One of the biggest issues I have with the game is the combat system and its targeting. On more occasions than I can count I ran into the issue of obstruction of line of sight for the player. Yes, the player, not the player character. You can’t rotate the maps in Underrail, so at times opponents will move behind things so you can’t see them, even though your character still has line of sight to them. On almost every instance of this I was unable to select the opponent as a target while they were out of my line of sight. I would have to move my character around and hope that the opponent would follow so I could again see them and attack them. I have read monsters do not scale. That might be true, but I had instances where I would fight creatures while I was level 2, and it was a hard fight, then encounter the same beast when I was third or fourth level, only to get my butt handed to me, even though I used the same weapons and had better skills. In one case I measured, and I was doing a third the damage I had done the last time I had fought the exact same creature. The way non-humans respawn is another problem. Underrail is a game where you are struggling to earn money and have enough gear to get by. It can be frustrating to be doubling back, trying to figure out what you are doing or leaving to try and farm gear to get past certain areas, only to return and now have to fight your way through a host of critters all over again. It felt like I had finite chances to gain and craft gear, while my opponents were infinite. Finally, there are gaps in story and quests that are infuriating. An early quest involves finding a missing camera. I spent a frustrating amount of time in a maze-like area trying to find it. I eventually read a guide, where I was told that after I went to a certain room I was to go back to the questgiver and tell him about it, even though the game never hinted at such. There is a good game hidden in Underail, somewhere.
This game was nothing but glitches for me. To start with, you have a character called Lindzi, who for some reason on multiple occasions when I would have her cast Cure Light Wounds on a teammate she would instead cast one of her offensive sells. This happened enough times that I could rule out me misclicking. Before I stopped playing I would click to have her cast a spell, only to start wandering the map. A major glitch occurred with the nightmare quest of the game. You are to receive nightmares from an undead, and you are to seek him out, else your main character receives major penalties. The penalties did not fire off in my playthrough until the third or fourth time I received the nightmares, so it took me a while to figure out what was the cause of the issues, which majorly impact gameplay. From there I thought you were to follow the quest the undead bestows upon you, rather than continue what I had been doing. I managed to eat up a lot of time and resources trying to do that, only to get a message telling me I was dawdling on the quest I left to deal with the curse. Combat is borked. Alchemist Fire is to do damage on a direct hit, then damage again the following round. In about ten combats I only saw the second round of damage occur once, no matter how many direct hits I had scored. There are also major discrepancies between the pop up listing of hit results, and what you read if you hover over the combat log. There was often no rhyme or reason between the two when compared. I also had a time where I successfully made a skill check to identify giant frogs, only for the game to give me the stat block for wolves that I had yet to encounter in that area. Sometimes changing a weapon in combat was a free action, other times it took the entire round for a character. Also, I bought the Imperial edition of the game, which is to come with a bonus pet and magic item. Neither one loaded for me, and I checked a guide to make sure I was doing it right.
Character creation has issues. The game will warn you if you remove points from your class’s primary skill. If you switch weapon skills you will get no warning, and your automatic load out of weapons will not update, so you will be suboptimal. The camera options are a mess, requiring you to zoom in and out to see everything. This made it a pain to find loot. After an hour of playing I finally got a tutorial notice of the key combination that highlights treasure in your area. You still need to zoom in and out to be able to pick up your loot. The first companion I found had such a backstory I had to look her up online to confirm she wasn’t a trap. The next one had an incongruous Texan accent in a fantasy game, with a kill-em-all approach that seemed a bad stereotype. I was very disappointed when the game revealed its “Save the universe” plot, moreso as it bears an uncanny resemblance to a storyline DC Comics published nearly a decade before the game was released. One of the two all-powerful beings you meet contradicts herself in her first few lines of dialogue, creating a plot hole. After this you are set on a quest that leads you into teleporting into a room where a woman is bathing, and apparently you are to enjoy being humiliated by this event. This also introduces you to the odd game mechanic of having to rock-paper-scissors for social interactions it is entirely possible for your main characters to have to R-P-S each other in arguments, where the computer acts for one of your characters. I encountered a orc. The game tries to make you feel bad if you decide to fight the monster that is resting a few dozen feet away from the mutilated bodies of the people you are to protect, all having been killed by orcs. The dialogue after the fight indicates the orc is a “citizen” instead of an orc, so maybe someone screwed up programming the game here. After an undetectable trap killed my party I gave up on this game. Learn from my mistake and do not buy.
To start with, there’s the tutorial in the beginning. Maybe my entire problem with the game is some sort of glitch, as after picking up the biscut the game would only allow me to end the tutorial. Could be there’s a bunch of information I was to receive on how to play the game. In the first town I managed to pick up and sell a quest item before I found out it was a quest item; rebuying said item put a dent in my cash. There are a number of skill and ability checks in the first town. I assume that the checks are flat against your scores. I say this because there were two plotlines that I could not advance in at all, despite each having three options to check your stats against to proceed, and another that I’m still not sure why I couldn't advance. Totally fun to be locked out of multiple stories in the first place you arrive at in the game, because you didn’t build your character according to whatever design the folks who made the game had in mind. Because of that lock out, I proceeded into the wilderness. Turned out there’s one place where you can get one of the aforementioned quest items I sold before knowing it was a quest item. Random encounters were all four-on-one against me, so that was as deadly as you can imagine. When I got to the next town I found myself backtracking, as once again I failed every skill check needed to get past a guard. I think there’s a resting mechanic. I developed two stat penalties with no explanation as to what they were from, or how you removed them. I’m assuming there’s some rest mechanic not listed, much as there are several items that list numerical values for your Toxicity, Hunger and other stats, but I can find no way to view them while playing. There's more, but I'm out of characters. Honestly, Atom is a nice-looking game with a neat concept, but seems to have been developed by people with a 1980s adventure game mindset of “Flail about and get frustrated trying to figure out how to do the most basic thing.”
The first time I gave the game a try, I played for almost 40 minutes before I had contact with my Skaven opponents. I had to leave the game due to real-world responsibilities, whereupon I found there’s no option to save in progress, and I had to let the game finish saving before I could get out of it. My next play I again found myself wandering for an extended period before contact with the enemy, the Sisters. The Sisters all did around 1 1/2 times the damage I could dish out. At one point I successfully used the Ambush State on a Sister, hitting her with an arrow as she came on-screen. She then jumped down to the ground, ran over to my archer, and got a surprise attack…on the guy who ambushed her…and watched as she ran up to him. Shortly after that a Sister triggered a trap, which only damaged a character of mine across the plaza. A check of the log showed it wasn’t matter of the Sister and her allies making the save. She activated the trap, but the game log said my character had activated it…while the Sister was moving on her turn. After the Sisters defeated me I played a mission where both sides were to have their characters randomly scattered on the map. The game, however, spaced the characters so one of mine was attacked by two Skaven immediately. During the course of that debacle I discovered you can’t choose who you attack in melee, always auto-targeting the last character who hit you. Being unable to focus on one combatant in hopes of bringing it down to a 1-on-1 fight made things worse. I need to also mention the Beacon system, which is meant to allow you to mark things on your area map, so they’re highlighted on your tactical map. For reasons unknown marking wyrdstone on your map with a beacon counts against your five beacons, but does not actually show on your tactical map. This is more infuriating because wyrdstone can be hard to see, so you can walk right past it. There is more I could say, but none of it is good.
