NEO Scavenger

I got this game for full price after playing the demo of it off of the site. Honestly, the gameplay loop is pretty addicting and I really enjoyed the feeling of being a (hobo) adventurer in a desolate world. Generally, while there aren't a lot of them, the small story elements give a nice touch to the world and the supernatural sci-fi blend is special and really sets this game apart. This, like many other roguelikes, is a great game to play while watching or listening to videos on the side so it can feel relaxing sometimes. Crafting and UI is not always very intuitive, but the game gets an entire star from me based on combat alone. It's a unique turn-based experience with brutal Dwarf Fortress-esque injury text and lots of options to plan your moves around. What dropped the score for me is that after playing it for a while, I started feeling like it was somewhat unfinished. There aren't that many items, the enemy variety is kinda small, and the endgame being an memorized, scripted experience doesn't sit well with me in a roguelike like this one, so I haven't even been aiming for it. If this game had some DLC content or updates to it, I would probably not have detratced this point, but I can't really justify $15 for this game when there are many extremely in-depth rogues like this one that are completely free. That being said, it's a mostly positive experience.

This ticked most boxes for me. Interesting setting, decent story, great artstyle and suitable game-mechanics. It is unfortunately also a game built on a brutal difficulty, combined with a story that requires a heavy time-investment to progress through and a roguelike that offers nothing regarding replayability. Which is (to me) the one and only problem with this game. A roguelike that offers no progression outside your save-game, which is erased/reset upon death, can be a frustrating experience when it requires hours of your day to get through. The reason this worked for a game like FTL is that it offered new and different experiences each playthrough because of the expanding ship-list. I wound up backing up my save-file to actually get somewhere. A great game, but unfortunately it got caught up in the roguelike-craze that reigned at the time, despite this serving no real purpose to the gameplay.

This game is a great concept and fun to play with but it is far from a polished product. Not speaking of graphics-wise either. The game is sorely lacking in documentation and the manual that comes with it is simply information pulled from a fan-made wiki. You will find yourself dying quite often not from legitimate game-play reasons but because of poorly explained game mechanics. Combine this with a mandatory "ironman" gameplay mode will lead to a lot of frustration until you learn how to play by a trial-and-error approach. If you have a lot of patience this can be an enjoyable game even in its current state. I would've rather held off on my purchase (and gave a better rating) until after things were a bit more fleshed out and documented.

The game is fun for few hours, maybe up to 20-30 if you're really into it for some reason. It's a homage to Wasteland in the form of a post apocalyptic hobo simulator. It has a lot of potential but there aren't that many items, interactions or overall variations. The fact that the game is written in Flash shouldn't be looked down as much as it is, but I feel it does make the UI interactions significantly less smooth than they could have been. The UI itself has mediocre design, separate from the Flash issue, which makes a lot of repetitive interactions in the game get tiresome much quicker. The main issue is that it's not even an eighth of the game Fallout 2 is, and you can get Fallout 2 for cheaper and while they are significantly different games, this comparison just irks me in terms of bang for buck. Get it for 5 USD if you're bored, 10 USD if you're extremely bored. I don't want to be too mean to the game, it's charming in a way, but, it is what it is.

I can almost see what people get out of this game, but my experience has been nothing but frustration. The game is PURE RNG, and given how many time's ive had to restart I really don't think I could be convinced otherwise. There just isn't the kind of balancing here that would make this game fun to me. I've died several times in scenarios where I literally couldn't survival, I guess because I went in the wrong direction at the start and got hypothermia. There are a lot of roguelikes out there, and I can usually do pretty well at them, but this game is pure evil.