Gra ma bardzo fajny klimat (wydaje mi się, że czuć trochę wpływy Frostpunka). Wczoraj udało mi się dotrzeć do Władywostoku i skończyć grę na najwyższym poziomie trudności (za pierwszym podejściem i bez żadnych wtop na poziomie zarządzania, które wymagałyby wczytania save'a sprzed wielu godzin). Szczerze mówiąc nie było to specjalnie trudne, a jakimś wymiataczem nie jestem - dla przykładu wymienionego wcześniej Frostpunka przeszedłem za pierwszym razem na normalu na styk - do samego końca nie byłem pewien, czy nie zabraknie mi zasobów. Tutaj tego nie było. Ewidentnie zabrakło jakiegoś testowania pod tym kątem na dalszym etapie gry. Zarządzanie Jak wspominałem, grałem na najwyższym poziomie, a mimo tego ta warstwa nie nastręczała specjalnych trudności. Pod koniec musiałem sprzedawać (czy wręcz porzucać) płótno, węgiel i jedzenie, bo nie mieściły mi się w składzie – i to wszystko właściwie nie zatrzymując się praktycznie wcale (poza barykadami i walkami) przez cały ostatni odcinek. Powiedzmy, że przez pierwsze 1/3, może 1/2 gry trzeba było się przejmować, oszczędzać zasoby i kombinować, ale potem brakowało mi co najwyżej prochu i metalu - nie starczyło do opracowania wszystkich ulepszeń. Zwłaszcza podczas misji bojowych zdobywa się tego masę. Choćby z tego powodu nie warto jest unikać żadnych starć. Walka Przede wszystkim bardzo podobało mi się, że walk nie ma za dużo. Starć jest raptem kilka na odcinek podróży, dzięki czemu każde jest unikalne i nie ma się poczucia, że gra zalewa nas bzdurnymi walkami w celu sztucznego przedłużania czasu rozgrywki. Każda mapa jest unikalna i ręcznie zaprojektowana, nie ma tu żadnego generowania proceduralnego. Raczej nie ma szans, żeby "zmęczyć się walką", jak w XCOM, Knight's Tale czy pododbnych tytułach. Na początku bitwy są dosyć wolne i na swój sposób wymagające, ale jak odkryje się porażającą głupotę komputera, starcia stają się banalne. Snajperzy/zwiadowcy są królami pól bitew.
TLDR: Gameplay-wise deeply flawed, unbalanced and heavily scripted. Almost all of the dialogue in this game makes you feel like they have been written by people frequenting various Reddit selfhelp subs. While at first it feels fresh and seems more realistic than your standard fantasy mumbo jumbo, it gets stale real quick. Imagine endless quasi-deep personal/quest discussions with 100% accepting, thoughtful, reasonable and "wholesome" NPCs. Those same NPCs are at the same time extremely one-dimensional, naive and downright gullible. A royal officer disobeys orders which ends up causing a major problem gets discharged (while keeping his pension) and starts ranting about it like a baby IN FRONT OF THE QUEEN who then proceeds to explain things to him like he's 5 and fails to recognize his resentment? That's comletely OK, he will not rebel for sure, let's just leave him be, everybody is entitled to their own quirks regardless of their professional (in this case military!) obligations and can get away with just about anything. And this is just one example of the issue with the writing in the game, there's much, much more. The vanilla game, while not perfect, was much better in this regard. I understand that the writers probably wanted to make the NPC interactions deeper than the cliche "we shall slay the dragon, m'lady", but it becomes so damned tiring REAL FAST. Yes, people talk about deeper stuff from time to time, but not all the time. Not unless they are in a therapy session that is, and the game honestly feels like that. When it comes to gameplay, it is extremely unbalanced and heavily scripted. You can win pretty much every RTS segment by just NOT UPGRADING the capitol (as it will trigger stronger attacks from the enemy) and just rushing the opponent with basic units and quickly conquering land. Once you get the earthquake spell to level 3 you can just rush the capitol with your heroes and instawin by destroying it with 1 cast of the spell. It's bonkers.
I love the grimdark setting and I am a big time w40k lore junkie, which is why I bought the game in the first place. Playing as the Mechanicum operative/cultist is a breath of fresh air after the oversaturation of various Astartes implementations. The story seems intriguing and keeps pushing you to play and discover more, but I do not think it has any replay value. Not for the bad part. I have seen lots of reviews and catchy headlines praising this game as the "Grimdark XCOM". Do not, I repeat: DO NOT BELIEVE THIS TO BE TRUE. Both the original author of this comparison and everyone that keeps using it either have never played XCOM, or they just blatantly lie to hook you in. There little to no tactics, no cover, no proper gear upgrades, you shoot with a w40k equivalent of a BB gun until you gather enough "Cognition" to fire anything that actually can harm the Necron warrios. The fights are tedious, repetitive and simply boring. Praise the Omnissiah that there's not so many of them. If a comparison to another well-known game could be made, it would be the Darkest Dungeon. Mechanicus is basically that in a different universe with a quasi-tactical combat system impletented. I give it 3 stars out of five only because of the egagning story, nice graphics and great audio. If you are looking for a mechanically well-made tactical strategy game, go back to XCOM or keep looking. This is not what you're looking for.
*WARNING*: I didn't really get that far in the game, just barely past the tutorial. I didn't need to see more. The game has one of the most terrible UI's I've seen in roguelikes. Starting the game takes ages with lots of unnecessary long animations that serve no purpose. Going through the menus is tedious and annoying. WIN10 info: I also got stuck in the graphic options menu while changing the resolution - neither the "z" or "esc" key could take me back to the main menu. Upon using ALT+F4 the game "quit" - the music stayed on and I was still stuck on the graphics menu screen with no way to force kill the process (task manager could not appear over the game screen). I had to reboot the whole PC jsut to quit this sorry excuse for a game. I also died on the third tutorial level by throwing a bomb from a cave merchant area. Not INTO the shop, but FROM it. The shopkeeper got furious and killed me instantly. This is simply bad design. After a few more death once the tutorial was done with, I was done with the game. It is abosultely NOT worth the frustration. Go play Dead Cells, this one will reward you properly.
I agree with most of the other negative reviews. Many useless guns, annoying reload mechanics (why doesn't it reload automatically when I hold the fire button?), WAY too much randomness when it comes to getting guns (synergises with many of them being basically useless or too freaky to use, so a chance to get a good one is even smaller), almost impossible health management (extremely easy to loose health, very hard to replenish it), bullet-spongy enemies (yes, even the basic ones on lvl 1), getting swarmed with many enemies that use varied mechanics that make it hard to avoid getting hit, basically no progress whatsoever between runs, unrewarding gameplay... I feel tricked with the videos showing only the cool stuff. Yes, the cool stuff is there, but is EXTREMELY diluted by the tediouseness brought by above mentioned issues. I am not going to waste my time playing a game that is only satysfying 10% of the time, with the other 90% being just plain annoying and frustrating. And all of this just in the first 75 minutes of gameplay. I am not interested in the slightest to discover more of it, I've had enough. Overall a bad and disappointing experience, I have played LOTS of better bullet hell Flash games for free. I wish there was a way to get a refund like on Steam...
+ Shooting feels OK + Tesla + Reasonably priced + Runs fast - Looks and plays like a Unity asset flip. - Extremely grindy on difficulties higher than normal. You need to complete the levels multiple times to collect crystals in order to buy permanent upgrades. Doesn't sound so bad until you realize that an upgrade can cost 100 crystals and you only get 2-4 per level. If you don't miss them that is, since they have a nasty habit of spawning just before a level ends. This was surely done on purpose as it happens WAY too often. - RNG is god on higher difficulties. Perks are pretty much random and if you get really unlucky, you won't stand a chance in beating a level. This synergizes perfectly with the point I mentioned above, increasing the already excessive grindiness. - Monster power scales to levels gained on a map. I hate this with a passion as it means that the game punishes you for increasing the strength of your character. At the very least they could introduce varying monster types (even if the only difference was their color) so it wouldn't be so blatant. Instead they just increase the stats of the creeps. This is simply lazy development.
