The first half of this game is awesome in every sense of the word. You're just trying to do your best and keep Freeburg from descending into chaos by managing a mid-sized town's PD, but it isn't as easy as it sounds. Your cops will die, their spirits won't be into their jobs, they'll call in sick three days in a row and you're forced to keep them on your payroll because they're the best cop in the city you can get right now. This plays through a mix between a top-down manager game and choose-your-own-adventures. You assign cops to different incidents that happen, and when they get there, it'll either resolve without your intervention, or it'll be a scenario that requires judicious decision making, like talking someone off the ledge of a building, or handling a hostage situation. It's easy going at first, but as crime ramps up you'll end up a day late and a dollar short almost all of the time, and you have to hope to god that your useless old-ass cop that you keep around just for days like this can handle a robbery by himself. [spoilers begin] The story, however, drops this game sharply from a 5 start to a 3. Jack Boyd starts off as an interesting enough character - your average fat, old, soon-to-retire police chief who just wants to go home - but once your involvement with the mafia begins, Jack goes on a forced character arc that ruined the entire game for me. It starts off as a hollow mechanic where you occasionally have to ALSO send cops to mob crimes to act as protection, but once the mob feud ends and Jack's character arc really kicks in, you're forced to play as a 'bad' cop who's edgy, dyes his hair, drives a hotrod around, and a bunch of other shit...while this also has no bearing on the game whatsoever. So while my desire to play out TITP as a stressed-out 'good' cop who just wanted to retire was shot completely by an arc that didn't feel as if I had chosen it, the gameplay remained mostly the same - and as such, the choices felt both hollow and forced.
The devs like Fallout 1 and 2. A LOT. So much, in fact, that they made a spiritual successor to Fallout 1 and 2, but instead of making a fresh take on the genre of isometric apocalyptica, they CTRL+F'd "California" and replaced it with "Russia". This game just doesn't feel like it has an original bone in its body, and that's a real shame. There's something skeletal and empty about the game world that's hard to put a finger on - Fallout 2 had this issue somewhat with the huge tracts of land you had to travel to once New Reno was available, but that's a game from twenty years ago(!), and it made up for the hollow feeling of the world screen by jam-packing towns with hours of shit to do. ATOM doesn't do this at all, and in fact reminds me of Morrowind with how the abundance of stock dialogue options serves more to cheapen the experience than flesh it out. The old fallouts at least had the courtesy to just not let you talk to people who didn't have anything worth saying - ATOM lets you talk to everyone, and ask the same four stupid questions and get one-sentence responses back. This is indicitive of another massive flaw in the game - the dialogue SUCKS. BIG TIME. It hurts extra bad that the dialogue is so trash, because that's the heart and soul of the OG Fallout games. There is the real possibility that the dialogue is better when the game is played in Russian, but I can get past grammatical errors and odd syntax! I can't get past people just running up to me and going "Hey! Get me something from the town you just left!" and my responses being either A) "What's in it for me?", B) "Sure, I'll do it for free" and C) "No", ad nauseum, over and over again. This game kinda...sucks. It's a valiant effort, but the whole is far, far less than the sum of its parts. For $15 it's alright, and you might like it as a cheap thing to fiddle around with, but don't expect anything more.
Kenshi was programmed by one guy for most of its development time. This means that it's a shambling mess from time to time, kinda looks like poo, and runs like eggs, but it also means that it was made with one very specific vision in mind - and that very specific vision was one of post-post-post-apocalyptica, where two catastrophic events happened thousands of years apart, and the world is gasping for breath. There is no plot, only a fleshed-out world that you're dropped into. You make your own plot. If you aren't good at setting your own goals, Kenshi isn't the game for you - but the world is so rife with interesting shit to look at and stats to train and mouths to feed that it might coax goalsetting out of you. It's squad-based, and it controls like an RTS. To level up, you do things: to not die to every sword slice, you first have to get the shit knocked out of you over and over again without dying so that your Toughness skill can increase. While you're getting the crap beat out of you by goats and starving bandits, the guy healing you back up (train Toughness with two people!) will gradually get better and better at his Medic skill. All NPCs in the world are built using this system with no exception, meaning that there's no essential characters or characters that aren't something you could eventually achieve yourself. The catch is, you start as an insignificant random NPC, so you have no stats for a *long* time - most of the early game is picking your fights very carefully so that they don't cut you to death. This is absolutely not a game for everyone. It's really tedious. Some gameplay loops are more satisfying than others. The sheer size of the game is daunting the first time you start it up - the map is HUGE! But it's one guy's very specific vision, and it feels like a labor of love from the bottom of his heart. If you dig shit like Morrowind, HoMM, Mount and Blade and Plainscape: Torment, you'll dig the hell out of Kenshi.
There's nothing to say about this game that hasn't been said already. If you have enjoyed any RTS game in the past, you will like HoMM3. The closest analogue I can give is a zoomed-out isometric Mount and Blade with turn based combat, but that BARELY does the game justice. Just buy it.
The game is a series of modes that go from "eat things to be bigger" to "simon says" to "really basic rts game" ending with the REAL start of the game, Space stage, where you explore randomly generated star systems and hobknob with the local aliens. Throughout the game, there's three possible playstyle archetypes (peaceful, aggressive, and in-between), and whichever playstyle you committed the most to in the gamemode you're in will decide what abilities you get for the rest of the game. For instance, if you finish cell stage as a herbivore, you'll have an ability in creature stage that lets you sing a calming song to briefly stop aggressive creatures. While none of the game is particularily complex, even in space stage, it's a great way to relax and just burn a few hours scanning wildlife and terraforming planets and trading artifacts you stole from other civilzations. You can even blow up other planets, which is kinda neat. However, the game never really goes past that kinda neat point. There's a LOT of further potential that you can feel behind the scenes, but it's ultimately a very surface-level evolution game. The difficulty settings seem to only affect how many hostile species you encounter, which is annoying. The more RTS-y parts of the game (tribal and civilization stages) are an absolute slog in my opinion, and creature stage is just long enough for you to start to get annoyed. This is circumvented somewhat by you being able to start a new game in any stage (as long as you've unlocked said stage at least once), but it comes with a massive drawback: you can't use any of the abilities you unlock by playing previous stages, so you start at a huge disadvantage. Space stage can get very tedious, but the inclusion of Galactic Adventures eases that by throwing some random third-person adventure that plays like the creature stage but with dialogue and quests. I'm running out of characters, so in summary: It's okay. For $30 it feels a little steep. Wait for sale.
It'll scratch your itch for first person bullet hell gameplay and then some. There's three kinds of weapons plus one basic weapon that regenerates ammo. All your favorites are here - spread shot, homing shots, explosives...nothing really groundbreaking is here, but that's not a bad thing. It's a polished, fun love letter to quake-esque FPS games of yesteryear with a great coat of paint reminiscent of Hexen. There's not much else to say about it -- besides that it's priced perfectly at fifteen bucks. Go get it!
There's a few immediate disappointments that need to be said: -It looks awful. It was released in that awkward period of time where isometric games started to use high res renders of 3-D models for characters while the backgrounds were still done the same as ever, leaving it to look like you're playing with poorly painted action figures on top of a paper playmat. Animations are DREADFUL. The UI looks half-baked, like it's still in development. Speaking of the poor UI... -Combat is more of a chore than ever. I'm gonna be doing some more direct comparison to Fallout 1/2, since there's a lot of shared staff between the games and Arcanum. Combat was kinda the weakest part of any isometric Fallout game, but it was servicable enough and had its fun moments. In Arcanum, combat happens suddenly and feels like a fever dream. While in Fallout there was a pretty clear aggro range that combat would trigger at, Arcanum surprises you out of absolutely nowhere by aggro range being absolutely TEENSY WEE. Real time combat moves WAY, WAY too fast for it to be enjoyable. Turn based is an awful slog. -What am I supposed to do? When Morrowind, a game (in)famous for giving you next to no direction on what do to next, has a better journal system than you do, you're in trouble. With a lacklustre dialog system in comparison to Fallout, Arcanum gives its quest information in a very vague way, and then doesn't record it ANYWHERE within the game besides "I was told to do this". That's fine if the game is interesting enough to make you want to explore, but Arcanum isn't. The ideas are cool, but the excruciating way in which you explore the world does not make you want to explore the world. I really want to like Arcanum, but I can't. There might be a hidden gem in this game, maybe I'm too dumb for this game, I don't know, but I just can't like this game no matter how hard I try. It's a shame, because it sounds like something I'd love.
