The atmosphere and writing is great, but gameplay is a muddled mess. Game contains a ton of options for engaging in combat, and then actively discourages you from engaging in combat by having no rewards for doing so, making your Hunters very fragile, making stealth an overpowered option, and slowly corrupting your Hunters if you do decide to kill enemies. As a result the best way to play the game is to... Not play the game. Get a single hunter with high stamina and movement + low scent, and just run past all of the enemies on every map. You can beat the whole game like this. You get a lot of people frustrated with playing the game like a normal X-Com clone for obvious reasons; the game mechancis punish you for doing that. But playing the intended way is just a complete waste of game mechanics. Anyways, story good, would have liked to read it as a novel. Medicore as a video game.
The prologue and first act are essentially exactly what I was hoping for in an isometric RPG, and exactly what is advertised. The story is interesting, you can complete quests in multiple ways, you can make what appear to be meaningful choices as you go through the world. That all goes downhill starting around act 2 though. A lot of storylines just kinda end unceremoniously rather than having a satisfying conclusion. Quests become simple combat encounters or fetch quests, and almost every faction leader wants to send you on some useless errand right after pointing out that you're the most important person in the dome. Interesting uses for most of your noncombat skills just stop appearing, and for the most part only criminal and Influence span the whole game. Companions are the same way; you get one intro quest out of them and a small bit of dialogue after reaching a high enough relationship level, and that's it. After that they're just some extra backpack space and combat drones. The ending is disappointing; though it is difficult to explain why without spoilers. Overall, if you're a big fan of the genre and hankering for an isometric RPG and have already played everything else on your list, Encased might do it for you. Otherwise it can be skipped.
It's a city-builder game with a moderately unique twist in that you're on mars with drones that go across the surface and colonists that live in domes. So far so good. Part of the challenge is to design domes so that workers with the appropriate specialization are in the appropriate dome so that they can work in the buildings they're best suited for. There is what appears to be an intuitive interface for this where you can set what specializations are allowed in what domes, and what specializations aren't allowed. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work properly. Once colonists enter a dome they get stuck, and won't leave even if I tell them to. I need to literally demolish their housing to get them to shuffle around, and hope the game recognizes the dome I actually want them to live in. Even once they're living in the dome, I'd see workers taking jobs they're not suited for even when work they are suited for exists in the dome they're currently living in. Anyways, once the level of micromanagement necessary to run a functioning colony became clear, I threw my hands up and abandoned the game.
