But like I said, had I not had great Internet… I wouldn’t have noticed it.
So one day my Internet was particularly slow, my provider was doing an upgrade on my service and strapped me with low quality Internet. Boy was it ever noticeable. Everything was slow. Turns took forever because they had to be recorded online first (in single player). Shields seem to work forever or never. There was even a weird glitch in which shields would block all four sides.
So I’m playing the campaign and suddenly this pops up:
So no I do not recommend this game for PC, and I suspect it won’t work that much better on a tablet.
What happens when you mix the most obtusely designed hardcore simulator game franchise with the casual market?
The answer should be something horrendous that pleases nobody at all.
But Bluebyte Studios has done it again, they have created something remarkable. That is remarkable for a browser based game.
Much like their successful The Settler’s Online, Ubisoft has really captured the feel of Anno in a browser based game. This can be compared to a game like Command and Conquer Tiberium Alliances which looks nothing at all like the game it models after.
So Anno Online is modeled after Anno 1404 (the game befoer Anno 2070).
Some favorites missing from this game is multi-factions, which was present in Anno 2070 and an unlockable intermittent faction (The Arabs and S.A.A.T.) that offers new and more complicated building options.
This is Bluebyte’s second attempt at making a multi-player Anno experience. Anno is the game of the anti-social gamer. It is a game that each playthrough gives over 200 hours of play and one that sees no need to interact with people.
Their attempt in Anno to make multiplayer simply did not work. The multiplayer scene was empty and isolated to a select few friendly Europeans.
One of the big things about multiplayer is that you cannot force it on a game. The game has to be designed around the need for people helping each other. First person shooters, MMORPGs, and strategy games have always benefited heavily from having more than one person play. Other genres have had a hard time breaking in.
So how do you solve this riddle?
Quite simple, as it seems.
Make it so that your resources are very limited and you need people to talk with while you wait on resources to accumulate.
No not quite the multiplayer we were expecting. It seems that inter-city trading is something they will be implementing in later. The game works under the basic formula of Anno. You lay down homes and your people demand various products. You provide those products. Certain services they may request will only work in a certain radius. This means city planning gets complicated as more services become available.
Inter-player trading really only makes sense in the first day of playing the game. After this you become more than self-sufficient so clearly in that beginning of the game you will need to implement trade there.
After you meet all the needs of a home they will advance into a different higher taxing kind of home. This new kind of home will have it’s own demands.
People will not overwhelming move into this new housing type until you fulfill their needs. As you get more of this type of person their needs expand until eventually you have met enough needs to evolve them to another type of citizen… to do the same thing with.
There are four types of citizens with the final one taking almost two weeks to obtain.
Buildings have their own resource cost to build. Some of them include wood and stone. Each of these buildings have money maintenance costs. A goal becomes balancing your costs with increasing your ability to expand.
When you are completely out of resources you do have the ability to expand by purchasing resources using rubies. Rubies can be earned by completing quests or can be purchased via micro transactions.
As an alternative you can just turn off the game and resources will max out while you sleep. Having a large warehouse means you can hold a lot more resources when you log in. Upgrading warehouses clearly becomes a pillar of this game. One thing about this game is that it largely will not appeal to the hardcore Anno crowd. People who only play religiously will really not enjoy this game.
The game gets even more complex with the addition of islands. You can discover and colonize off-map islands that will provide other resources. One player can hold 9 islands, although it seems two of them are unlockable only with rubies.
The supply chains are simple. The game is not obscure by any means. There isn’t much of a competitive dynamic to it. And truthfully Anno 2070 and Anno 1404 are just all around better games.
It will however appeal to the massive casual games crowd. It offers more complexity than anything else currently on the market and can be played over hours or over minutes. If you’re looking to get into Anno this is definitely the friendly way to learn how the game is played.
I’d definitely recommend purchasing Anno 2070 over it. I’d also recommend playing this game over almost any other browser title on the market. And I’d also recommend playing this game if you’ve never tried Anno 2070 and if you find yourself addicted to this game, give Anno 2070 a spin.
I should state as a final note this game is still in beta, however the core game mechanics will stay the same and if this review needs an update it will get one post launch, but as far as I can see nothing will change post launch.
When Mass Effect 3 came to an end people were clamoring about how bad the ending was.
Having never played any of them the debate really had no interest to me.
So one year after the release of Mass Effect 3 I decided, I should probably play them.
I’ll be playing them all in order and playing them to the fullest. Since these games require you to beat Normal Mode to unlock Hard mode and Hard mode to unlock nightmare mode… I’m only doing one playthrough.
It’s weird that Bioware stated only 5% of the population actually did their hardest difficulty setting without looking into WHY so few people played their games on the hardest difficulty settings.
Regardless, three brief reviews of three Bioware games.
Mass Effect 1
Sheppard you have to prove your worth and will be observed on your mission.
Mission failed
Promoted to SPECTRE!
What?
Yeah that’s how this story begins.
Highly unlikable shallow characters galore.
Worst yet the game is constantly reminding you that you can choose as you want. The Council (who are like your bosses) are always reminding you that they do not care what you do or how you pursue your mission. However at the end of every mission they will make sure to lambast you. HOW DARE YOU SAVE THOSE PEOPLE they might say… if they find nothing wrong with what you did.
Much like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic you can just go wherever you want with no absolute path. One of the things I was immediately attracted to this game was how you could travel to so many planets that had nothing to do with the story at all and chase a bunch of red herrings.
The game allows you to pick various characters to bring along with you. In my experience it seemingly did not matter which characters I brought with me. There were unique conversations but nothing major.
The game features a moral system. I of course, hate moral systems. You get dialogue choices in which one line of questioning is rather neutral, one is kind of dickheadedish, and one is kind of nice and friendly. The problem is the words you are given don’t always indicate which is which. Sometimes you might get something like “Keep talking” and then suddenly Sheppard will jump on that person in a very negative manner.
No time to dance when you’re saving the universe
But you get two moral leveling options, Good and Bad (real names? who cares). Supposedly these moral choices have an effect on how things go.
The combat system is pretty bland. You get behind an object and fire at dudes. You hit a spell button and hit dudes really hard. The grenades are annoying. You throw them straight and have to activate them. While waiting for them to hit the right location you are left exposed and fired upon while watching.
The RPG elements in the game are pretty weak. I think a good RPG needs to have a large number of mostly useless skills. Skyrim is the perfect example of a game full of mostly useless skills. In this game you get Charm and Intimidate. So I maxed out charm and every now and then as long as I followed the path of good I’d get a unique option to get extra cash and XP.
On top of this you were allowed to customize your team mates. This is where the bulk of those useless talents kick in. The default option is auto level… which is what I used. 99% of the time I didn’t have enough “Electronics” to salvage anything.
Overall Mass Effect is a great game and a great start to a series. With every single unlock completed it took me 14 hours to finish the game. Once again however I am playing each game through three times so I can do all difficulty levels… that’s just retarded game design at work.
Had I bought this game in 2007 at $60, I might not be so enthusiastic about how little play value I get out of it. But as of $5 Steam sales this game is pretty good.
Mass Effect 2
I tried my hardest to keep my save file from the previous game and play with it here but no matter how hard I tried I just could not get it to work. So I played the game fresh with no information from the previous game. It was a little disappointing because apparently it made some major modifications on the game.
But whatever. You open the game and Sheppard dies, the end. Except he’s kind of cloned back to life. His entire team has disbanded and he has to pick a new team. I was desperately hoping that my krogan was still alive. I took a path in Mass Effect 1 that allowed me to keep him alive.
The game however was successful in making sure Kaiden was dead. I hated Kaiden so much so I was happy to see him go.
Since Mass Effect 1 seemingly killed off the big bad guy who successfully killed off the Protheans it is essential for them to create a new threat that is large enough to make bringing Sheppard back to life worthwhile. The new threat are a bunch of garbage men… I’m sorry collectors. This brings Mass Effect into the oh so common path of having insectoid enemies.
So a man, an Illusive Man, sends Sheppard on a mission to kill all the bugs. You know, like Starship Troopers. The switch is now Sheppard is working for the bad guys and of course everyone knows there are some devious evil corporate terrorist stuff going on here.
The character creation was just so much better. Apparently I could have picked a class in the first game, I had no idea until I played the second game and found eight classes. I played as an Adept so that I could shoot lightning balls at people and be a boss like Goku.
Unlike the previous game I could play this on hardest difficulty. The big change is that enemies have so much health you run out of ammo and you are forced to Goku blast people to death.
The talent trees are really tiny compared to the old ones. Basically you can completely max out your talent tree by the end of the game.
This ruins replay value because it means you can’t try and play the same class again with a different build. Yes it means you can only replay just the 8 classes, what a sad sorry world we live in (that’s sarcasm).
I tried my hardest not to have sex with anyone while playing but dear god you play the Paragon role and it’s guaranteed you will get every single female on the ship guaranteed (and maybe even a gay lover or two).
The game mechanics changed around quite a bit. The old infinite ammo heated weapon mechanic was replaced with actual ammo clips. The downside is… you run out of ammo, a lot. Head shots are in which is cool but massively downplayed by the insanely high amount of damage you wield through powers.
Some cool new things I liked is the ability to position your squad. It makes you feel like you’re actually commanding a squad that matters as opposed to a bunch of people that sort of just do their own thing and subsequently die all the time. It doesn’t matter how many times you command them to stay out of fire in cover, as soon as you move they seem to just change position. This of course makes it all around less tactical because honestly what’s the point of ever bringing the sniper (Garrus) if he always run to the front of the fight and dies.
They also changed up the planet scanning mechanic from being a collectible to being a way of customizing your weapons. Truthfully this was the part of the game I cared least about so any change to this won’t matter to me (unless they remove it). I scanned every single planet in the galaxy before embarking on too many missions and truthfully the game would not let me upgrade heavily… so it seemed pointless.
They definitely have more lineararity to the game. In Mass Effect 1 you could leave planets at any time. There could be zombies everywhere chasing you down and you could be like, yeah I’m leaving this place. Mass Effect 2 locks you in. Once you enter a zone or a planet you are locked into that zone or that planet and you may never leave. To make it feel more like levels you get a status report at the end telling you all your rewards for completing said mission.
But to make it feel a little more open ended The Illusive Man informs you that you can choose whoever you want to be on your team, he is merely giving you dossiers of the galaxy’s most qualified men. So you get all the missions in blocks to complete.
Unlike the previous one you don’t have a ruling council sitting at the end of every mission going REALLY MAN YOU’RE SUCH AN ASSHOLE!
I’m uncertain how I feel about this. I didn’t particularly enjoy the sandbox style of Mass Effect. It seemed kind of tedious and pointless. Sandboxing to me feels like where you should be able to do everything or it sucks. And that’s kind of the problem I had with Mass Effect 1. It feels like the far more linear storyline of Mass Effect 2 works out.
There are some Easter Eggs but I mean they’re so obscure and hidden 99% of people won’t get it. The Miranda/Sheppard love story takes dialogue directly from Team America World Police. There was also a reference to Star Wars I noticed and then there were tones of Easter Eggs so obscure not even I’ve heard of them.
It was about my third day on this game I spotted this:
Why yes it is in fact the lofty promise that everyone references that Bioware made (that there was seemingly no evidence of) that your decisions would create your own individual specific ending… except that’s not what it says.
Good time to shift over to Mass Effect 3!
But before doing so I should note that my copy of Mass Effect 2 (on Steam) came with all of the DLC. The standard copy gave 30 hours of gameplay, the DLC added about 5 more hours.
Oddly enough the DLC isn’t listed on the Steam page despite the game containing it.
When you compare to the original it just makes Mass Effect 2 that much more amazing.
But yes, time to move on to the grand finale, Mass Effect 3.
Mass Effect 3
Is it just me or did they give Williams a sexy make over?
Mass Effect 1:
Mass Effect 3:
Yes let your hair down Lieutenant Williams because it’s time for Mass Effect 3!
So right off the bat a lot of the annoying things from the Mass Effects are gone, mainly scanning the galaxy for minerals this was a tedious boring grind and I’m happy it’s gone. In its place is a zone wide scan to see if there’s anything interesting (extra missions). Far bigger improvement.
I’d also like to announce that I was able to transition all my data from Mass Effect 2 to 3…. yay I would have flipped my shit had it not worked.
Immediately the first thing I notice (and most people do) is the game is structured a little less sandboxish. There is about 20 hours of extra side missions to do, but you can opt to skip all of them and only complete the main objectives in 20 hours. Yes I did the side objectives anyway.
The upside is that it means you are getting 40 minutes of well scripted voice acted content. This can be compared to Mass Effect 1 in which you ran around in a dune buggy and killed a bunch of people at an outpost 100 times as your side missions.
Or this can also be compared to Mass Effect 2 in which you went across the entire galaxy scanning every single inch of every single planet in hopes that one of them would have a compound for you to attack that would have a few enemies in it to kill.
Having these side missions scripted gives them context and meaning in the overall story. I never felt at any time I was doing a mission which only involved me killing stuff.
Also there are less options as far as crew members go. You might remember that in Mass Effect 2 you had nine different crew members to choose from. This approach was actually really dumb on Bioware’s part. I’m sure many people shat on Bioware for not including their favorite new champions in this game, but I like it. With as many champions as there were in Mass Effect 2 I feel I didn’t get much of a chance to meet the reptillion guy or the matriarch woman or well… most of them. Cutting down the roster also means the various champions are very specialized as opposed the the vast number of copies that I saw in Mass Effect 2.
So story. Well the reapers are finally here and they are… zombies. The first wave of guys were robots. The second wave were proteon bugs. The third wave are space zombies. They’ve pretty much covered every single scifi villain race.
The reapers randomly show up and simultaneously invade everything Sheppard is re-commissioned to the Alliance Army to unite everyone under his banner to do battle with the reapers. To make matters worse Cereberus is evil again and doing all sorts of bad things.
One major difference in storyline elements between this one and the others is that the others featured a lot of unknowns. It wasn’t entirely certain what they would face when they reached the end. In this one they know exactly what they’re facing because it’s just always around.
To this extent the storyline writers had to make some major stylistic changes to how the story is told and added in a lot of hipster bullshit stuff that was seemingly unnecessary. On top of that they’ve also made sure to elevate every single average character or champion from the past games to some massive status.
It goes like this.
I MET SHEPPARD ONCE, HE HELPED ME MILK A COW!
Promoted to General.
But seriously the story of this game is REALLY good. A lot of people are going to dislike that it moved further and further away from sandboxing. To me the Mass Effect series is great for someone who likes well written stories. This can be compared to Elder Scrolls which has all around terrible story telling but really great sandboxing elements.
So.
The worst Mass Effect is…. Mass Effect 1.
Hands down out of the three this is the worst. There are tones of terrible design elements that don’t fit. Mass Effect 2 is so clearly the best Mass Effect. Despite having way too many champions it made for an insanely satisfying experience. Mass Effect 3 just might have been too cinematic. Just the shear amount of time spent on cinematics is insane. It could have easily been over 50% of the game.
So closing this one out.
My favorite thing about the Mass Effect universe is easily the Morden. When you first get him in Mass Effect 2 he is a scientist who carries a shotgun, gunning down any mercenaries that come to his clinic. He thought like a utilitarian seeing things in terms of results.
We find out that he engineered the deadly genophage virus that was killing off the Krogan population. But over time as he travels with you and sees the consequences on people’s lives that he is causing he slowly changes his mind.
By Mass Effect 3 Morden is so pro-Krogan that he leaks information to the Krogan clans of a cure.
It is because of this transformation from psychotic sociopathic doctor to caring and guilt ridden scientist that his death is so tragic. It is interesting to know that only 5% of people opted to murder Morden, goes to show how much people got into this moment.
There is no single statistical choice as low as this one. Every single person wanted Morden to become a better person.
It is stories like these that made people rage so heavily at the end of Mass Effect 3. Mass Effect from start to finish has had a very emotionally invested storyline in which you are introduced to a large cast of very likable characters who you personally have an impact upon.
To me I was more upset about the ending of Mass Effect than Mass Effect 3.
In the end the game offers what people wanted, a different story every single time. After finishing all three I decided to look up Rachni Breeder Betrayal. As it turned out had I saved the Queen in Mass Effect 1 the Queen would have appeared in Mass Effect 3 and not betrayed me.
The game offers tones of permutations and alterations. So what if the game ends the same way every single time. If you really cared about the ending of an RPG you probably haven’t played a lot of RPGs. Skyrim ends the exact same way every single time, and yet you never hear people complain about how absolutely crappy the ending is to that game.
In the end Mass Effect 3 is not a bad game. It’s not the best of the series. But it’s definitely worth purchasing the entire series (on sale of course) and playing through all of them.
One day out of the blue Focus Home Interactive released Mars: War Logs. It really came out of nowhere as there was no publicity material or a launch date for this game.
It launched with a price tag of $20 on PSN and PC. No doubt everyone coming here is wondering, is this game a heaping pile of crap or some amazing $20 gem?
Focus Home Interactive is rather known for allowing their studios to do as they wish creatively with their games. This has lead to some catastrophic failures like A Game of Thrones: Genesis, but it has also allowed for some sleeper hits like Cities XL and Wargame: European Escalation.
With that in mind the developers of Mars: War Logs already receive their first award for this game, the single most Hipster Game of 2013!
The head developer for this game is clearly the king of all hipsters and must be this man in the picture below:
Mars: War Logs starts off with you entering a concentration camp in which you have to take a sand shower (because water is a valuable resource). As you enter a skinny kid who looks like he has fetal alcohol syndrome you find a fat man cleverly named “Fatso” wants your man meat. Now of course this is a concentration camp for soldiers, this kind of stuff goes down in prison… not concentration camps.
But all that aside the first hispter bullshit moment happens in the first 5 minutes of the game. A tough shows up to protect you and after 5 minutes it is revealed… you are not the loser FASD kid you are in fact the tough guy who has come to save the day.
The kid is named Innocence. Within the first six minutes of the game you have your second hipster bullshit moment. But if I was to point out every single hispter bullshit thing about the game… I would literally be here all day.
The protagonist is a former technopriest who used technology to do battle which made them seem like they were gods.
I couldn’t help but notice that the protagonist looks a lot lke Vince Vaughn.
Vince Vaughn:
Protagonist:
Yes the similarities are uncanny. Your character’s name is Roy. But as you find out later every single one of his people have a virtue name and his virtue name is Temperance.
These kind of names are those that terrible parents give their children. They are names like Destiny, Unique, Hope, Angel, and Dillon. If you have any of those names… yes you have terrible parents.
The planet Mars is ruled by various guilds who are constantly fighting for power and control. The technopriests are starting one such war attempting to stage a coup from the inside. Your hero just so happens to be caught upon all of this.
The game has few memorable characters. This is caused mainly by the fact that everyone has virtuous names, except the protagonist. In most games people with virtuous names are the only ones you remember, but this game has a habit of making sure no one is memorable.
Even some of the most iconic looking people end up being forgotten pretty fast because so many people look like this.
The problem probably has more to do with the steampunk feel of the game. Steampunk really has so many acceptable fashions and realistically there’s only so much brown you can put in the game.
The game’s a hack and slash game with a one-shot pistol (nail gun). You have some powers. All of the non-punch abilities are easily interuptable by enemies.
One of the main lacking features of the game is the RPG side clashing with the hack and slash side. Great hack and slash games rely on consistency of control. The skill comes from being able to quickly respond with the appropriate button push at the appropriate time.
The RPG element of this game makes it so that parries do not necessarily avoid damage and blocks do not always work.
There are three tech trees you can advance in. Only two are available initially. One is a tree of stealth which focuses on attacking from behind and sneak attacks. This trees end up failing because you can’t re-enter an undetected sneak mode and you can’t always sneak initiate. The second is a soldier high health high physical damage tree, that most people will probably be attracted to. The third tree is based on the tech powers and makes it so they’re less obnoxiously bad and more potent and powerful.
There’s also something a little bit off about the voice acting. Sometimes the voice doesn’t sync up with lips. Sometimes the way things are said is so awkward it is hard to tell whether someone is making a declarative statement, question statement, or being sarcastic. Then there are those really awkward moments when your character is looking up at the ceiling like the Undertaker from WWE. It’s just poorly designed and odd.
You would think with all of these terrible things that the overall game would be terrible.
But it’s not.
The game is full of interesting side quests with adult themes. The main story has you wondering what will happen next. The world is vivid and enthralling and the politics of this society will grab you.
The combat system is not as amazing as something like Ninja Gaiden Black or Kingdoms of Amaleur but it just gives you enough complexity and options that you have to think strategically to deal with enemies.
The mission lay outs is very good and some of the best I’ve seen in a game. You enter an area that might feature 5-6 zones. The quests are written down with giant arrows showing where you must go to.
Living up to its RPG elements not everything is solved by the sword, you can choose to just talk it out. The game isn’t as complicated as most modern RPGs, the game doesn’t really remember your choices. But within a single dialogue line you can change how you handle a mission.
A lot of the situations are kind of adult in nature. So you acquire a sexually abused assistant of your enemy who is mentally unstable and confused. She admits to you that her master always had sexy with her and she just thought it was normal. So she offers herself up to you. You have the choice of having sex with her or not.
Most RPG games have moral systems that matter, in which your morality selects an ending. This game doesn’t have this. And thank god. I actually HATE these morality based endings. The morality system DOES effect how people respond to you in the game, but that’s it (thankfully).
There are relationships in this game, which seems odd. Along the way you will have four different companions to choose from and you can form close relationships with some and adult kinky relationships with two. Of course because the game isn’t as large as something like Mass Effect these relationships do not develop over time they sort of just happen instantly. YOU LOVE ME!?!? Love making scene!
Having it setup this way has more to do with you. You can be an asshole in the game or you can choose not to be. There is no RPG designer coaxing you to choose to be an asshole if you don’t want to be with promise of a different ending.
Something I never gave much thought to was the crafting system in this game. It looked straight forward to me, you click on a button that says ammo and you get ammo. But that’s not really the cool part of the game. The cool part is how weapons work. You find a copper pipe, a bone, or a rod and you hit people with it like a cave man. However you can modify it by adding a top (axe, club, pick,sword) to it and by changing the handle. This all adjusts in the live graphic.
The game is about 6 hours of gameplay. This is the main reason why it is a $20 game.
If you are deeply offended by a person sitting down at a Starbucks typing on an antique typewriter…. well this just might not be the game for you.
This game is not going to replace your time in Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Fallout, or Bioshock. But if you can deal with the hipster bullshit you might want to give it a try. The game value is worth about two full playthroughs and the hardest difficulty is taxing and unforgiving.
