UnderRail

hour four of chasing rats with a crowbar, because I can't afford bullets for the basic gun. still don't know which merchant ofn5 so far even can be bothered to buy the rat meat i'm collecting or how to cook it so it's useful..... so i'm praying for the RNG to give me leather. in another hour or two I should be able to buy enough bullets to kill A BUG oh my, my gun is degraded to uselessness after less than 100 rounds...goody if this game was anymore realistic i'd just go to work instead...they are similar amounts of fun so far, except one i can actually make money. I'm sure this is a fun game, but the beginning is a SLOG i swear if one more rat bumps me out of stealth and makes it take 2 minutes to cross a stupid empty room i'm gonna just delete this game, someone should have playtested this

Underrail gets a little too old school for its own good. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic somewhere that is an obvious throwback to the classic Fallout. Unfortunately, this is the most poorly designed RPG I've played in over 20 years, with systems that seem to be engineered more to annoy than entertain. Of particular note: Your character's move speed is slow, making it seem to take forever to get anywhere. Game speed can be adjusted, but this setting resets back to default every time you start the game. There is no fast travel outside of major towns. Given the size of most RPGs, Underrail being no exception, this makes navigating the world a true chore. Poor crafting system: crafting items literally involves collecting dozens of otherwise junk items, all of which have weight. Even if you want to ignore crafting, much of what you encounter as loot consists of crafting items, and there is no Pillars of Eternity style "stash" to route these to. Dated encumbrance system: becoming overloaded makes your already slow character move around a third normal speed, and becoming heavily encumbered slows you down further. This, combined with the lack of fast travel, means you're stuck slowly trudging across zone after zone if you pick up more than you can carry (or making multiple trips back and forth), which happens almost constantly. Naturally, using stealth makes you even slower. Poor balance: combat is difficult, which is normally a good thing. What's not good is crossing a seemingly innocuous area transition and getting killed in turn-based combat before you can do anything. This is an sadly frequent occurrence. Limited auto/quick saves: you get two of each. That's it. Zone transitions autosave the game, but since the save occurs after the transition, the slot gets wasted if you run into the above. Insufficient automapping: most interior dungeons have no map. The world map cannot be scrolled. This could be a good game with a few QoL improvements.

I mostly* enjoyed Underrail up until the endgame content, which was irredeemably unfun. I probably won't touch this game again until they add modding tools. Most annoying things for me: 1. Backtracking for hours on almost every quest 2. Looting ends up worthless because you can barely sell anything, even if you visit every single vendor in the game every 90 minutes 3. missing "95%" attacks 4 times in a row - just make max hit percent 100 ffs 4. serious lack of AOE options for most builds 5. asymmetry of combat options - by this I mean, something like crippling strike or acid entrapment is immensely more unfair when your opponents use it than when you do, since you are fighting 1 vs 10+ 5. music loops are too short for #1 and end up very repetitive. Core city is the worst offender. *when the RNG was behaving

I'm not necessarily one to shy away from challenge, but UnderRail takes it a little too far. At first it struck me as being a bit similar to Fallout, which I had just played and finished for the first time, so I dove right in. It does start out very similarly to Fallout, too. The combat was similar, but improved in a few subtle ways, and it seemed a bit clearer how to build the sort of character that I wanted to play. I began exploring the settlement, and found that I could learn to develop my psychic abilities. Fallout with a magic system? And I can set people on fire!? Sign me UP! This is where things started to go south... I did the same thing that you'd do in any RPG: check rooms for things that might be useful to me. Well, suddenly, I'm the one being lit on fire. Okay, it's more realistic, so I can't just take people's stuff. Beginner's trap, but I can learn a lesson. This time, I looked at some aquatic plant the wrong way, apparently; gun to the head from some angry botanist that hadn't paid me any attention prior. Okay, don't do anything. Finally survived the town - the safe zone - and made my way out into the world. Soon began my first real fight against rathounds. I had something that was supposed to rot their muscles into mushroom fertilizer; should be an easy fight. Even with maximum proficiency in melee weapons and firearms, I was hopelessly slaughtered, even before the reinforcements arrived. Well, maybe I'm not supposed to go that way yet. Every other way that I went got me killed EVEN FASTER, and I never once got close to any kind of victory. That's all well and good - again, I'm no stranger to challenge - but this was impossible, and I was on EASY.

Started 3 characters on normal difficulty, all die in their first fight without a hint of a chance, even with consumables. Seems to me you need to either copy&paste a min-max build from somewhere and then learn every game mechanic before you even start or, well, you don't get anywhere. In my point of view this is not difficulty, this is bad design. Let me get involved with a game before I need to know its mechanic.