Not sure why, but the save system for this game is terrible. I got tired of fighting the save system, more than enemies in the game. Its a game. The idea is to enjoy it. Not get angry because it resets somewhere else, after you played a while. For context, I was about to die and ran back to my base. I healed to 100% health. Quit the game and today I loaded my save game, to find myself somewhere earlier, at near death. To which I was surrounded by zombies, killer cars and gun toting enemies. It locked me in a loop of death and I said screw this. Its not a good game.
First off, I payed for this game, even when it was free. The underlying mechanics are replicated well. But that was where it also fails. It becomes very clear they made this in this fashion: Blood+Thief+Fallout perks+Minecraft graphics. --Doing this is not wrong. Making these games into one game with NO changes at all, is a huge mess. You cant have a sneak system with loud noise items like guns and explosives and make the game map as small as it is. The open world must be bigger for the logic of the noise. You also have to make the lighting system more logical. No lit light unless something lit it+ why. Dark areas need to be DARK! They left out a day time...apparently evil takes a nap during daytime? Because nothing bad ever happens in day light. Decap enemies, but you cant dismember them to prevent their actions. Also, decapitation while prone....with an axe.....wtf guys? A lack of logic everywhere. Also, enough with the main character without a body! The Citadel has a body while looking down, you can make this if they can team. So your main character is an undead guy. Fine. He doesnt need food/water, fine. But make some other requirement. Like eating the living while that makes him slowly lose his mind. Perhaps some lesser bad deed, like the shaman can have him gather soul essence of felled enemies for healing agents. The game feels to lazy. You have to make the logic of enemies work with the mechanics and it just does not. You can have the sneak system, but with loud items, you need space. LOTS of space, plus the enemies should all come running in an area....hint hint, like rock throw distractions. Plus you need areas with the living. Horses to go to and from. When you leave a horse tied to an area, you risk walking back, when sun down comes yer horse get ate! Perhaps your zombie main guy needs blood in a pinch and he eats the horse...or the people he partners with? This could have been a bit hit. Sadly these ideas will never matter to the team.
I do not take any pleasure beating up an old game like this, that has a genuine commodity of open world realism. While it has many faults. It does have the appeal of being open enough, similar to say Morrowind. But with so many bugs. So much is also lost here. A true rebuilt is needed to bring the mechanics up to modern game expectation. Playing this in 2024, feels like a good proof of concept at best. Playing the stock game is a mess. Playing with fan made patches still cannot make the game better. Graphics do not matter here at all. To some, it may be offputting. But what really breaks everything, is poor controls. So terrible are they, that everything you try to do, feels wrong. Its like trying to drive a car...while you are gagged and hogtied in the back seat of it. Its bad. Then there is the complete lack of logic, to just about every action that makea your character behave insane. Yet no reaction by npc. Eating food as a health restore is on par with medical items. More broken stuff you ask? Pull a weapon outside the bar and kill people, with no reaction. Walk inside and you cant pullout a weapon. Go back outside and keep open the door and throw a grenade inside. Kill people inside annddddd.....casually order a drink wtf!?? It is such a mess. You cant lean left/right. Iron sights view is....another mess. Sorry folks. The entire game is a dumpster fire of could be ground breaking. But just fails from everything not meeting expectation of function. Is it fair to compare to modern games? Yes! Why? Because it feels like nobody had any clue how to design even simple controls. Just adjusting the option settings crashed the game! I dont even want this game for free, having actually played it. You have been warned. The die hard fans rather blow smoke up yer backside, rather than concede it is a broken mess.
I know. Not very becoming way to detail the game. But seriously. It is. It may not be perfect, but you can play it from start to finish and not be frustrated with most of it. Which is hard to come by in gaming these days. The one thing I would want, is a post apocalypse type of game, without magic.
Lets have a quote: "Gameplay inspired by RPG classics like Ultima Underworld, System Shock, & Daggerfall" To which I say is a pack of lies, to ride the coat tails of better games. Im not ragging on the little guy for fun. Im annoyed when anyone tells tall tales and a bunch of fools blindly follow, parroting the lies. Then I buy a product under that falsehood. Barony is a game more in tone to Minecraft, but with an rpg feel as much as one could add, to fps game Blood. Veloren. A very visually similar game. Which is free by the way. Comes blazing out of this horse race ahead of Barony. Due to adding in the basic mechanics people would feel familiar with, that Barony never bothered to implement. Barony lacks pretty much all the qualities one expects from the games it was "inspired" by. There is no comparison to any one them. Atleast in terms of mechanics. This is my primary gripe. Arx Fatalis has a reasonable claim to being similar....still crap of a game. But at least they made an attempt. So....is there anything redeeming? Sure. Why not mention a few highlights. 1-Graphics and music 2-Options and settings(lots of toggles) 3-Random generation of levels 4-A sandbox with an end goal...seriously this is really is important in most games. I know people like this game for what it does have. But it lacks far to much to appeal to me. Especially after having the balls to name drop those better titles and not even include their mechanics....wtf guys!? Heres an example: Someone wants to make similar icecream after Ben&Jerries goes under. People rejoice. Then when the customer buys that "icecream"...its...ravioli pasta! Fans exclaim they like it....yet I am scratchin my head askin about what happened to B&J icecream?? It is not what I have an expectation of at all. So just because the product is liked by many, it will piss off real fans of the games they claim to be like. You future customers are warned.
Normally if a game is 1 star, I would request a refund. But this game is different. While I think of it as being crap, it just does not appeal to me and my interests. I still dislike it for a lot of reasons. But I did research it a bit and figured it was cheap enough to try it. It seems well made on the surface. The concept is also reasonable. Many aspects of the game seem logical....on the surface. What really turns me off to it is, the lack of any goal. Not a story, STALKER Anomaly has point to point goals. But its still a sandbox to get there. In DeltaV. You go to work playing an over developed version of Asteroids. Is that explicitly bad? You decide. You can play Asteroids or play this game and it has no real incentive to turn it on from start to finish. Gear up a space craft that each in a roster looks identical to the next. With almost no differences. No real feeling of being in control of your ship design. No sense of playing a game beyond some trivial whim of doing something forgettable to pass time. No depth to one action or direction. No sense of any feeling at all! You care nothing about characters you hire. Not even about your own ship as you do not have an avatar to relate to, nor any character building whatsoever. Apart from the design of space and what the stuff in it may look and behave like. The game feels so lifeless as to wonder why the devs even bothered to make this. You can get more depth from a Carl Sagan documentory about space. Come to think of it as I write this review. The game does have a feeling. The feeling of a relationship you stayed in far to long. Living apart as 2 strangers that know each other well. Indifferent and not caring about anything that goes on. ....but the apartment was nice and well designed! That is the game experience I had here. So you may ask why not request a refund? With a game this bad, I felt charitable....it looks grim for the devs and they need the charity.
I cannot recommend this game. The entire game feels like a pretty tablet game. But put onto pc format. Just imagine people getting excited over Flappybird...on pc. Atleast this game has a point, just a good one. You play an agent that is tasked with making different factions war with each other. No story but what play out. This at first sounds good, but the game is so limited as to be summed up as this: Diablo 1, without stages or waypoints, nor bosses. Around 4 search/loot boxes with random items and a janky fast pace political system. Which is like a king of the hill scheme. No real faction battles. Mainly the player actor flying around and stirring up trouble. Delivering quest goods. Wash rinse repeat until your agent is a high level and the agents faction criteria for "winning" is met. Whatever faction the actor courted most. Putting it mildly, a game with so little, even on sale for $10 is asking to much. I wouldnt want it for free. If quick and mindless is what you need in your life, this is perfect. Maybe something you play on a train going into work.
As title, but for those not aware. This game has realtime combat. What this means is, you have to sometimes deal with a tank control scheme. Even against fast moving instant kill monsters. While most of the time you can avoid battle altogether, some encounters cannot be avoided. The save and load of a game is needed. On the bright side, the really dangerous creatures can have solutions to curb the fight sometimes. So talk to everyone, not trying to kill you to eitjer find items or give help!
