The Age of Decadence

The story reads itself as badly written fan-fiction, the game itself is buggy and clunky beyond belief, the quest structure and moment to moment gameplay tedious. It's hailed as this deep, introspective and godly-narrative but I haven't found any of it in my gameplay. I give it 2 reviews because even though it's held together with duct tape and bandages, it does somehow work-ish.

Modern classic - Age of Decadance is challenging RPG for new players. Reason is simple - modern player is lazy. He think that game must be easy and casual. Every character must have right to live from start to the end, visit all places, win all quests and competition and kill Big Bad Boss without sweat. Even if it was very unbalanced character made without care. In that games world made for players character - not players character try to survive in world. AoD give you another point of view. Most build are valid it is true. But every build have its flaws and you will be wandering - is your build good at all? You can play your game with talker - but then you must back away from combat. You cannot resolve all situations just with words. And of course you cannot be Arenas Champion. You can play game as combat character - but then you miss some quests and even locations. You can try and play hybrid - it is most challenging but most rewarding experience. But even then - you will see only small part of the game. Factions play major role in story line and all factions have different chains of quests for player. Sometimes it is same event - like assassination - but from the another faction perspective. And almost every quest have different endings. Often you can betray your masters and sometimes they will betray you. Plus in this game your actions matters. In many games you kill dozens of enemies but still some stupid thugs try to rob you in the bright day! Here body count is part of dialog system. If you are bloody murderer some people think twice before insult you. Combat is very hard but balanced. Quests are sensible and hand-crafted. Crafting and alchemy is brilliant. Quest decisions, builds, choice, equipment and tactics - all matters and have consequences. What more you want from classic RPG? It isn't pop-culture Hollywood style game and it isn't have romances and that biowarian thing about LGBT rights. It is art from people who love CRPG and it is awesome!!!

I like pretty much everything about this game. However, I think the developers went overboard with skill checks and "choices & consequences". I don't think it would have hurt the game to be a little more linear. Instead, I spend a lot of my time watching loading screens following choices whose consequences were a little opaque. You really can't play and enjoy this game without a walkthrough, especially in the beginning.

After multiple runs and builds my conclusion is that the devs are anti-player.

The Age of Decadence is absolutely riddled with typos and spelling errors which, in a text message, wouldn't be a big deal. But in a for-profit, narratively focused RPG is absolutely flabbergasting. And there's no redemption in the content, either. Dialogue relies heavily on modern-era sayings and needless profanity which alchemize to burn right through the fourth wall. Combat has a good deal of features: the ability to power attack or to trip an opponent are, on the surface, interesting. But it doesn't take long to discover their wholly cosmetic nature. Knocking an enemy down, for instance, costs your entire turn. Should you succeed, the enemy will simply get back up with no more penalty than having lost -half- a turn himself. If there's a purpose to that... I don't see it. Where combat is concerned, once you've stripped away all the bull, all you're truly left with is an attack roll simulator that, due to the nature of the game, will always be stacked against you. It's like playing craps. But craps is only fun when there's money on the line. In the AoD, your sanity is what you bet, and the house always wins. Non-combat options allow you to take a different path, exchanging a poor combat system for poorly written vignettes. But these choose-your-own-adventure sequences require high levels of proficiency in a vast panoply of character skills that you simply can't afford. Strategy and planning have no place: you're simply left to the mercy of unforeseeable pass-fail checks that wag their fingers at you when you, say, don't have enough historical knowledge during a sneaking section. This ultimately leads to constant reloading to allocate the skill points you've learned never to spend until you've reached a barrier. Far from inspired, The AoD is reminiscent of the efforts of a wannabe tabletop game store DM. Nothing you do works, mind-reading is essential and the whole product, while terrible, has a smarminess about it that betrays an ego that was dialed up to 11.