If you haven't played before you will likely be frustrated by the extremely dated interface and controls. I promise it is worth learning. Very few games nail the dynamics of grand strategy and Alpha Centauri does. Very few games could be used in a course on philosophy and Alpha Centauri could. If you aren't normally a consumer of science fiction please go in with an open mind.
The parry mechanic in this game is trash and what's worse is I couldn't rebind. lmao Otherwise the game is fine. Visually pleasant. Ok moment to moment gameplay.
The game is middle of the road in difficulty. Some of the challenge comes from being obtuse and some of the challenge comes from decent mechanics. The manual that you slowly unlock being filled with foreign symbols and expecting you to parse minimal explanations is not something I find interesting or fulfilling. Given a limited supply of consumable items and not knowing what they do means I'm not inclined to use them after I lit myself on fire and died. On a related note not having mechanics explained means that you might fail to learn some necessary and core mechanic and repeatedly die until you quit the game. YOU HAVE TO DODGE ROLL TO PUT OUT FIRE, WATER WON'T DO IT. LMAO So while I have enjoyed many aspects of the game so far I also have found numerous increasingly frustrating reasons to not play the game anymore and might not ever play it again. I expect more garbage in an otherwise enjoyable atmospheric throwback to Links Awakening and the like.
The game is engaging and fun for a little while but it doesn't take all that long to realize that nothing you do really matters. There is a bit of min maxing and a little bit of knowledge to acquire before you are just waiting for the chips to fall in your favor. The lack of agency is pretty tiresome. If the game didn't have some interesting (text) dialogue it would be worth fairly close to nothing. Currently trying to decide if I have the time to waste completing the game or if I should just read the rest online somewhere.
Everything feels good until it doesn't. The quick battles or whatever you'd like to call them are cute and silly but have very little depth and the game feels like it makes sense until you randomly get destroyed by an enemy labeled "easy" and while it might make sense from some functional standpoint there isn't enough information available for you to learn and do better in the future. Was the pixel art a high level spell? Do I have a weakness to red monsters? Did they have some sort of protection from what I was doing? It's all possible but you'll never know. If you don't care about strategy and just want to laugh as you either win or lose by essentially random luck then have at it.
First mission, blocked paths cannot be cleared, AI yelling at me to expand my base because I've hit the population cap, can't expand after using the glossary and consulting google. Game is either bugged or just incomprehensible dogwater. Do not buy.
I love the concept and theme. The visuals are ok. The controls are awful, the auto wall running is unintuitive and feels terrible, auto mantling takes you over objects instead of onto them, the screen jumps at hard angles when you change surfaces while wall running, and the levels are not well designed. It's not good. It did not take me long to figure that out.
I was very much enjoying my time with this game but I haven't touched it in ages because it makes me terribly motion sick. IDK why but this game specifically makes me feel like puking. Otherwise solid.
The game is entirely about the art. It is very pretty. Bad mechanics, bad UI, bad repetitive audio (I guess the music is kind of chill), the turn system is pointless, everything takes a bunch of turns and you have to click through turns rapidly to do anything.
