The lore, dialogue, and really everything about the foundation of this game and world are great. But it's NOT an RPG, it's NOT strategy, it's barely adventure. Really it's an interactive story. No real puzzle solving, no actual choices that matter, no action, it's just point and click. Which means all the motion graphics and moving around are entirely pointless. If this was the foundation for an open world rpg boy would it be amazing stuff. As is, it's quickly boring, and just silly that you leave your injured brother to trapse around the world through jump gates trying to find the story you should be following in a roughly linear way while fumbling around dead end or not supposed to go there yet locations. I just can't find enough interest in it to play through the rest, especially since it's also kinda predictable, but mostly because your dialogue choice mean absolutely nothing. But for those who like this kind of point and click story walk through, it's quite nice.
Look it's not really a game ok, but I'm not sure what else you call an interactive choose your own adventure horror time loop mystery novel. Wait I do know, you call it amazing. I'm sure it's not for everyone. I too was initially annoyed at not having time to really consider your response choices and being lost as to what was going on. But the events were so engaging, the acting so spot on to the roles (normally I think game voice acting is on average pretty weak), that I stuck with it a bit. And then stuck with it more. 10 hours over 3 days later I had played through twice, mind blown at the radically different outcomes as I went from lost to trying to shape events across the timeline. Ok to be fair, there are tiny faults in the pathing of your friends and once it caused a point I had to quit and reload because the game was stuck. There were a few missed opportunities to have even more options and depth. There are a couple points the dialogue options don't quite line up. But given how many games are in my libraries that never get more than an hour of play because of their faults, and how I had to then talk about this game for 20 mintues to my partner because it was such an experience, it's a must for those who are in to this general genre. If you're looking for FPS RPG Action shooter strategy and don't like story exploration, maybe not your frequency. Otherwise, tune in.
It's an interesting take on the new style tower defense game where your character runs around and fights during the waves. Innovative in that it's interactive and more on the character than the "towers". Unfortunately you quickly fall victim to game mechanic flaws. In the initial tutorial a net kills anything under it, but then suddenly in the very next night it does not kill anything. Having assumed things worked as you were taught, you failed to plan for things to survive the traps. Ok, try again. This time you find the indicator for the net doesn't work and you get attacked and didn't see it coming because you have to be staring up at the net that betrayed you. Also, suddenly you're attacked more, take more damage, enemies violate the "next" indicator... It went from "ok cool, this is pretty fun" during the tutorial to "wtf this is impossible and nothing works" instantly. Very odd, highly disapointing. If they fix the problems it could be 4-5 star probably. Free or not, unplayable is what it is.
This is only half game, the other half is "visual novel". So far though only one bit was gratuitous stupidity, the rest is rather like an average anime. That is, a mix of contrived and silly and epic and tragic. Unfortunately you get the sense that choices really don't matter when you make them, you'd have wound up in the same place anyway. Side mission choice so far was only offered once at the begining with the implication it would be important, but no callbacks and no others since then. The gameplay is decent but does suffer at points. The daring wedding rescue was imposible on average difficulty let alone anything higher. Disapointing because up until then it had been pretty balanced. The battle chatter does get repetitive though, and it would be nice to have an option to speed up and skip that junk after a while. I'd only give it 3 stars but the fact is it has already compelled me for hours so extra point, and it is free after all.
I mean, what do you want for nothing, rubber biscuit? It's really simplistic. Tries to add depth but it's wasted. Lots of mechanics and UI issues. Even starting a game is confusing. No campaign, lousy tutorial. Every game is the same, slow start then you cross a point and just swarm. It's a time pass but offers no real enjoyment.
Warcraft meets torchlight should have been a great gaming experience. Unfortunately the game is extremely buggy and suffers serious design flaws that quickly make playing it tedious and annoying. The screenshots are rather deceptive as to what the game may be like as well so don't go by those. It really is mostly like Warcraft 3 in that it's an RTS with 3d graphics and persistent heroes you can level and equip, although there is real continutity across boards. There is also a regular swapping from RTS (build armies and wreck the enemy base) and Diablo type RPG (small party fighting small encounters, get loot, equip). But the writing/acting is horrid, dialog interactions constantly have visual and audio problems, the leveling is flavorless as you have to level up everyting equally instead of specializing, equipment comparison is non existant so deciding if a new item is an improvement is tedious at best, several mechanics don't work, quest grant/complete/reward is a tedious string of anouncement sounds and short messages instead of one notice, managing abilities in a big fight is fraught with targeting issues... it's just a hot mess. Really unfortunate the execution was so bad because the idea and foundation are great.
It doesn't take terribly long to tire of this game, because it simply lacks variety and interest. It almost seems like it will be good. Variety of choices to set out with, big universe to explore, lots of random replayability, multiple alien encounters, etc etc. But what happens with all those great ideas is a mediocre implementation and poor follow through with random failure. It turns into a wash rinse repeat of the same thing over and over: make a jump to a decent system, make a drop to get resources. And that's it. You don't really get to appreciate the few places they actually put graphics, boggle at how such a minimalist game can use 11gb of drive space, tire of bland pointless chats with alien races, puzzle at seemingly random messages from species, fume at the badly implemented physics of piloting, and lament that the special missions and encounter outcomes are so woefully unremarkable you're still bored after 30 min. Definitely not worth the price, even on deep sale. It feels like a 500mb game from 25 years ago that was badly done.
Imagine my massive disapointment to find out this was a game I had already played, because it's a mini game inside Van Helsing. Apparently I missed the part before buying this that it is just that mini game with a few changes. And they are not changes for the better. I actually really liked the mini game in Van Helsing, but this is not as well designed in multiple ways, and the voice commentary is apparently limited to 3 statements so it's annoyingly repetative each stage. And of course, it's offered up as a whole game when it was just a small side portion of another game. Complete waste of money, don't get duped into buying it.
The spongy camera, laggy controls, directional sound issues, and sluggish movement are bad enough, but then you are litterally thrown into a boss fight 5 minutes in. Maybe if you were given a proper tutorial. Maybe if you could use the powers you apparently need to have for a boss fight. But as is you can't defeat this boss and even start the game for real. Now clearly people have managed to beat him, but if you have to look up videos online to figure out the trick to something in the first 5 minutes, it's a failure of a game really. The mechanic appears to be you should wait for the overhead attack (unblockable having been told to block attacks a minute before, so nice failure there), dodge it, then counter while there is an opening. The problem is you can't. Because you can't actually dodge an attack if you're in range of the attack because of the "locking". Which by the way, using makes it impossible to fight a boss because you can't actually maneuver as needed, so again failure there. You move so slow, by the time the attack is over and you move in to counter, the boss recovers and puts up the shield. Unclear why I can't move as fast as in the youtube video. Unclear why dodge doesn't seem to work like in the video (get hit anyway). Maybe due to the laggy controls you have to anticipate and use commands before you see the time to use them, but you shouldn't have to be Nostradamus to play a game. So yeah, the entire review is a detail of how unplayable it is within minutes. After dying a dozen times fighting these controls and terrible design I give up. Glad I bought it at 90% off, it wasn't worth even that much. Real shame, the graphics are wonderful, but you'll never see anything past the first couple rooms.
Deeply sorry I backed this on Kickstarter, complete waste of money. The game as you can see was never finished. They claim it was, but it never came out of early access on GOG or Steam, so you're buying an incomplete game. Further, they made DLC without finishing the game. But to the game itself. It is sadly not playable. There is a lot of promise here, but it's so broken you literally can not get more than a couple hours into it before it's impossible even on easy. Combat is pretty much always fatal. Early run in with thugs? Dead. So you have to avoid the whole encounter. Try to get through the next phase to get to the first base? 3 rats kill you trying to find some way around the fact you aren't the right class to disable the generator that powers the instakill turrets. The difficulty is horribly out of balance, the interface is clunky, the tutorial is broken, and mechanics are even worse. Which is to say, if I started over it might be possible to get further in the game, but there is an early point you simply can not pass from what I can see unless you are a certain class that has a certain skill. That means the other classes are not playable, so the game is just broken from the start. Since it has seemingly been abandoned, it does not seem these fundamental crippling issues will be fixed. On a final note, it seems horribly inefficient given the install footprint to the actual game content. There are much better games of this genre in every way that are a quarter of the install size.
