The Age of Decadence

Pro: - Setting is somewhat interesting. Roman like setting with fantasy and steam punk mixed in. - Items fit nicely into the setting and are somewhat realistic. Gladius swords, roman armor, nets, greek fire etc - The combat system is well thought out - there is a crafting and alchemy system - Choices and consequences at every step - Combat is hard Con: - The game grafic engine is abysmal. Looks worse then the oldest isometric rpgs. - The world feels lifeless and bland. - every location is small without many things to do. even the cities. - no hidden treasures, no real incentive for exploration - Quest density is very low. 5 Quests in the starter city, 4 in the second, even less in the third and next to no in the fourth in a playthrough with merchant. Wasn't better as combat character, but you get different quests. Playtime of a social character was 4 hours by me. - Quests are not very interesting. - No interactivity with the game world. You can not light campfires or use torches in dungeons. - Stat and skill checks at every corner. You can not even have a dialogue without skill checks. So you save your skillpoints for the next quest, check out what skills you need and reload invest your skillpoints to satisfy the skill checks. - Very rigid stat and skill system. The skill points are so rare that you can not invest in many different skills. So for combat characters it is one weapon skill, one defensive skill and perhaps alchemy or crafting to augment your char. Hybrid characters are next to unplayable. What you miss in combat skills will loose you all ability to fight. Only expert players can make them workable. - Difficulty for fights is over the top. Even the first fights are next to impossible when you do not know what are doing. You have to build a optimized character to even win the first fight in the game. It is very frustrating. RNG heavy. AoD feels more like a textadventure then a roleplaying game. I can only recommend this game for extreme masochists.

This is an old-school game. This is not hack and slash action RPG with quicktime events and hand-holding missions where you just follow along without any real failure or consequence kind of game. Everything you do matters. There is no "right" way to beat a quest. If you fail a quest to kill a target or find an artifact the story moves on and that target might turn out to be your best ally down the road or that artifact was just worthless junk anyway.. You can get through the merchant questline the quickest, then some of the others are much more complicated and stabby. The combat is grid based isometric. Lots of good attack and death animations. Huge choice of weapons. There is truly no "ultimate" weapon. You want to keep a variety of favorites. Each armor actually shows on your character. You play solo but sometimes you have allies. Tactics are a must. You can't rush three guys at once hoping to knock them out with one hit each. This isn't Diablo. So the pluses will be minuses for some; -Rich story, great art style and music -High replayability with multiple questlines with each questline having three or more outcomes. -Different ways to complete quests, failing quests intentionally or unintentionally unlocks new quests (or has better rewards than completing the quest). -Exploration and side quests are optional, you can betray your bosses and pick who you want to work for at any time. -Combat is challenging, must use tactics, variety of weapons and armor, you get the spoils of war so whatever your enemy had is now yours. Kill street thugs for fun. Or join the army and jump into the middle of a war. -You have to really think about what you want to do next. The only goal of the game is to benefit yourself, not save the world. You won't find a cliche ending where you are hero who won the girl but tearfully lost your best friend. -Old-school RPG meaning you have stats, you have action points and HP, you must heal yourself. You must learn and adapt to excel.

When you first start off Age of Decadence it's fairly exciting, you get likely what is the closest to an original Fallout vibe there's been yet, it seems very atmospheric, and the backgrounds and choices seem versatile. Despite a generally clunky and mediocre combat system, it seems that the game really is very open to noncombat characters, and seems to welcome a general mix of playstyles that give a dynamic experience. From the very start there seems to be an intriguing web of interconnected quests and results from your actions that look like they'll vary each playthrough quite a bit. Then you leave the first area, after Teron, it's easy to see that the meat of the game, and the majority of its decent parts, were stuffed into the very beginning, and steam very quickly runs out. There's just too much wrong with this game, the content is thin, you can argue that replayability is the goal but there isn't much to it. Archaic skillcheck design means that you essentially need to have foresight of what skillchecks are coming in the future, as it's very unlikely that you'll build your character exactly to the game's specifications. This is especially true of the end game, where it's very easy to screw yourself over and end up in a situation where winning isn't possible. I haven't seen game design that poor since Sierra adventure titles. The combat also becomes insufferable very quickly, the quests are generally dull, and while the dialogue is above average, the plot itself isn't very interesting and the world building and backstory loses its mystique once you unpeel the layers and realize it's fairly uninspired. The endings are weak and uninteresting, incredibly anticlimactic, and even one with extreme weight to its decision is utterly underwhelming. The sound design is sparse if nonexistent, typos and terrible bugs generally mar the experience, and ultimately the game feels like a poorly assembled collection of Choose Your Own Adventure setpieces. Massive disappointment.

Age of Decadence is a good game, and which development I followed for a long time. It was pretty exciting to see the result of years' worth of labor come to fruition and experience for the first time the craft and dedication put into the title. I must confess unfortunately, my first go at the game was less than ideal. I started out as a hybrid character who does not specialize in any specific task, but realizing my error, later tried at every turn to focus on a defined set of skills. The game experience changes markedly depending on what character you create, to the point that the most important choice in this game becomes the character creation. I found that due to the emphasis on choices and consequences, a large swath of content is gated behind certain checks based on these skills. For a character who aspired to be a jack of all trades, this created a funneling effect where I didn't have any choice being carried along the base plotline just to continue the motion of seeing to its conclusion before finding myself in a yet another similar situation of a pigeonholed exit. In this harsh world or game, broad yet meager talents don't suffice, they wither and soon become part of the moribund landscape. My well-mannered gentleman swordsman drifter soon drifted through the cracks of game design and swept away with the ravages of dictated progress. It all snowballed to a point the game simply and literally refused to budge or work with my flawed character, a hard crash within the game world with no exit to desktop, only an obscured 'exit' sign awaiting those who had failed the experiment to boot you to an ignoble end. Exit and New Game would have been a more compassionate choice. Recommended, for the richness of the world, the choices a player has, and the world that compute and react to those choices. Just be sure to specialize, use common sense, and stay within the pages of this Choose Your Adventure. Do yourselves a favor and try the demo.

Played about 5 hours before giving up. Really wanted to like this game, the promise of a more pen-and-paper, thinking man RPG where combat wasn't as prevalent. Huge wall of text at the beginning explaining combat is not to be prioritized, and to ensure stats are put in other categories. Great! Proceed to create a street wise merchant with high persuasion, then explore the start area. In the next few hours, I fail pretty much all checks everywhere, no matter what it is. Can't climb a wall, can't get information from people, can't persuade the guard to let me through. I eventually have success in a quest line to poison guards in a remote location. Awesome, the poison will ensure no combat! Get there, promptly get murdered by two guards that have been poisoned but still very much alive. I reload and try every single combination. Every one leads to combat. No way to get back to town from this location. Try to fight, I'm under powered; proceed to die a few more times, impasse. Load a previous save, and get entangled in a different quest, to deposit the current ruler of the city. A few screens later, I'm again in the middle of a fight, against the entire town guards. For a game not prioritizing combat, there sure is a lot of it. Not the "kill the rats" variety either, killing the entire town guards or an entire garrison of soldiers. WTF. If I ever get back to this game, I'm making a fighter. In the meantime, it will collect dust - there are far better isometric RPGs out there that I haven't gone through yet.