I'm a big fan of a rogue-lite deckbuilder game, and Rogue Mage should tick all the boxes for me. It's got decent progression, branching paths, and the ability to trash/upgrade cards. But, as others have said, it's unbalanced as hell. I understand you're going to have hard battles, and deck composition matters, but when you're half an hour into a run and you're up against the Chapter Interrogator, who on almost every turn can deploy YOUR characters to their side for free, it sucks the fun out of the game. I don't shy away from a challenge, but that's not a challenge; it's just cheap artificial difficulty. What sense does it make to lean out and buff up my deck if they can just play a card and get a 16 power card on the table for absolutely nothing? Then sometimes you'll just steamroll the enemy and have over 100 power to their 3. That's just one example of the obnoxious, lopsided battles you'll run into. It doesn't seem like it rewards anything besides just hoping the RNG is on your side. I'll probably give it a few more hours of attention, but I really don't feel this is hooking me nearly as much as superior games like Monster Train or Slay the Spire.
I originally played this game back on release and absolutely loved it. It's a no-brainer, then, that I purchased the "remaster" DRM-free to both support the series and have an offline copy free of EA server checks with the slight "tweaks" they advertised. The main issue is that this game runs markedly worse than the original. I tried to replicate the graphics settings as much as I could to test. I own the Steam version of the original so that was my testing against this version. Vanilla for both; no fixes changes or mods. Ryzen 3600 EVGA RTX 2070 32GB 3200MHz RAM 1440p, 165Hz Monitor I tested in a couple areas, mainly the first hours' worth of content and used Afterburner to capture the FPS. The remaster, even in small enclosed areas, ran a consistent 60-90 FPS LESS than the Vanilla release with dips in clustered areas. I understand that they didn't overhaul the engine or anything so we get what we get, but this is shameful to charge full price for a game with these issues. Like I said, I bought to support, and I hope this means we get continued games in this world, but this is incredibly disappointing.
Despite all the hype, I managed to avoid getting my hopes up. My expectations were relatively average, hoping for a lightish experience built around exploration and perhaps blowing things up once in a great while. I'm a huge fan of games without set objectives, so this appeared to be right up my alley. I managed to play for around 5 hours, and during that time I saw enough to get the gist of what Hello Games was trying to accomplish. Sure, it's relatively shallow and repetitive, but these are things I actually enjoy in a game where I'm untethered from a linear path. It's nice to plop down on my couch, boot up a game, and mindlessly wander. I can tell that my experience will be average; not great, but certainly a different opinion from what appears to be the vocal majority that seemed to expect something more. The biggest issue at this point is how incredibly painful it is to enjoy that average experience. My rig is quite capable of running most games at High to Ultra Settings and struggles to run "No Man's Sky" with any sort of consistency. Here are my specs for reference: i5 4690k (OC'd to 4.2 GHz) 8 GB RAM GTX 980 Sure, it's not the newest or most powerful build, but it's nothing to sneeze at. I've experienced the following in-game: - FPS dips and stuttering from 80 FPS down to nearly nothing - Intermittent crashing to desktop I've adjusted everything I can think of, including giving the process more priority, changing graphics settings, disabling G-sync manually (why is it default "on" anyway with no option in the menu to turn off?) etc. Nothing has improved the experience. On top of that, the graphics menu appears to be some sort of joke, with the AA settings still causing the game to look blurry and muddy. I really want to enjoy this game on its terms, but it won't let me, so I cannot possibly recommend this game for anyone at this point. Perhaps when Hello Games patches these issues I can change that, but for now, it should be avoided at all costs.
