Long story short... If you're looking for the best RoboCop game, I believe this is it. If you're looking for an objectively awesome FPS game to play, this is so not it. + Peter Weller's voice and likeness, RoboCop's purrrrrfect character model, familiar locations, and the iconic pistol! 0 Delivery of the satire, lumbering around with the titular cyborg police ain't fast, and the previous point has been compensated with the relative tight open areas between more linear bits. - Rest of the weapons are a mixed bag, the weapon upgrade system is a halfbaked chore, collecting 'evidence' is a proper chore, and there's chores to do at the frequently visited police station which give you a quick shuckle followed be a long... you know... chore.
I really like the theme and animations of Neurodeck, but I may indeed have same bias for mental health related stuff due to my personal background. I also believe Neurodeck works best in short one run dips. Think working in a home office, eating lunch, and enjoying a bit of Neurodeck afterwards while waiting for the lunch to digest. The game is relatively light and there's just enough of unlocking stuff for future runs to carry the game for a week or two in once a day session schedule. That being said, I am also a dude that has played my fair share of deckbuilders... on physical tables, online, offline, socially, and all by my lonesome. One might even say that I like deckbuilders. And within the context of all the deckbuilders I've ever played... Neurodeck is light to play, easy to learn, half decently balanced, and absolutely outshone by a metric crapton of competitors. From a purely technical point of view, I'm also wondering why on earth is a 3-years old game showing minor elements of shoddy scaling and weirdly low resolution renders on the otherwise competently executed animations. Why...? Just why?
Silence is Golden - The good bit with some nice storytelling. Do play and enjoy! Defunct Brain Cylinders - The OK bit, some world building. Fool’s Gold - The bad bit. Fetch quests of no value in nigh identical locations.
Blood From A Stone - Involves some nice storytelling. Breaking News - This one is kind of fun. Mystic Tomes - A bunch of decently built fetch quests.
Fills (and keeps refilling) the safe starting location with vital consumables and crafting materials for making more bullets. Removes a lot of the (desirable) tension and risk from obtaining crafting materials. Real munies in exchange of making the game worse. Nice...
Gives you the tommy gun straight in the beginning of the game, which screws with the early game balancing. Kind of makes the game actively worse in exchange for real munies. You will get the tommy gun later in the game anyway, and the gold-plated metal texture is barely noticeable.
Yeah... just skip.
A chill-paced and immersive 1920s lovecraftian detective story experience that manages to capture the feeling of everything going shite just before the looming end. Sounds good? Nice! However, did you notice the asterisk on the title? We'll get to that next... *however... here's three points good to know before getting at it: 1. Deluxe edition, DLC, and repetitiveness - 'Merciful Madness' and 'Worshippers of the Necronomicon' contain playable content of somewhat uneven quality. There is some good stuff within these two DLCs, however, if you happen to be completionist type of a player, these might also very well commit to the game starting to feel a bit repetitive before you're done with it. The three other DLCs are at best utterly and completely shrug worthy or may even make the gameplay experience actively worse. 2. The Detective in 1920s bit of the experience - It is kind of neat and immersive how you'll be doing some manual piecing together, figuring out, sourcing information from archives, making your own notes on the ingame map, and such and such. But manual does mean manual, so be prepared to think for a bit, run around a lot, and read at least an old-school printed newspaper's worth of text. 3. Beelining through the game is the way to go - The skill tree is boring. Getting overpowered happens a bit too easily and being a god-like figure armed to the teeth kind of screws with the theme of the game. And the optional side quests contain maddening amounts of fetch quest, which snappily make it glaringly obvious that there's no elder goddamn value in scouring through the same recycled building asset for the nth time fetching some unusable thing with no value of anykind. So remember this: minimum amount of XP necessary to progress, and if you need more, avoid the side-quests with lots of icons straight from the get go, as they are a telltale sign of crummy fetch quests. TL;DR: If you skipped here immediately, The Sinking City really ain't the game for you.
