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Intriguingly most of the major complaints people had about this game have been fixed! There's actually been a map added which is much appreciated, a bunch of fixes are still being made on unbalanced encounters, and it seems more stable and intuitive than ever before. This really feels like a labor of love constantly being tweaked. A lesser studio would have cast this game to the wolves given the chilly reception, but this is still not a terrible game at all. Music is nice. Voice acting is spirited. Atmosphere is rich and dark. But to be fair though, this is a diamond in the rough. This is not a speedy game and it has some shakier parts. The combat is INCREDIBLY involved with consideration for placement, weapon, abilities, and humors...which leads to the RNG issue. At times fights will seem impossible because the dice rolled poorly. Some aspects you cannot control and there's just too few options and materials to make it through every poorly fated encounter. This game might have worked better as a rouge lite give how often you will crash head first failure. Don't get frustrated. This is made to be tough. It reminded me a lot of games like Age of Decadence where there's a lot of situations you cannot overcome realistically or a bad roll leads to doom. Still and yet this is still an ongoing project, what's here is enjoyable in sprints, and I wish the best for this company that puts the customer over a quick cash grab.
I'd argue that Disco Elysium was the first big foray into a roleplaying game entering the realm of the psyche as much as the traditional 'ability scores'. You had to contend with your ego and id which carried on conversations in your mind so that each encounter was a battle with the self...and that legacy continues with Syndicate only in an imaginative fantasy/steampunk alternative London. This is not an action RPG with the emphasis firmly on the 'roleplaying' aspect. You aren't just dictating a character's path of their humors, their memories, what they will risk and what they are capable of. You can get into fights and undertake skill checks but out of these you lose 'hope' instead of health, and most of the time you're balancing your chosen aspects of personality with choices to unlock new 'tarot cards' which create new opportunities. Take a blunt approach? Unlock new opportunities to intimidate and smash things. Become introspective? Discover new options for deeper thought and self control. It's ambitious, it's fascinating, and it's no slouch in terms of breadth. You can collect inventory items, come up with different solutions to problems, unlock new paths with choices made that are unique to each new play through. There's multiple characters with their own interlocking stories so it's not just Disco Elysium with a steampunk skin. There's also a card based instead of dice based element of random chance. Similar to Disco though anything you can walk away from is not game over. You failed a test? Let it be a lesson and the earned unintentional changes to your character perhaps set a new path entirely going forward. Nice graphics, pleasant music. No voice overs, but thankfully there's a lot of definitional info for the slang and weirder concepts in the dialogue itself. I want to see more games like this that put the RP back into RPGs.
Have you ever played an open world game and gone 'I like this, but I want to feel TOTALLY immersed and I want every mission to feel completely different'? Boiling Point has the fully explorable open world of an Ubisoft style game but then it goes the extra mile in every other area. This is like an 'extreme' mod for an open world Farcry style game. Your weapons will degrade with use! You need to increase your statistics by gaining experience! You can't see enemies on the mini-map! Your car needs gas and repairs! You can become practically IMMUNE to health syringes! Your standing with the factions determines if they attack you on sight or deal with you! Enemy factions will routinely go to war, take over strategic positions, and even attack you if you interfere! If you want all the info you may have to talk to every NPC because they all have different approaches to the same topics! There's an exhaustion system! Some of you probably tuned out, but some of you are interested and if you stick with it this game is amazing. Your path is yours here and the consequences too. Kill a quest giver? No problem: an opposing faction now probably likes you and will give you quests instead. Want to get through the jungle faster? Bring a car or hijack a helicopter or a plane from a military base. You can afford something? Go fishing, collect things from fallen bandits or soldiers, sell stolen vehicles, find black markets, do missions for random civilians. Problems? A few. There's some noticeable hiccups. NPCs sometimes run in place or get lost. Not all dialogue is properly translated or voiced. There's some instability like ending up places you should be which usually just kills you. And this game is HARD. A couple bullets you're out or so severely injured it will cost a mint to get back on your feet. But Boiling Point is special. Everything was thrown at the wall, and a surprising amount sticks.
This is a BLATANT love letter to Max Payne, specifically the original game. Gruff voiced protagonist, early 2000s graphical style, slow motion gunplay controlled by a meter, dreamy locales and noir influence, you use painkillers to heal...etc. It wears the influence on it's sleeve with inside jokes in the dialogue, you find an old cop show that starts reflecting your life, and when even you quit something like the 'I was too tired to go on' question is asked before you can get to the desktop. But there's some innovations too. This isn't just hunting gangsters, it's hunting vampires and other monsters. In addition to you firearms you can actually break the environment to acquire stakes that deal a lot of damage in melee. It adds an element of practical exploration when you're looking for a table to smash for a one-shot damage booster. Slow motion and diving are not the same thing so you need to activate one then the other which is a little awkward but it does make slow motion less of a crutch when it takes an extra button press. Enemies seldom have projectiles so you're really just buying time to keep them from closing the distance and hitting you, or giving you time to negotiate the large swarms of foes you get in later levels. Also you get to rescue hostages which is gratifying (thankfully the monsters focus on you over them). A few issues crop up. Hit detection is a bit sloppy. You can't tell an enemy is injured or even dead until it rag dolls. You don't make any noise of any animation if you're injured either so it's easy to die, but thankfully death is pretty inconsequential: you just zap back a couple screens and start again. There's no map and levels can be maze like but there's almost no backtracking. The music is very high quality: jazz, original hip hop, moody techno. Almost feels like a Persona game at times. So if you're an old school Max Payne fan and always wanted to see him fight vampires, this is your chance.
The first time I played this I gave up quickly because of the terrible voice acting, un-explained systems, and confusing hands-off progression where people would give me quests I had no idea how to accomplish or the sometimes shaky translation threw me off what I needed to do. That and the fact that the intro movie crashes the game. Still can't fix that... But coming back to it after finding the manual online, this is quite a fun and unique RPG! Ignore the grating voice overs and you're in for a deep experience which is wholly separated from game like even Baulder's Gate by incorporating concepts like courtesy into the gameplay itself. You want fame? Refuse rewards three times. You want experience? Pretend you don't know about a basic concept so an old wise man can teach it better. The gameplay is more than just real time slaughter of animals and villains, although there's plenty of this too. There is a robust crafting system at your finger tips in the menu that allows you to take pieces of your environment and enemy drops and combine them into new weapons and armor and gear. Hitch some tiger-fish tendons to some lumber and now you have a bow! As for the rest of the game the story is remarkably nuanced. You're experiencing the tale backwards from the lowest point in a man's life, but he was a decent person in the past so people can remember him fondly...unless that bounty on his head brings out their baser instincts. Prepare to read, explore, and discern. A guy will ask you to find an antidote at his house so you need to search every house. A person tells you to do something which might not be accurate or even advantageous for you so you need to make up your own mind. The graphics are very pretty: detailed and atmospheric pixel art. The writing is engaging regardless of bad V.O and some translation hiccups. It's a rare 'eastern flavor' RPG that really feels like settling into a new world to explore and understand. It's difficult but fair and worth it.
This is an odd little game but clearly had a lot of care poured into it. The first thing that will hit you is the voice acting which is legendarily bad, but it's only in cutscenes and most of the dialogue isn't poorly translated thankfully with a lot of nuance. The other interesting thing: you don't pick a character. This is a Diablo game from the perspective of one person, a woman named Lan Wei, although you can find companions to follow you into battle and on your adventures. This is much less a hack and slash game as it is an action RPG with a lot of emphasis on varied quests for NPCs and just walking around enjoying the atmosphere and talking to the inhabitants. Everyone seems to have a little story which even Diablo can't claim to often. For all the voice acting might tug you out, the charming graphics and interactions can pull you in. This is NOT a thrill a minute game although thankfully the combat systems are fairly easy to understand. You need to look around, interpret clues, talk to everyone you see. This actually reminded me more of Dark Earth than an ARG: a world to explore more than wandering mobs to crush for gold and upgrades. It sits uneasily in the gap between action and roleplaying, but the unique setting and clear care than went into this game won me over. Also you can set the voices to Japanese for better performances.
I want to like this game more than I can. It's got a nice art style, it's voiced, it's clearly packed with content and charm. I like the setting, I like some of the systems. When you're slashing goblins it's visceral and fun. Exploration is fun: there's a surprising amount of places you can just stumble across. Can't find a way across a pit to get a chest? You need to find multiple hidden levers all over the level to find a way to it, and it makes searching and destroying things in the environment rewarding. BUT It's super slipshod. You jump from enemy to enemy erratically. Some enemies like flying crows are very difficult to kill so they just peck at your health without much to do against them. There's a potentially interesting exposure mechanic where you get colder without being next to a fireplace or source of heat which could have been atmospheric but comes across as annoying when it carries on into boss fights and makes you focus too much on the raising cold bar rather than anything going on in the screen. So it feels sluggish and slow at worst, and this makes boss fights a chore. You need to do pinpoint rolls and dodges to avoid telegraphed attacks, and you need to focus on TWO different bars at this point since rolling also exhausts a stamina bar. You are freezing, getting exhausted, and you're taking constant damage, but surely you can heal yourself with something, right? Yes you can...three times only. You can't purchase more health anywhere. I liked the concept of building up the burned down town again, buying upgrades with blood you gain from enemies, and as I said the aesthetics were nice. But I ultimately had to abandon this game because beating my head against a wall is not fun when it feels like the problem is primarily technical. I can't lower the graphics effectively to improve the speed, the boss fights are annoying, and overall it just feels a little too slippery to be a solid title.
I don't get the hate for this game. It's typical for a first person shooter, yes, but in the most functional of ways. Guns have punch, bad guys are diverse, numerous, and have interesting patterns of behavior, levels are huge but linear enough you won't be lost for long. The story isn't long winded and feels like you're playing Total Recall as an amnesiac agent on the run from criminals and soldiers. A lot of emphasis was put on environment. There's always something exploding, something falling over dramatically, lights flashing, spaceships soaring overhead. There's a tutorial that outlines the major controls which can all be mapped as you please. Graphics aren't half bad for the era either. There's a couple issues that hold this game back I think. One, is that the feedback for guns is a bit off. Without blood or sparks or anything you basically just spray until the enemies cry out and fall over, it's difficult to tell if you're effecting them until they die. Another issue is Field Of View. This is an older game so you are RIGHT up close to the action which can be disorientating to people who prefer a farther FOV. But if it looks nice, sounds nice, is stable, has plenty of content, and is just a fun sci-fi romp I don't understand what more could be asked from a game of this time. Check in if you like the sadly dying genre of full on catered single player experience games with exploration and a story that isn't terrible.