Posted on: April 5, 2017

iceberg

Games: 14 Reviews: 1

Heartbroken....

Looks like all POE engine games seem to share the same flaw- the character creation and combat system is way too developed and complicated compared to ..... duration of the game. Literally, you have 6-8 different kinds of damage you can take or deal in combat, but you will fight maybe 10 fights throughout the game. You have various secondary skill to choose from while 90% of them is totally useless, or you do not even bother to make additional click to use it. I was able to finish it in less than 30 h, looking under every rock. The story and world has a huge potential, however too much of it had been revealed at the very beginning ( even in trailers). Definitely not Torment style. The game gives you a little bit of freedom, however only within a particular location. The best of Torment - wandering around a city with no clue what to do next, will not happen here, since plot is linear and it is very obvious what to do to push it forward. Some pluses. The world itself is quite fascinating, the main storyline is consistent, and really interesting. In few places you can find relations to original Torment that will bring a smile on your face and chill down your spine. If it just could have been 60-80h game not 30 h game....

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Posted on: July 1, 2017

miracle.flame

Verified owner

Games: 304 Reviews: 63

A mess

This is what you get for over-financing a project way before the job is done. Huge PS:T lover here who backed this by 130€. I really did not expect much, but I hoped I would at least like this. I could not finish the game half way through. If you have to try hard to keep your interest in the story, characters and the world then there is something terribly wrong with the writing and atmosphere. And it's not like my tastes have changed. I've played PS:T two years back and I've been blown away even more than ever before - that's how brilliant the writing and atmosphere was. But I've approached TTON as a completely standalone piece of art with no association to PS:T. I was thinking that will prevent my disappointment. Boy I was wrong. Actually any resemblance and respect to PS:T is what helps this game to stay above water surface. Otherwise the writing here is just overly complex, overly flowery, overly mysterious, overly abundant and in the end overly unnatural, overly uninteresting and overly boring. I also blame audio management for the lack of atmosphere. I've written exhaustive letter to devs and they pretty much ignored every single point even clear bug reports. That's what you get for backing. The score is composed.. or better yet the audio mixed and processed in a way that the result sounds very flat and featureless without any noticeable dynamics or remarkable details and memorable moments as it was in PST. Not only it's barely noticeable but during dialogues where you spent over 70% (!) of all time someone decided it would be good idea if the music is all muffled and almost muted. What is the point of musical score when you spent literally hours and days listening to it in this muffled state? The ambience of people in the area is lacking heavily. Something I loved about PST that you could hear and FEEL you are in a city full of people around you. In Tides people are silent. You go in a tavern and the place is more dead & silent than mortuary in PST!

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Posted on: March 17, 2020

AlucardNoir

Verified owner

Games: 241 Reviews: 28

Unplayable

Title frankly says it all. I bought this a few years after it came out in the hopes that the bugs would have been ironed out. They haven't. I "played" this on Linux, so this might not apply on other platforms - please keep that in mind. The game is very unoptimised - making the use of the "Pillars or Eternity technology" bit that you get in the intro sequence rather annoying. It also suffers from some rather unfortunate memory leaks. Now, the good part is that I actually succeeded in playing it. Once, in the tongue-and-cheek die before the first scene even starts that I'm sure somebody thought was very clever... and then the problems started. I got stuck at the death screen. Unable to return to the main menu or load another save - since there were none. Force closing the game showed me the game had left a few hundred megabytes in memory so I restarted. With the computer restarted I tried launching the game again. No problems yet. Then I tried starting a new game. This time wiser in regards to what choices not to make. The game never loaded the new game. IT got stuck. I had to force close the entire computer via the power button. Here's the thing. I don't buy games to make them work, I buy them to play them. Since the start of the year I've already completed a full playthough of Tyranny, one of West of Loathing, and am currently doing one of Pillars. All three Unity games, two of which use the same base as Torment. I know for a fact Unity works on this machine and how the Pillars version of the engine should behave. Torment is unoptimised, badly programmed and suffers from a rather serious memory leak issue. I know GOG doesn't like it when we bring other games into these reviews but in this case it's a matter of the engine and Torment themselves using the name of Pillars of Eternity in their own game. Torment invites an engine comparisons to Pillars and other Unity CRPGs. Pillars and other Unity based CRPGs work, Torment does not.

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Posted on: March 7, 2017

Midnight Walrus

Verified owner

Games: 917 Reviews: 2

How does it stack to the other torment?

Loved the 90s Torment. Still my favorite game. This... I love it less. There is always danger in comparing something new to nostalgia, always some nit to pick. Frankly, though, the designers begged for it by calling this the 'spiritual sucessor' and naming it toment. So here goes: Story: Yes, Tides is a story driven game. The world, the pacing, the descriptions, all top notch. Plus, the way they marry sci-fi and magic is quite fancy. The environments, hard to talk them up without spoiling the story, so I wont. suffice to say they are intricate and always decorated with interactable flavor of the world, much like PST. As for the characters, they feel true. They feel like full fledged people. The last cast off isn't as compelling a character as the nameless one, but the supporting cast is quite good. Just like PST, It's esentailly a book shaped like a game. A kind of moral choose your own adventure. Sadly, It won't ask you to re-evaluate your values and perception of reality the way PST did. Thats asking a lot, I know, but it is the 'spiritual sucessor.' Expect an excellent but not terribly challenging Sci-Fi story. Combat: Like PST, you can get through the whole game never slamming anyone with that uber hammer you paid a bazillion of the game currency for. This is fantastic. You can be a true pascifist and still feel satisfied at the end. On the other hand, if you do choose to fight, the combat feels weak. The tactical decision making is obvious... always. Tankers tank, healers heal and dps go dps. If there is a thing to use in the environment, use the thing. The move/action system they landed on leaves little room for player originality. The combat feels dumbed down, even compared to PST fighters, and that's saying something. Other: Graphics, AI, and sound... Its not hard to beat a 90's game. They do resoundingly. Final thoughts: Worth your money, but don't expect the same level of wow you got in PST or any type of combat challenge.

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Posted on: November 11, 2018

KainKlarden

Games: 769 Reviews: 59

Underdeveloped greatness

The setting of Numenera is genuinely intriguing. It’s a world reminiscent of fantasy ideas, yet full of cyberpunk or sci-fi elements, with artifacts, magic and a lot of odd phenomena having some kind of scientific explanation. This world just oozes interesting stories and characters and it feels like you can learn something exciting just around the corner. Yet, in this game the places are interesting to look at and they seem to live their own interesting ways until you interact with them and suddenly feel as if the place is fake, just decorations that will disappear as you exit the scene. Characters pop in and out, mostly with no real impact or consequence. Game does have lots of great mechanics and ideas to tell cool stories in interesting ways, to not boil things down to just fighting or just talking. But there’s always a feeling of the “right way” and a “wrong way” to play the game, instead of different valid possibilities. And the “wrong way” will be less fun and less full on the story. A pretty good, if less impactful than it wants to be, story that is worth checking out. Though even there, apart from few exceptions, the game gets less and less full on interesting ideas as it goes, with most care put in the opening act and later story bits just kind of happening one by one. Oh and there’s also a fact that some of the things that Kickstarter backers were promised never made it into the game… I liked the game. I liked what it tried to do. I liked the music by Mark Morgan. I liked some of the character lines that felt truly fresh and unique. I liked the setting and hope to see more games set in it. But it’s not a title I would really want to revisit.

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