Posted on: October 15, 2015

klops1

Games: 76 Reviews: 2

Very good. A fresh take on CRPGs.

There's a demo - try it first! The Good: -Replayability - AoD is designed with multiple playthroughs in mind. While your persuasive merchant talker that slithered away from all fights might complete the game in a few hours, your praetor loyal to royal house might take much longer while trying to serve your lord with both silver tongue and blue-steel gladius sword. Thief, loremaster, conman, fighter and assassin backgrounds and your skills all give you different takes on the game's story and consequences. You get a very different view of things happened when playing an assassin built to kill or a loremaster who gets to know what is really going on and especially what has happened before. -Lots of branching/ multiple quest paths - See above -Writing. Dialogue. The story - There's no ancient evil coming to destroy lawful-good elven community with the world. There are power-hungry assholes like in real world - although some of the power hungry assholes are much closer to gods than presidents. Dialogue is good. The story and the lore is good. -Combat - At its best the the combat is like mini-puzzles. Arena in Maadoran is a perfect example for that. You character might survive that berserker easily, but what happens when you get three opponents against you at once? Or a dodging bastard with a long spear that you cannot reach at all? Or an archer + heavy hitter duo? At its worst? Read more: The Bad: -Combat. It can be really hard if you don't have character concentrated almost wholly to fighting. 1 fighting skill + dodge/block + perhaps critical strike - and that's all. Supporting skills such as Alchemy or Crafting are good also. Don't try jack-of-all-trades build with your first playthrough! -Skill points. They are few. They are hard to divide since you don't always know what to use. For example thief build can be tricky - especially if you want to fight also. This leads to the game often being difficult. The Ugly: -It's not very pretty. Small indie team...

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Posted on: October 21, 2015

catking2003

Verified owner

Games: 112 Reviews: 3

Not an RPG

I have been thinking a lot about what this game actually is and finally I come to a conclusion. This is not an RPG as it claims to be but rather a point and click adventure game disguised as RPG. There are certainly many choices but not much freedom. I know this sounds conflicting but it is not. You have the choices to do various quests but there are requirements for succeeding in those quests, most of which require certain levels of this skill or that skill. So in the end, to do and complete quests you are forced to put points in specific skills instead of investing points as you like, just like in an adventure game, you are forced to put items together to solve puzzle and proceed the game. There are also encounters and events that you can not get out alive, no matter what class you choose and what skills/stats you put in, just like that death spot in the adventure game where you will simply die by walking over. They make different stories for different classes which exactly show how lacking the game is. No, you can't solve the same problems with different methods using different classes but you can solve different problems with specific methods using specific classes. No freedom, just branching, the fact that there are more branches does not mean it becomes open ended.

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Posted on: July 13, 2020

topgwim

Verified owner

Games: 185 Reviews: 13

A rough gem with an Incredible story

I usually don't write reviews, but this flawed masterpiece has been the only game that has managed me to sink over 500 hours into it. Age of decadence is an isometric RPG that does not hold your hand like majority of other games out there these days. You're not the hero that is destined to save the world, get the girl, get your ego boosted by imaginary sycophants and to enjoy mindless hours of lame stories. You're just a guy trying to survive in a broken world full of people who want to survive just like you - a refreshing setting for a guy who likes to face gaming challenges. Expect to die a lot! A little bit about the story; AOD takes place in a setting of a fallen empire loosely based on Roman Empire. At it's height, they were able to employ steam-tech, a lesser form of magic and finally able to summon gods. This empire ended up facing another faction called Quantari in an epic war were both sides summoned their gods (or did they?) in order to duke it out in a field of battle. The was was devastating to the point that it the Empire's technology, political stability and plethora of other social issues, ended up regressing to a very, very backwards state. The last few lords are fighting for the high-hanging fruit, as the low ones have long ago been plucked by the opportunistic individuals, and everyone else is just trying to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. This world is a world where there is no hope, where there are no good guys, where everyone just wants to survive. Nobody is bad, and nobody is good, everyone is just selfish. If you're worked in high-tier corporate you'd find the ideas behind this setting very similar to the games played behind the scenes. In short - 5 stars, and an admiration to buy any and all Iron Towers Studio games from this point onward, the soul they've put into their games is incredible. I do hope that Vince and his crew do get to make a sequel, I'd pay good money for it personally. With best Regards "AODFreak"

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Posted on: April 6, 2019

Teskron

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 54

Min-Max your own adventure

It's nice that some quest can be achieved with different means, and even failed quest don't always break the game, but mostly failures lead to death and mostly their is only one way to achieve the goal dependend on the chosen skills. Whatever skill the player chooses, it has to be maxed out. Mediocre skills will fail. One has to choose either a fighter or a smooth talker. A talker gets through almost the entire game by maxing persuasion and streetwise. For a talker the dialogue is written well, but there is not much gameplay left, since it forces the player to go for the dialogue choices his skill tree allows. As a result the game is sometimes even less a choose your own adventure, but more an interactive story. A fighter has to max one weapon skill and either block OR dodge. The combat allows different strike options, but it's for me not satisfying enough to endure a whole playthrough with a fighter. So it's okay for one playthrough (or two if one likes the unimmersive fight system). Sadly the atmosphere, absent ambient sounds, repetitive music, boring graphics are make it feel like a story told through a little interface window which the player looks at most of the time take away a lot of the fun. Especially annoying are super long loading times, when changing areas (which are sometimes small).

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Posted on: September 7, 2021

Vilcapaza

Verified owner

Games: 167 Reviews: 9

Lack of pollish/content/paths

Are you tired of power fantasies? Do you want to guess (incorrectly) how to build your character, and reload and save 1 billion times, so you can try the same linear unforgiving storyline again and again, until you maybe get a taste of the rich story and narrative in an post-apocalyptic roman-empire-inspired world? Oh boi, do I have the game for you! Thematically and aesthetically (not counting the mediocre graphics) I adore the world of TAoD. It promises a dark and mystical story about living in a world sundered by magical forces, so powerful and alien, that the people now living in it can't agree on what they were, what caused them, and why they happened. But the story and gameplay is gated behind character stats and (mostly) skill checks. Never player choices. Based on what character you build, you seemingly only have *one* route in TAoD, and if you do not spend your points "wisely" and min/max, you cannot even progress through that route. Also, the dialogue options and paths are way too few, and it is way too inconsistent in its density and description. Also, the writing cannot decide on how authentic, sarcastic, self-aware, or dramatic it wants to be, leaving a schizophrenic story-telling that sometimes is either very engaging or simply too boring to bother with. Navigating and finding areas of interest is also a bother. If you like being bamboozled by the camera angles or the layouts, which does not much to imply what is interactable and what is basically in-game white-space. I got lost and bumped into important areas by accident more times than I cared for. Honestly, I myself would prefer to read about this world in a wiki, or hear some youtube-essay about it, because playing it was only fun for the first hour or so.

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