It's a charming game... at first. Then it gets more and more frustrating. Like other games of this genre, it is designed to make you fail and the only question is when. If you get particularly unlucky the game might throw a tile with e.g. 5 railroads at you, guaranteeing that wherever you place it, it will mess up everything around it. There is no way to discard these, you are forced to place them. It will also punish you for playing well by forcing you to start new groupings with a very low target. For water tiles and railroads this is ridiculous because keeping them in one area is the only way to stay sane. Your strategy is always just trying to contain the damage, which ultimately makes it unsatisfying. Bad game design which never gets past the first act, and shits all over the board by the second.
The Occupation is a fun stealth-em-up in a polished retro noir setting. Crawl through vents, nick keycards, fax documents, hack chunky 90s computers and sneakernet the floppies, in contained but meticulously detailed non-linear environments. The game's unique twist is the real-time nature of each level, forcing you to complete the objectives within a fixed time window, as various timed events play out. When it works, it's fun, tense and fair, albeit short. But I have beef. The developers have made a classic mistake, namely, messing with the save system. I get it: they want actions to have consequences and players to stick with their choices. Fine. But like almost every other game that does this, the devs have written checks their game can't cash. Tension is sneaking behind a guard's back and swiping the crucial evidence before ducking into the shadows. Tension is a crucial clue missed due to running out of time. It is not Tension to get caught on shoddy climbing mechanics, or to be told by an increasingly irate NPC to leave the area through the very door he's currently blocking, while I try to bunny hop around him in exasperation and insta-fail the entire game. The devs have crafted a handful of sprawling puzzle boxes of levels, which want you to explore them to their fullest... but the only way you can access them is through a single permanent save slot in order, going through the same unskippable cutscenes, hearing the same self-important dialog over and over again. Look, it's simple: letting people skip cutscenes preserves, not diminishes, the impact of the story. "This game relies on an auto-save system" is dev speak for "You don't get to engage with and enjoy this content in the most accessible, convenient and reliable way possible." You may look, but please don't try to get comfy. For a stealth game where you play the nosiest person in the world, this is a fundamental mistake.
The game is entertaining enough at first, but has obvious flaws that make it fall flat by the end. You will spend the entire game underpowered, both in gear and in level. Enemies destroy your armor on the first turn or two, while you struggle to scratch away at one of the simpler enemies. Items become worthless within 2-3 levels. Enemies are always optimally positioned with scripted openings, but your own party will be uselessly bunched up and short on actions. Cursed surfaces only exist to ruin your day with status effects you can't counter effectively. The UI is buggy too. Button clicks don't activate, even though there's a click sound. Clicking a moving NPC is near impossible. Party grouping is still broken. Inventory is abysmal. You will be stuffed with books, papers and keys, with no clue which are still useful and which aren't. Crafting is tedious and unrewarding, grenades are useless. For a game that claims to reward choice, the final fight is also a giant middle finger, with seemingly no way to tip the scales in your favor with dialog, exploration or questing. Planescape Torment, this is not.
After putting 10 hours into it I have to give up. It fails on combat and inventory management, and the world isn't engaging enough to care. The game lacks polish in many areas and there isn't much reason to look past it. The combat is full of compounding attacks which kill you flat when facing 2 or 3 strong enemies at a time. Long cool-downs on both items and abilities and a lack of friendly companions fails to even the score. Cheesing the AI, retreating past level boundaries and save scumming your way through is a regular occurrence. The crafting and merchant system work against each other. You don't have a stash, you can't sell most of your excess, and some essential ingredients weigh tons (e.g. metal for bullets). The skill checks on recipes aren't advertised until you try them, which means you end up with lots of unusable junk.
I really wanted this game to be good, I was looking forward to it. But the camera is terrible, the walls are in the way, the combat is repetitive, the locations are bland, the buildings and tents are solid props, the map is useless, the enemies are idiots, the thief skills are overly divided, there is no stealth, there are no cool perks or abilities to level up, the weapon jams are annoying, the traps and safes are dumb, there is no quick travel through cleared areas, the characters look nothing like the portraits, ... This is a boring game, badly implemented. Some parts look downright unfinished, like an amateur mod of the real game. So happy I only spent $15 on this. This does not look good for Torment 2.
This is an ambitious game that manages to mostly deliver on the premise of being on a sci-fi space ship. The authors clearly watched a lot of TNG. Unfortunately I too suffered fatal crash bugs and story-breaking errors that pretty much ruined my first two play throughs. It's kind of like Fallout 2 before the patches: brilliant yet broken.
Amazing. From the Blade Runner-esque soundtrack, to the design of the locations, this game is everything that makes old school adventures awesome. The only complaint is that I wish it were longer.
