(Keep reading to the cons) "Noir" says it all - you're a jaded, cynical detective with a tragic past who is solving a missing persons case in a world where good succeeds seldom, and corruption is the rule... set to the background of bags of espresso. The game itself has a novel premise. Run a coffee production company to fund your investigation while investigating the crime. The game is played by assigning tasks and individuals to execute them, while you go and negotiate contracts and have conversations, and link the clues. Every time you negotiate a new contract, there's a new set of clues, which fill up your crime board. This game is effectively three partially linked mini-games. The production office, the negotiating the contracts (honestly, the only interesting part), and linking the clues a-la Phantom Doctrine). The negotiating table affects your profit in the production office, which enables you to purchase clues from disgruntled servants and the like. PROS: The plot is decent (so far), fairly complex, with pretty good voice acting. CONS: Where the game falls down is in the language localization. "Pfft! What does that matter?!" Well, it DOES - and not how you might expect. You see, in this game you are expected to negotiate business contracts, and the game uses real-world tactics in the negotiation. Low-ball, phony BAFTA, silly money, all of these are explained in a "Compendium" on the desk in the production office... literally 220 pages (so they say) of business school negotiation textbook... translated from Polish by somebody with an indifferent grasp of the nuances of English. It's mostly comprehensible. Sorta. I've ghost-written MBA papers before and I genuinely felt I learned something even through the language barrier. Bottom line: It's a possible 4-5 star game as soon as the Dev team finds a native English speaker to clean up the language and get the actors to re-voice the new dialogue. Probably worth $12-$15.
I liked it, but I don't think it'll be for everyone. In this game, you're playing the part of a police chief trying to make his retirement fund before he's booted out by the mayor. He's mostly honest, but he knows the reality of being police - and how hard it is to get by as an honest man. He's made his choice. This has several value added's as a game. The first hour is honestly a little slow - the game plays at first like a visual novel as characters are introduced, plus the tutorial. After that the game goes into several related minigames. The first is "deployment", which has you responding to crimes and requests. These appear to be randomly resolved, modified by skill of the officers, i.e. hit a threshold and succeed, otherwise chance of death or failure. Deployment also has "civil deployment" (crowd control at movie theaters), "favors", both illegal and legal for friends, and "city hall requests", i.e. "hire more minorities", or "go sing to the mayor's wife" (not a joke). Occasionally there will be decision tree responses to crimes, where you must direct your officers. The second minigame is the "investigation" aspect, where you assign investigators and they uncover aspects of a crime, after which you deduce what happens and make an arrest. It's a little simplistic but enjoyable nonetheless. The third minigame is more of a meta-minigame, as it affects the others - "management". You have to schedule, hire, fire and deal with random crap as a police chief. On its own, each one of these games has little appeal, but taken as a whole, tied together by a well-voiced and gritty plot, it's been a good ride."Surprisingly compelling". Lastly, I know some dipshit is going to go "misogyny! Raaaar!" due to several seemingly anti-feminist plot events. If you are one of these, go soak your head. I think the game is evenhanded, as it contains events that are both "suppress the feminist protests" and "hire more women". Plus, the prosecutor investigates you, and she's female.
In the first 10 minutes, you leave your planet, get shot down by mystery ship, and become captain when your previous captain bails. Interstellaria's gameplay is space and ground exploration and combat, traveling from planet to planet, exploring different levels and following a fairly linear quest line involving the mystery ships that attack you early in the game (there's more to it than that, but SHHH! Spoilers!). You're given a lead to follow up, and you either travel there or explore to find it, in a manner reminiscent of Starflight 1 and 2, or Sentinel Worlds, There's a fair amount of sophistication in the game, but it needs polish. In space travel you fly there in your ship, except when you get attacked or run into an anomaly. These are NOT FF VII style random encounters. As you travel through an area, various anomalies appear and fade on your sensors, and you can alter course ( requiring an actual choice on the map), to evade the pirates or explore the asteroid field, etc. Space combat takes place on an itty bitty screen where your ship throws out fire and evades enemy fire in 2D. All of this requires a power management scheme, and a feed/sleep/entertain crew requirement. Ground work is vertical 2D, and consists of you exploring the level, killing anything that could bother you, getting the McGuffin and stripping the level for resources. Boring, which is bad, because that's where plot advances. The game has serious flaws. The AI for your crewmembers is terrible. The ground level has a "harvest" button to speed up resource collection. Your crewmen routinely forget what they're doing and stand there, until you reclick "harvest". Crewmen in ships don't "think" - no autorepair or "i'll fill in for you". The game has a seriously lacking user interface. Selecting crewmen is almost impossible as they all stand in the exact same spot. Space combat should have larger than a 2.5 inch screen. After four hours gameplay, I will probably refund. Worth $6-7, not $10.
