Torment: Tides of Numenera

Nowhere near as good as the Planescape Torment. They somehow menaged to make the Combat even worse than the PS:T. Story is bland and you cant get into it like you do in many other great CRPGs. I backed this game and i am a big fan of CRPG genre. But this game is a massive dissapointment after waiting for such a long time for it. They also lied a lot during the devopment stage of the game. If i knew this would be a console game i would have never backed it in the first place. It is obvious from the gameplay that they comprimised a lot to make it compatible with the consoles Dont buy it.

The game world is awesome, but not very well utilised. Visuals are not great, but neither would call them ugly . The game has pathfinding issues, something that infinity engine games didn't have more than a decade ago. Skill system is subpar, passing checks doesn't give any sense of accomplishment, if you don't have enough points to spend then your companion will. There is nothing that I could compare to discovering secrets of Unbroken Circle of Zerthimon in the first Torment game. Combat. Have mercy, it's a trainwreck. Most exciting parts of the story are shown in a badly painted (greyscale to add an insult to the injury) choose your adventure panels. Even old Torment had cutscenes, nowadays even more can be shown in-engine, what did they spend those $4m on? I think that many people give this game a rather high score out of sentiment and I think to validate themselves by liking a game that requires a lot of reading (it doesn't btw, you could'tskip 80% of the text and still figure out what's going on) - "the book was better" kind of attitude. Music doesn't have any of the charm or teeth that the previous game's score had. The entire - feels like - 10 minutes of it. I highly recommend the old Torment game instead. It will take 10 minutes to get used to 640x480 graphics, but EVERYTHING else is better. I wish I could refund this one and get a bunch of other games instead.

Ludicrously over-written, appallingly designed. Especially the move to a terrible implementation of turn-based combat for no obvious reason at all. Which could have been fine - I mean, X-Com 2 is *incredible*, Wasteland 2 was pretty fun, etc, but not the way it ended up here. This is a mess. The game has no discipline whatsoever with any of its systems, just a firehose of mediocre, disorganised creativity which leaves you cold. In a world where anything is possible, everything is just ever-so-slightly different from every other game like this you've played. Which brings me to the story - it's basically just an artless re-implementation of Planescape: Torment, with nastier companions. I am not particularly happy I backed this, but I'm very glad I didn't play $53 for it!

Firstly, let me just say I backed this game during its Kickstarter campaign as I'm an avid fan of Planescape: Torment, Icewind dale I & II, Baldur's gate. I had really high hopes that this would deliver in terms of content quality. This game took 4 years of development and it doesn't show at all. It is a half-baked game. -The gameplay itself is slow, with combat being almost unbearably un-engaging. The puzzles are random for the sake of being interesting. There is no unifying design for the world other than it just looking weird, wonky, and lacking cohesion and quality. -The companion characters are terribly uninteresting and, despite the other reviews, I didn't find them fleshed out at all; I didn't get attached or felt remotely interested in any of them. And that's saying something, as I still fondly remember the companions from the previous games mentioned above. -Its only redeeming quality was supposed to be the dialogue and storyline. Well, they failed there too. The dialogue is dreary , and clicking through seas of endless text that feels like poetic content for the sake of content is not what I expected. The storyline itself tries so hard to stay interesting, but quickly becomes repetitive. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone. Save yourself the disappointment and go play some Bioware RPG's. They're the only ones continuing the legacy of quality content and deep, engaging storyline.

Sadly, I don't have room for the 20,000+ words necessary to describe in painstakingly intricate and unnecessarily obsessive detail every aspect of the game that managed to disappoint or irritate me. Perhaps an excessive amount of verbiage to waste on a game that only took 20 hours to complete in any case. So, I'll sum up my entire experience with by analogy to a small spoiler regarding one of the companions (Erritis). Now, this guy is the only character I managed to care even a little about. Aligern is a massive asshole with no backbone in him to save his life. Callistege is much the same. Matkina has no personality at all. Tybir is a weak, cowardly traitor who sold out his own friend and deserves death. Rhin is the helpless girl equivalent of a $2 hooker, written with all the subtlety and nuance of a brick to the face. Which left only Erritis. Now, he isn't exactly written with a lot of subtlety either... that's being generous... but I guess I felt some sympathy with him because we kind of shared the same plight. Him burdened with the inane, screeching voices of ones he wished only to be destroyed. Me hanging out with at least 3 of these companions, including his very same voices. Joined in shared torment. Really brings me back, to the good old days. Anyways. By the end of the game, I relieve him of his burden; he's finally free, and I actually kinda care. He smiles as his face fills with tears of joy. The most natural feeling in the world at that point is to hug him before he leaves! But then he just... disappears, waving me off as if that scene had all the impact of taking a dump. Wow, thanks man. Way to punctuate the end of that struggle. Yeah bro, just let's wave at each other. 'No homo, bro!' Come on! I actually managed to care a little about this guy, and that's what I get for it. Which is this game in a nutshell. You actually start to kind of care a little bit... then it inelegantly drops you on your ass. And this applies to every aspect of it.