I have fond memories of this game. Even better is the enjoyment of replaying it. The seemingly endless space to explore in a open world space. The planets you explore. Each encounter feels like a bit of tension is in the air, when a alien ship could be friendly or dangerous and you do not have a powerful ship. You can do a lot in this sandbox game. Have fun!
1)Everything controlled by 1 mouse button(except for mouse wheel zoom). Since this is not going to matter to the developers, this explains the 1 star rating. 2)No camera wasd nor any follow options. 3)Combat is almost hopeless to which you will almost always lose. Mostly, due to your characters inaction. No matter how fast the player button mashes the target! You must shift the camera, zoom, target accurately AND gauge where other enemies are around you. All at the same time......with 1 mouse button...wtf were the devs thinking!? If the idea is to frustrate the player to make a point of how the characters feel, they succeeded. But now I will never play any of their games in the future. Good job folks, I hate the game this much, under the current 1 button scheme.
When you get a vibe that makes you think of Command and Conquer, with a turn based logic and think"cool, I'm interested". But after planet creation, everything goes down the toilet. Every part of the game is so unintuitive to logic, it feels like I'm expected to learn how to use my feet in lou of my hands to live life. Each function of the game seems so overly complicated. Imagine you get hungry. You think of what you want to eat. Now instead of fetching a bite to eat, it becomes a rabbit hole of endless charts and graphs, with a long seminar about the history of food. Then add a lot of random math tests and buttons that do seemingly nothing except confuse the player with information, that does not seem to do anything. It looks like it should be a more in depth table top game, but buckles under its own weight of messy design. In short, think of tying your shoe laces. Now make it micro managed and overly complicated, with charts, toggles and un-needed busy work to perform a mundane task. This game is like that. Itblooks amazing until you actually play it. Then...not so fun.
I really hate this game. So go ahead and downvote this review now. There is such a laundry list of reasons and frankly the entire problem, when comparing Oblivion and Skyrim to previous Elder Scrolls games, makes me keep thinking that neither feels like a completed product. The more I have played both games for over 50+ hours. I just thinking how so many things are either not implemented. Not finished or just flatly broken altogether and left that way for many years. To name a few major problems: -You need and I do not mean as an option. YOU NEED to change the entire interface to be able to stomach looking at the dumpster fire that was made and meant for console systems. -Controls are illogical, even when you should be able to change things. You will find the primary key pressing really annoying compared to most other games. The "Activate" key for example. You press it to open fifty billion containers and instead of being able to press it again to leave the container, you have to use a different key.....well, that may be picky to you a few times, until you slip a few hundred and just hate this as one of many annoyances that you should have change in the first place! You should not have to literally change the entire way the game functions to tell others the game is great. Even vanilla Morrowind was never so ignorantly designed. The limitations of the time are acceptable. Skyrim should not be more than a graphics bump that ripped off the fan creations of(no surprise) Morrowind mods, such as MGE XE for example. I know this may seem contradictory. But think about it. Morrowind was good when it came out. Adding to it, to make it better because the addition of something was good. Skyrim is just half a game that is not even made well and added stuff from a previous game many to make the "New" game look shiny. Also, doesn't anyone question the map being a fraction of size compared to previous games?? The entire map should not have so little......such a mess of game...
I would like to write a glorifying review about every detail that makes other game pale in comparison, but sadly the game feels unfinished. A game in 2022, that was put out in 2016. Games take a while to be developed, but the game was already worked on before 2016, in order to be released then. A few points to look at before you buy this: 1) It will disappoint you if you expect anything like a Star Wars - Mos Eisley bustling town experience. At the most, you can find a small settlement that is poorly cosmetic. If you find such a small settlement, the best you can do is look around and realise just how dead everything is. It just feels so lifeless. 2) No motivating factors. Apart from immediately not dying at the beginning, the game does not have the player character, nor the NPCs do literally anything that would be logical. As a result, it feels dead and lifeless(see the trend?) 3) Clipping. As in, EVERYTHING will walk through walls and other barriers and even stuff trying to kill your character. The collision in the game is truly terrible. Plus the ability to hit you from 10-15feet away with a melee attack is really absurd. Ex; Hostile plants can do this. Anything can seemingly do this, but plants are especially bothersome. 4) Permadeath is a great idea. But problematic if you take #3 into account. 5) Space craft while planet side, won't allow reverse thrust or hovering. You can just crash for no good reason. You can traverse hyperspace, but hovering in place or going in reverse? Nope! Why? I dunno, seems pretty dumb anyone would not want this. Reminds me of driverless cars first being built and having the "Do not run over people" be optional.(yes, this actually was a thing) My main gripe, is the lack of motivational factors. Nobody eats, drinks(recharges batteries if a robot) nor sleeps(stasis recharge;robots). Because of this, you have no reason to fight for a resource you don't need. Animals mostly are the same. It needs these. Its all cosmetic at best.
Well I looked over this title and played it for free. But what I found was frustrating controls and illogical game design mechanics that just made me think over and over...why the hell am I wasting my time on this crap? On the surface it looks like it would be a really cool in depth game with a great set of architectural elements to keep the player interested. But this is not really the case. While a game such as Neo Scavenger is great to go through over and over. Tales is just a work out in its self, for its own sake just to play the darn thing, with no real joy in playing it. While I like indie games, I cannot recommend this title unless you want to feel like you are at work instead of playing a enjoyable piece of entertainment.
The background of any game is the frame and the image you place inside may look pretty, but what you need in order to enjoy it is the architecture holding it together. This describes Neo Scavenger rather well. While the story is barely there, it is a game that was really made for the structure in which the player will delve into. The game has a few motivating plot elements to it so it is not ENTIRELY devoid of "why should I play this", it just doesn't give you concrete answers to the reasons why everything in the game is happening in the first place. Which...well...kinda sucks. But that is the only thing bad about it. When you find characters that tell you a piece of something, the game dev. didn't really know how to give an answer. Without giving away the few plot elements the game has, I will tell you it is still highly enjoyable getting to the end of the game after 100's of deaths lol There have been a few games in which such seemingly menial tasks to stay alive have been made. But none so well designed as this title. With the design already created for the developer already complete. Let us hope he will add more story driven side quests to the next one. Side quests ALWAYS add the meat on the bone. The game allows you to do just about whatever you want....now if only we could get more side quests, it would be great!
The entire time you hope you can actually DO something in the game. You find the game won't let you. Why? Simple, everyone has weapons in the game that do nothing at all. There aren't any tactics at all either. You basically are told by the game where to go. You go there and pretend to choose your stockpile of weapons. Then you get to move once and sit for an hour while "enemy" ships circle you and go "PEW PEW PEW!!" and then after another hour of this non-sense, you kill them and start again. This could not be a worse under exaggeration of this title. You do a lot of sitting and watching the light show they call a video game. There are no tactics whatsoever because the "new" weapons are equal to the shields every new level. So had they not even bothered giving you the option of choosing "new" guns to choose from to beat the next level, it would not have mattered anyway. You really just sit in one spot and wait until the light show is finished. Frankly that is poor design.
I do not know what game everyone has played that was so great. But I didn't play it after I bought it. The game controls were clunky. The graphics were fine. The story however was horrible. The characters were not only hollow, but completely retarded. Cliche after cliche character, it felt like a joke game instead of a full supposed triple A title. The game mechanics had some of the worst illogical rules I've ever come across in an RPG to 30 years of gaming. If a bunch of middleschoolers had made this game from scratch I would have commended them for the effort, but this lump of excrement was made by people who should have had enough experience to put something together and didn't. I was so tired and bored of the go fetch it. The first part of the game has the characters just aimlessly running around with no sense of reason. Even having a reason was so hollow as you would just be hung up by strange stuff for explicable reason. Well I have to get a magic acorn of retardation in the woods, ok, oops. Guess I'll be distracted for 2 hours for no reason while I do this pointless task. That is the entire game. Plus expansions give you a meter that prevents you at times from progressing altogether. You cannot sleep and thus die and you cannot go back unless you had an old save. But by that time you probably don't and there you are. Stuck and can't progress any further. So if you want a review on this game beyond fanboy ball gargling. Take mine to heart before buying this game.
I first felt ripped off by spending $5 dollar for a map I thought was more of a campaign. It was not. Then I was irritated constantly by the appalling mouse controls. Think of every rpg style game you have ever played. Now think of how annoying it would be to have you mouse do everything opposite of every game ever created. As for the game itself? The game just lacks most of the basic elements that were in Shadow Magic. Which may not as good, but that goes to show you that the game is just pretty without the polish. I personally rather sit back and play a well rounded good quality game, no matter how high the graphics are upped. That said, after playing through the terrible campaigns of AoW3. It was enough. Large portions of what you are supposed to do are just ignored entirely and you fail repeated in some maps. Not because of poor game tactics, but because they designed it to be so vague you have NO idea whatsoever what or where to do or go. Feel free to play this game. But be aware the last one was crafted better in terms of game play. The other hand will say, if you like being frustrated and only playing a game just because you paid too much for it, well at least it looks pretty, just don't expect the brains >_>
