I actually did enjoy the moment to moment resource and turn based management the environment offers; yet there’s a lot lacking in polish. The start is rough, and the challenge can unravel fairly easily once you know what the game is bad at explaining. Yet I’d recommend that the developers put forth this game to be remade with another studio to make the scope they want, because they’ve already have the solid prototype for this. Mesmer is very amazingly modelled and animated; really the lack of polish extends to both the technical, optimization, and structural aspects; there were at least 3 errors including the key-binds, mini-map and camera clipping. I finished in 3 hours. I felt like the riot segment was meant to have more long-term obstacles, including the horn; Yet I got very lucky during the first speech, to start the riot early and overthrow the king; (Pro-tip, save your faction specific dialogue choices in the speech events for when you’re about to exceed a rank, or let a rank fall down once to push it back up with the next move, it will push back the police force by a massive amount) The tutorial did encourage the necessary skepticism for dialogue scenes, but I did get locked out because of the RNG persuasion choices. The quest are indeed bad at explaining their scope, but encourage exploration. You also get the reward in advance, so not fulfilling some quests isn’t as punishing. This is definitely not the game that expects skill, but tries to tell a story with the dice it rolls, so expect a short 1-2 hour long rogue-like toy-box experience. There’s a lot of missions I didn’t do which offers some replay-ability, but not much. Stealth contains spotlight enemy sights, blind corners, unwieldy cameras, no patrol routes, no delay when being spotted, and random enemy placement; Yet you can outrun the cops charge attack and searching state, and persuade out of consequences when getting caught.
Can't really recommend unless really into dungeon crawlers, perma-death and being spiteful; Boring to play, interesting setup, brutal to the point of meaningless. Optimization is key here, and most of my entertainment was from the base/character management while my frustrations lie in the combat. Even then, most strategy comes from compensating the random percentages that happen with every attack and which seemed skewed to make artificially tense moments. Use 2nd character's 1st attack to stagger enemy, use 3rd characters 3rd attack to do extra damage to staggered enemy. Some parts of the complex web of stats vs other stats require some critical thinking with the order in which you perform them, but the random number generator will most likely ruin your excellent plan at some-point; Which does build tension the first time, but after a while it gets aggravating. The selling point being the way the game calculates sanity as "stress", get over a hundred stress points and your character will sometimes be afflicted with AI making poor decisions such as: skipping a turn, hurting themselves or other teammates, or forcing a retreat, all while pilling more stress onto your other characters in which you can rarely compensate for even while breaking to camp. Ways to relieve stress are not signposted well, if specific afflictions make for certain behaviors they're really not signposted well, to the point where I think the game's just random. The game goes for a purposefully miserable and grim aesthetic, but it really just falls flat for me. Character dialogue is repetitive and serves no other game-play purpose that requires intuition. I wish they left it out, as I started disassociating the characters being human beings in the story and more of just a game-play element as they rightfully are. The morality of just abandoning reckless "stressed" droids is just par for the course. Imaginatively designed but lacking in just any sense of fun. PS: the witch boss is garbage
Fun concept that is executed with an Iconic art style. Machiavillan is a Building, strategy, management game with an Iconic twist of inviting enemies into the base itself and killing one by one, almost like a purposefully done tower defense. However I full heartedly regret this purchase at this stage. I read previous reviews on steam that warned about serious game play bugs, I knew there was a risk. Several occasions I would be stuck with corrupted game saves after hours of play. Much to the point that it became as how other put it as a grind. I want to support the creators but as time goes on I feel like I've already moved past it. The bugs need to be fixed and new content needs to be introduced. It's been almost two months since it's release and I've heard nothing. I already reported late to have this game be refunded so I guess this is on me. Right now this game is worthless and I feel betrayed.
