Mars: War Logs

I no longer have the time or patience to delve into absurdly huge open-world RPGs that overwhelm me with tons of silly side quests and a forty-hour main quest, and I love titles like this. The voice acting is decent, the options are fairly limited and you have a fair chance of discovering everything, you can save and load at any time, it's worth playing for an hour and feeling good afterwards, the storyline and characters are well written, and you can finish it in 14 hours (including all the side quests) if you play as slowly as I did. If you like small, clunky and charming games, you should give it a try!

First of all: it works great on lower end GPU without any problem (1920 x 1080, high settings, 60 fps on Geforce 1030 GT). Yes, there are some graphical glitches or bugs: two time my weapon disappeared from my hand (it was invisible, yet the animation still showed like it is there in my hand), the fallen bodies sometimes go through walls etc. But these are not too disturbing. The best thing: the game never crashed and I had switched quite a few times between applications with ALT+TAB. I won't write much about the story, the world is very interesting, the sounds, background noise, the little music there is solid. There is a radial quick menu (for this press the Q button) for choosing different abbilites, injections, grenades, explosive traps etc. Most of these you can key bind to the number keys (from 1 trough 9) for fast access. The melee attacks can be quite powerfull, especially later, when you can upgrade your technomancer powers like the electrical charge. I simply don't have time for RPGs, that need hunderds (or thousands) of hours of playtime not to mention huge open-worlds. My playtrough of Mars: War Logs was about 25 hours (I tried to make trough most of sidequest two). For me as a causal player, this was a very nice experience. I liked it! Maybe one day, I will try a different path and have a romance with Judy ;)

This may have had a very rough start, but the patches and English dialogue overhaul make it a great experience for anyone who enjoys meaningful quests, a believable world, and realistic characters. My only recommendation for anyone considering purchasing it is to watch a gameplay video showing the combat, because it's likely to turn certain people away immediately. Try to play it like a hack & slash and you will die endlessly. Currently, it has its share of tiny errors that can be easily missed if players aren't looking for them. To avoid bugs/glitches, update your computer's graphics controller, audio controller, and verify the integrity of game cache before playing. The level design is so well thought out that the entire world feels expansive and every location feels like what it is. An hour into the game, the level design reminded me of Phantom Dust. Fourteen hours later, it still did. This isn't a negative trait in the slightest. There are more than enough non-mandatory side quests that get players more engulfed in the game world. Not a single quest is dull and pointless. All bring the world together and add character to its many inhabitants. Quest can go anywhere from helping prostitutes and mutants to stopping serial killers and spying on a political figure. Get ready for some odd situations you may not have been prepared for. The party members are interesting characters with their own motives, back-stories, and personalities. They actually comment on Roy's decisions (serum extraction and dialogue) every now and then. Those moments help breath life into his character and theirs. Conversations are well written and funny. Thanks to the dialogue, I've found myself caring about the characters I met throughout the game. The actual war logs used in the game is a nice touch. It adds first person perspective immersion for those who are interested. Think of the journal from the Elder Scrolls series or, more accurately, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura.

Like the title says, the story is fantastic. even the side quests werent simple fetch quests and if they were, still had an effect on the story. There are branching plot points. Its a bit clunky and a bit buggy, but we all made bethesda into a giant didnt we? Mods arent the value here, but the game itself. Couldnt recommend it enough honestly. The 'little guy' will always get my business.

IMPORTANT!!! Annoying stuttering with this game can be easily solved by modifying this config file: C:\Users\[YourUserName]\Documents\Mars - War Logs\graphicconfig.txt Change the REFRESHRATE parameter according to your monitor refresh rate. (I get 80fps on a RTX2080 OC Super at 3440x1440) Surprisingly enough for an old game, this one supports ultrawide resolution so kudos to Spiders for not being lazy as most AAA video game developers. BUGS: I fell off the world once and had one game crash. Other than that I had no technical issues at all. It took me 41 hours in Extreme difficulty to finish the game with most of the secondary quests cleared. There's a lot of backtracking and enemies respawn often, this can be annoying if you don't like the combat (cause stealth is not always an option). I like this kind of sci-fi story, it is well narrated and interesting enough to keep me glued to the controller till the end. About combat, even if mechanics feel dated, there is one thing I really liked: If you are facing several enemies at a time, they won't take turns to give you time to react, they will attack you with no mercy even if that implies to hurt their own teammates, so you can take advantage of that, give orders to your companion and most of all use your brain and plan accordingly before fights. I have to say I liked it: it's short, it's cheesy and it's fun. The most important thing to me is that Mars Wars Logs has soul, that old RPG flavor that is more and more difficult to find nowadays.