Posted on: December 10, 2016
gnossos
Verified ownerGames: 286 Reviews: 6
UnderRail is the perfect RPG game
UnderRail is the best a videogame I have seen in quite some time. This is coming from someone who is an ardent fan of RPGs. I have played almost everything going back to the early 1980s, and I currently works in the industry. I seldom leave reviews, but this morning after over 40 hours of game play I discovered "Core City" in the game and was so awed by this I felt compelled to write a review. UnderRail's dialog and story is superlative. Quite simply, there is so much minutia they have gotten right. For instance, there are weird characters who speak in strange, made-up languages, with no apologizing or explanation. They just do it. It adds spice and realism. There are characters who are mean to you because they are ornery. There speed-freaks and tweakers and drunks. There are husband-and-wife pairs who playfully toss each other crap in the middle of a conversation you're having with one of them. There are story elements that are planted around major events and all the dialog options perfectly reflect this, from the lowliest NPC to the most major conversationalist who has dozens of dialog-tree avenues to explore. It is very much a game made for someone who appreciates Fallout 1 & 2 and Baldur's Gate. If you like those games, this is every bit as good as them. Anyone who knows those realizes saying something like this is quite a statement. Realistically, in today's market, nothing else is as good as those 4 games in terms of rpg purity. Sure, there is Arcanum and a few others, but apart from those close siblings, if you are looking for something new, with a fresh take made by different developers and not done in Unity, this is it. I love Pillars of Eternity, but UnderRail is better. It is more spiritually in tune with the original vibe. The original thrill of creation the game creators had when they were young and knew few boundaries. All of us, as we get older, incur some knowledge and experience about the world that both informs us but it also limits us, in our ability to see outside of the paper veneer we have become comfortably captured in. The UnderRail team are young and fresh, and this game is really really good. Inspired even. Also--and this goes a long way--its not self conscious. The latest gen of kickstarters seems to suffer from self-consciousness to an overwhelming degree. UnderRail gives us a whole new mythos and world that is realistic and futuristic, but is also gritty and exceptionally realized. In the tradition of the very best world-imaginers, you can actually conceive that this scenario could happen at some distant date if the right set of circumstances were to happen. Instead of magic there are psionics, as well as some mutation thing that I have only begun to explore. The world feels very very large. I have no indication of what its boundaries are yet, or experienced the feeling that I am running out of areas to adventure in to gain XP which I am sorely in need of. The balance is good if a little on the "hard" side. Challenges as you come to them always feel fairly impossible at first, but after a bit of poking around you can usually discover another way to face it that works well. I haven't run into an unsurpassable challenge yet. But they nearly always make me earn it. Which leads me to one more salient and important point as to lending realism to world-building: There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of areas in game that you are not supposed to venture into. These are wholly imagined as well. And if you go into them the characters immediately respond by attacking you. This happens if you accidentally search someone's locker you're not supposed to or go into private areas you're warned to avoid. This is awesome! These guys usually cream you in a matter of seconds with weapons and abilities far above your own. Remember how encountering the Enclave felt in Fallout?, that you were this twerp running around the desert and they had energy weapons and power-armor? You knew these items were out there but never got the chance to get them yourself. And they could cream you so you had to be sneaky and clever -- this is like that, only there are all sorts of factions like that. There are punk-rock subway dwellers with bitchen psionics who will just cream you if you wander through their camp. I love it. It doesn't stop progression from happening, but only forces you to consider other ways to getting what you're after. In short, Its MORE LIKE REAL LIFE IS. There are boundaries and you dont cross them and there are always people more powerful than you. Instead of being some linear RPG where there is only ever one way to go and difficulty is calibrated according to your stats in some disingenuous manner, but its all fine as long as you keep clicking and are mesmerized by the pretty purple color-glow spells. I hate those. It's not realism, it's bad design, which is a meaningless experience. Underrail, by contrast, is a gorgeous story couched in a top-down, Cavalier-Orthographic projection (isometric to most) turn-based combat, and equipment gathering progression. The ambient soundtrack is marvelous, definitely in my top-5 game soundtracks, along-side Mark Morgan's Fallout and a few others. In this day and age where so many new games stumble over seemingly simple design decisions, it's a miracle that a game like this ever got made at all. It is the perfect rpg game. 10/10
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