The original had a lot of promise, but then suffered such massive design flaws it was litterally unplayable. The sequel strips out making a character, now you're just THE character, so some replay is gone if only in feel. The game is playable, but only barely. Balance is still woefully broken. Tactics still make no sense (archers and mages are often useless because of nonsense line of sight issues, AoE spells can never be cast on the spot you want, always one spot off for some reason, and what is with the stacks of boxes that if you try to push over always fall on you instead?). AI is clunky at best, suicidal at worst. your troops will always take the worst path to the destination going through hazards so you have to micromanage their movements. Troops will refuse to move some times. Managing gear is an exercise in madness because the stat changes are wrong half the time. Really the gear UI is the most flawed aspect and was not fixed from the original, absolutely the worst I've ever seen. The story and dialogue are passable, but often feel like there are gaps and everyone is just insane. Dialogue choices have an unclear impact, if any. It can manage to hold interest for a few hours but then it just starts to wear you down and feels more like a chore than a hobby.
It's really short and pretty simple. Once you figure out the setup and don't immediately die it's easy to maintain a rythm and finish the game. So it's really lackluster. There is a lot of meta story thrown at you that you never see and is never explained, so it's atmosphere that just leaves you disapointed and wanting. I kept waiting for more resource types and other challenges to pop up but they never did. I want to know what the hallucinations were about. I thought maybe it would shift from escape to explore, or terraform. Nope, just manage the suicidal crew so they eat and sleep between chores and blast off. Pity more didn't go into it, and I'd drop it a star if it wasn't free because clearly not worth paying for.
I really enjoyed this while it was playable. There is a lot going for it with the rpg elements and story and good playability. Unfortunately it's riddled with bug that ultimately make it uplayable. Litterally. The sound bug is irritating (have to reset volume every time you load the game). The erratic dodge bug is really annoying and makes combat much less enjoyable and tactical. The random crashing that can happen is really bad, and the fact that this can get stuck in a location until you find the spirit world hack to get through the glitched location (which is only temporary until you pass it) was nearly the end of things the first time. But then the game comes to an end at the first boss fight. Even once you find out the first trick to why the fight is an impassible death trap (and really, that was a design flaw because with no prior incident of that mechanic how could you figure it out without the internet?), then you are faced with a seemingly impossible fight that goes on and on and on and on... It's a rare untriggerable mechanic that lets you make any progress in the fight, and a half hour fight of mostly running around waiting for random chance is not fun. But then the game crashes after 20 minutes of the fight and you're just done because who wants to put up with that again. Real bummer, I wanted to see where it went once you got into the city, but I personally do not have the patience for an unstable game with this level of frustration factor.
Not even through the tutorial and had to quit out and start over? Yeah that's a problem. How can you have that level of bug in a game? It just stuck mid jump, couldn't move, couldn't use powers to get out of being stuck, no option but start over. $40 for this? Dream on, glad I only paid $4 given it seems to have been a waste. Graphics are ok, not great. In fact, they are rather overdone for a game of this nature. No view options, only isometric. Layout is diagonal and control is cardinal, so it's at odds with itself. Otherwise, it's basically a really fancy modern version of something between Berserker and Smash TV. Don't know those games? Get off my lawn!
Any game has to be designed to grab your attention, pull you in, keep you interested, teach you the ropes, and then once you're hooked set you free. This game fails to do any of that. Terrible UI shows no information on troops of any sort, be it attacks, health, or anything else. Tutorial is pure annoyance with failed humor that teaches you nothing about anything. Controls are downright faulty randomly swinging the camera as you move for no reason. You're thrown into combat with no information and are taught nothing. You loose troops to find you should have raised them before the fight ended as that's all you get for the whole mess of battles to come. It's a complete disaster. If there is somehow a game here worth playing, it's hidden behind far too much bad design, frustration, and confusion to ever be played. I'm at a loss how it has such high ratings when it's a complete no go from the begining.
Do NOT pay full price for this, totally not worth it, and GoG full price is way over competitor for some reason. I paid $2 on crazy sale here, totally worth it. The graphics, sound, voice acting, ambiance, etc are all good and make for a fun play time. It is linear, so there is no exploration, but that's typical of a shooter game, but no jump, which feels forced. What throws many is thinking this is Skyrim and not a shooter, and it's not. In fact, it shares some feel with Skyrim in the first person mage spell in each hand setup. There is no money or armor, you only harvest energy to craft more powerful spells. Simple, and could have been elegant, but then it falls down. The crafting is terribly explained, has missing stats, missing info, and in many cases makes no sense. Watching a 30 min fan video on it helped, but not totally, and pointed out the UI was DOWNGRADED from the original that had more info! What? You combine things and get random instead of logical results. You use an upgraded component and it makes no more powerful a spell than the original part. Some things are totally inconsistent, like fire ray has very short range but ice ray is very long (range is NOT a stat shown...). You can't swap hands, attack animation is always right hand, but you can swap buttons, which is good because default is reverse of the screen which is disconcerting. Like other games, no save, only respawn checkpoints. No real penalty for dying. You can't jump, but you can fall down a cliff and die. Poor design choice as there is no warning. Once you get past the irritation of the design issues, mostly in the crafting, you sit back and just throw chance to the wind, manage to make better spells, and go back to having fun nuking things. And the game play really is fun, but too simple to pay more than a few bucks given the annoyances. I don't like shooters, I like this.
The graphics aren't great, the acting is mediocre, the sound is fine. There is no real game here in terms of a world to explore, which makes the install size of 18gb rather perplexing as you can have entire MMOs in that footprint. You simply go from one battle arena to the next, rather linear. You go rest in town between fights (usually) and go in and fight another arena. Again, no world to speak of, and I've seen games that follow this formula for decades that are tiny because there is nothing to them. This one apparently blows a ton of space on semi shiny skins. Also the first game I've seen where half the equipment is useless. Boots? No need, they do nothing. The equipment mechanics are confusing at best. The interface is not clear. Skill ranking is half wasted time for no apparent reason. The biggest problem is you die in under an hour and discover that trying to play a mage is futile. Once you find the right tomb in the crypt, you are near death, but this time you can't go back to town, you're ambushed and killed. There is no way to prevent this outside of playing a fighter, and equiping specifically for this fight. That's just terrible design to offer a ton of options but none of them are viable to get anywhere. Combat also suffers from HORRID RNG failures, which again means fighter is the only way to survive by soaking just enough damage to live. Sorry I wasted the $2.50 on it on super sale, do NOT waste full price!
