I came into this game due to my love for the generation ship trope of sci-fi media. I left it abandoned because of the game-mechanics. I can't recommend this game to people outside of those who enjoy a very certain kind of role-playing. The prohibitive one. Let's start with the positives, the setting. Generation ships are a underutilized trope in media, mostly because they need a good amount of nuance to really get right. In here we will have questions pertaining to a lot of fundamental questions. It can be all very interesting when you manage to set it up correctly. And they mange here. Although the story told is rather linear and offers only a few moments of choice, it gets your nogging joggin'. The themes in it are realistically dark without becoming grimdark and you get the atmosphere of a society in decline and the desperation that comes with it. So much so good. The only downside to this story is the underlying game. The character-creation is mostly a mirage, since what they really want you to do is play the game a few times with different preset characters. I personally think a lot of frustration would go away if they got rid of that creationscreen completely. The game-mechanics itself are also rather prohibitive, since the stats work as absolute checks, not as percentage checks, which means you either go hard in a skill or you really just waste points. So it's easy to create characters that softlock you out of the game in later stages. Combat is as prohibitively "difficult". The difficulty comes not from complexity or tactical depth, but mostly something that feels like a DM trying to kill his players intentionally. It gets to the point where you intuitively want to avoid all combat, because it's so unsatisfying and rigged against you, that one might argue the devs want you to play a talking head instead of a walking gun, but didn't have the guts to remove combat altogether like others did. A lot of wasted potential with a great setting.
It's essentially a resource management boardgame, where you can place your playing-pieces onto workstations to meet the various requirements of the scenario. In detail, the game is made of two halves. One half is the resource-management inside the castle. You have fixed resource-drains and requirements like the defending forces, your character's needs like food and water and your animal's needs. You meet them by creating a basic economy that is maintained through various workstations, which you have to build. Almost every workstation can be upgraded to make the related work-processes more efficient or to unlock new recipes, while some need to be operated by your characters and other work on a passiv timer-base. You don't actually play out the defense of the castle, but you are able to impact it by expending additional resources in the later half of the game. The economy itself is, to be honest, a bit basic and it's not hard to see a almost always very likely optimal buildorder and production-priority, at least on the standard difficulty. Don't expect to create very complex production chains, is what I'm saying. BUT, it fits with the theme. Overall that part is enjoyable. You never feel screwed by RNG and you are able to recover from mistakes. The second part is a also rather basic stealth-game, where you pick a character to sneak through the looted city, which is patroled by guards, You do this to scavange for resources, which you need to run your economy on, so scavanging is a priority. There is a combat system and the city is filled with encounters and sort of "miniquests" where you need to find items to open up shortcuts. It's rudimentary but fun. As a way to allow for replayability, you can adjust everything about the main-story scenario in NG+ and, as a treat, there is an editor added to the game, which from a cursory glance allows for creating everything from scratch, from map to city, castle and encouters. Overall a very enjoyable experience.
I'd say it's a nice hybrid between a ARPG and a Moba. Why? Let me explain. The game offers a choice between 3 startingheroes. The standard fair of meele, ranged and mage. But, in a stroke of genius, you are able to devour the souls of other heroes along the way of your journey. All of these heroes come with an archetype, coresponding to the startingchoices, But all of them have their own story and their own skills. You can then setup a party of 3+1 heroes, which you can shuffle through on the fly. This allows you to combo the skills of your chosen party. Use a aoe-slow that reduces fireresistance, change to your aoe-firemage to place a DoT on the enemys to then change into your meele-goon to quickly dispatch the big unit after the adds die. Every gauntlet is basically a mini-teamfight where you switch between the roles. On top of that, allmost all skills are a aimed skillshot, while enemys have clear wind-up attacks or projectile-attacks, which strongly encourages you to dodge their attacks by movement. Concepts like orb-walking/kiteing or dodgeing with skills are something you will pick up naturally by playing this. Braindead clicking while standing still, basically attritionwarfare like in a lot of other ARPGs is strongly discouraged, espescially on higher difficulties. Add the bossfights on top of that, which usually have bullethell elements incorporated into the fights and you have one very interesting and engageing game. This is a full on remake in a better engine, includeing both the first part that was allready available and the second part. The engine brings about a nice graphicsupgrade and, more importanlty, makes the game run way smoother and more responsive. It's just a joy to play, espescially if you made your way through the first 2014 release. All around a very good job by the devs and Kalypso, who gave the game out to those who bought the 2014 release, FOR FREE. A pact made and KEPT!
I bought the game on a whim because I liked the theme and the artstyle. I don't regret it, perse, but I don't feel it's gonna be a favorite of mine. Here's why. It's basically a player vs gameboard digital boardgame with some plotflavour. You have a set number of moves during your turns, which get determined by the number of people you have in your camp. Every person has traits - positive and negativ - and numerical skill/stat-values, which determine their chance of wining dicethrows. The game is basically about useing your limited moves to procure resources to develop your camp, uncovering more of the map to further the plotline, while managing to sustain a baseline of resources to keep your people working, since every action drains a stat/skill and has to be eventually replenished. It suffers from the same problems that games like " Robinson Crusoe" or "Dead of Winter", in which it all comes down to random number-generators. You can have 99% chances on winning the skillcheck and still get "snakeeyes", which both keeps you on toe, but also makes mostly the early game very dependant on luck. For example: I made maybe 6-7 remakes, before I got a decent skill/stat-distribution and wasn't fucked by droughts/storms in the early game. Once I got a baseline of buildings-up, I was able to, so far, salvage sittuations, allthough I don't know if I didn't allready "softlock" myself from going much further, seeing how luck can allways ruin a otherwise "good and conservative" run. There is a "save-on-exit"-option which you can abuse. Makeing new games is needlessly cumbersome as you have to go through 3 menues. The story, so far, is entertaining and gives a nice context to the dicethrowing. Can't say much about it for now. All in all, I should've checked to see that it's the followup for "Dead in Bermuda". I recommend to play on vacation, you'll save yourself some nerves and time.
It took me 32 hours to finish this game to an allmost 100%-stat (questwise, with only 1 seemingly bugged quest and the romance-options left out). You could probably shave off 10 hours off of that, since I ran around like a bum for the first 10 hours, saveing up skillpoints/abilitypoints and doing every factionquest before takeing on the coat of any of them. By the end of it, I had no problems with anything the game offered me. 10 hours of moderate fun and roughly 22 hours of extensive exploration and plotline-finishing. Here are my thoughts. First off, the Good: + A nice array of characters and factions + Interesting worlddesign with some really nice screenshot-setups + A challange in it's early gameplay with somewhat rewarding character-progression Now the Bad: - The combat-system It tries to emulate the darksouls-stamina bar, but does so badly, since damage is based allmost only on your equiped weapon. This means that not your mobility and reactions determine the outcome of a fight, but how well you can wait for the bad AI to expend their stamina so you can unload your quickattack into the enemy, hopeing your weapon does enough scaleing damage after the first 2 hits. - The characterprogression-system Most skills outside of the combat-skilltree have no impact on the gameplay. Even those do not have a higher impact than %-bonuses to dmg. Most damning, they encourage you to gimp your character by pumping useless skills to be able to pass arbitrary skill-checks in dialouge for extra rewards/questoutcomes etc. It's just a drain on your allready too plentyfull skillpointpool. - The Story It's a sequal-setup. And a unnatural one. Gothic 2 followed Gothic 1 from a finished plot. The return of the sleeper was as much a surprise for the nameless hero as it was for you. Here, it isn't. The Ugly # The graphics # The voicework (even the german one is weak, emotionless) Conclusion: In absence of great games, even the weak can shine. For some.
The current version I recently bought in a weekendsale is pretty fun. Which, I have to say, surprised me after reading some reviews from earlier. I pretty much bought the game simply out of the fact that it wasn't that expensive and made by "Deadalic Entertainment", who's products I very much enjoy. And I was surpised by a fun albait a little repetetive game. So, what is Bounty Train? It's basically a hybrid of a easy streamlined Railroad-Tycoon and a light RPG. You are a son, inheriting your fathers railroad-shares in america. You instantly set out to be a goody-two-shoes and take over the majority of shares to stop the native american genocide - I know, quite the goal - You do this by unlocking railroadtracks and then useing those connections between preset citys to trade goods from one city to the other. The economy, as far as I could tell, is determined randomly at the start of the game, meaning that citys never change their products. This means that a worthwhile traderoute is allmost allways static. There are some other factors by which the economy changes, but they are rather temporary. So yeah, the economy is rather simply and not comparable to more in-depth titles of the railroad/logisitc-tycoon genre, but they are still fun to exploit. You frequently find yourself checking the cityhalls for interesting contracts, optimizing your limited traincapacity and planing out which route you take, what and where you buy and sell goods on that route. It's a fun gameplay-loop. What are the RPG-elements? Well, on your way to become a proper Railroad-Tycoon, you need trainguards. Those stay with you and level up. Same as your Charname. They have stats, skills and perks. You can equip them with items and weapons and they are used in the Combat/Minigames. Combat in itself is very simple and in my opinion to worthwhile. I for example run a genocidal deathtrain up and down, killing every indian and bandit, to level up. It's serviceable. There is also a sandboxmode
