The game itself is great. The remaster doesn't do anything to help. They should not have bothered. Buy the original. You will get both of them anyway, because you get the remaster for free if you own the original one. Play the original. It really is a great game.
We have here a fun little naval warfare game. Nothing too deep at first, although you do have to set up your own factories to make the better gear. It's fun sailing alongside an enemy and unloading a broadside at point-blank range or sending a swarm of wasps (rockets, not insects) from long range. There's some nice wit in the writing. Some of the dialog is quite amusing. Even mission requirements can have humor - the gunnery officer's promotion is a mission that requires 20 beers to start. Well, I guess he got promoted so we gotta have a party... Unfortunately this game needs to be optimized and fixed. It leaks memory somewhere like a screen door. After playing for a while I have to save, close the game, restart it and load. And although I have a graphics card well above the stated requirement, the bigger ships make battles a slideshow. When I tried a drone build my framerate dropped to a DECIMAL! Here's hoping they keep tinkering with this game and get it running smoothly. Or... restate the required video card for running it.
That's all you really need to know. If you don't like it, you haven't wasted any money. Why are you still reading this and not trying this game? :-P STORY: actually pretty good for a freeware game. Standard premise - this side and that side have a truce but war is about to break out, but of course somebody is behind the scenes stirring up all the trouble and you get recruited to help put a stop to it. But for all this is a well worn trope, the dialog is fairly witty. (No I didn't just spoil the plot. That's only the beginning.) GAME PLAY: Standard 2D space shooter. Start with the freighter because it's much tougher to make a living with the puny little starting fighter. Figure out a profitable trade route (or just google it up) and grind out enough for a real fighting ship, and then you can start exploring. After that you can start capturing enemy ships for fun and profit and build a whole fleet. MODS: Tons already exist. I like the one that makes the Normandy available. Yes, THAT Normandy space ship. TIP: To make it easier to capture instead of kill enemies, outfit your AI controlled fleet with beam weapons. They shut off the instant an enemy is incapacitated. Ballistic weapons will kill enemies more often because there are already more shells on the way when the enemy stops being able to move. I wound up with a fleet of slow moving, omnidirectional gunships with six gun mounts each, that could wipe out just about anything that flew anywhere close to them.
"Oh no! There are guards just EVERYWHERE and even one of them could kill me! Whatever shall I do? WHATEVER SHALL... What? You say the guards can't see even slightly above them, there are fences and barriers everywhere to limit everyone's line of sight to less than 20 feet, they're deaf as a stone and can't hear you kill someone elese 5 feet away and you have superpowers? Never mind. I got this. I R Master Ninja!" Ahem... The game is a carefully constructed sandbox to make you feel like a super-sneaky ninja. All the Hitman tropes are here though - Being even slightly above a guard's head makes you invisible to him, every guard is carefully placed so he can't accidentally see you outside of the area where he's supposed to notice you and sound doesn't travel AT ALL in this world. No challenge for a veteran of real stealth games, but a nice little power trip to blow through in one day.
It's a nice mining simulator when it works. If another ship spawns in, FPS tanks. No GPU or CPU reason for it. Better hope TWO ships don't turn up. Google turns up many reports of similar problems, many attempts to fix it, but no real solutions. Nice game though. Lots of different ways to mine asteroids, from using the ship to grab ore chunks to using nanobots to bring the ore to you, to... using two mechanical arms to bash the asteroids against an anvil inside your hull? Oh well, it works to get the ore out. EDIT: Found a workaround! --no-vsync --set-fps 60 Game still slows down like it's going up a big hill every time any other ship spawns in. You can almost hear the game engine muttering "I think I can, I think I can, I think..." But at least the player ship is still controllable now.
Don't play it for the graphics. They suck. Don't play it for the combat. It's simplistic. Play it for the story. It's great! A disease of madness is sweeping through the land, and the only thing that can stand against it are a team composed of a young swordsman, a lady mage, a sentient harvester robot, a... floating head, a gadget maker and an ogre of noble birth? Yeah. That works. The floating head is actually an archmage who is looking for his body. The gadget maker has a big gun he named Mabel. The ogre is a member of the army special forces and the floating head mage has much respect for her. The swordsman keeps flirting with the lady mage and the lady mage keeps dissing him. But the real humor comes from the people you find in the land who have gone stark raving mad. Some will fight you. Others are just good for a laugh. If you just play straight through for the gameplay you will hate this game. If you take your time, poke around and talk to everybody you will love it.
Gameplay: Fly around in 2D space shooting at stuff. If you have played Transcendence (yeah, that old Kronosaur game) you'll be right at home. Although you can build a more powerful ship than anything you could get in Transcendence, even with the Playership Drones mod. That's only half the game though! You're also piecing together the mystery of why you are here, where "here" is and what you should do about it. And believe me, the piecing is real! This game doesn't spoon-feed you anything. You can't just fly around shooting and expect the story to unfold. You have to go out and find it. TAKE NOTES! The game lets you make captain's notes on any planet or star. Use it! Believe me, if you don't you'll spend five hours searching through star systems and googling for the answer to "Now where was that group of furry natives who needed their Ward Stick back?" PRO TIP: You can use the search function in the missions/logs to find the notes you want. Very handy. I used it a lot in late game, especially to remember where the warp generators were. Get this game, get out that cork board and yarn and start shooting, because the galaxy ain't gonna save itself.
THIS is X-COM the way it should be done! (Caveat: I don't know how Phoenix Point was at the start. All I know is the Year One edition. If you got burned by the Epic release I feel for ya, but do please give this a try, or at least watch some youtube lets-play videos. As the game stands now, it is solid X-COM gold, man!) I've played a lot of X-COMish games. UFO: Alien Invasion is my favorite, and it's actually freeware. Well... it WAS my favorite. Now Phoenix Point is. If you have ever played UFO:AI you will understand just how high this praise is. Finally you can move, shoot AND MOVE AGAIN to get back in cover, like it always should have been. Finally you can cross-class soldiers, so a sniper can have an assault's reaction-fire or a heavy's jet pack. (And yes, I'm playing this just like every other X-COM clone I ever played... eight snipers overwatching and shooting anything that moves anywhere on the map. High power, single-shot, long distance FTW baby!) Tip: With a quick-fire skill that reduces AP cost of firing a weapon, a soldier with a lot of willpower can totally wreck in one turn with a pistol... because most pistols only cost 1AP to fire, so you can keep pulling the trigger as long as you have willpower to use quick-fire. This can be a tactical game-changer on a unit with a jetpack.
First the good... okay, the great. Gameplay is awesome! If you want to play this game for the enjoyment of outfitting mechs and using them to tromp the enemy on the battlefield, this is your game. Buy it! With the proper mechs and supporting skills I could wreck anything the game threw at me. By "proper mechs" I mean Atlas II with an autocannon 20, four pulse lasers, four SRM6 (short range missile, six-missile salvo) launchers, full armor, a gyro to help my evasion and a few heat exchangers to keep from building up heat too fast. All the weapons were ++ versions (extra damage.) I could put out 560 damage easily. By "supporting skills" I mean I kept my crew morale maxed. That meant I was able to do a called shot twice every round - that's where you choose which part of the enemy you want to hit - and all my crew had tactics skill (increases called shot accuracy, among other things) maxed out. All that 560 damage going into a mech's central core... if I didn't take an assault mech out in one hit, I would certainly get it in two. So yeah, I pretty much trampled everything in every mission. (Nota bien: I wasn't even really trying. If you grind a bit more you can probably put out more damage per mech, per turn.) Now the bad: The story is meh. I mean, they didn't even TRY! The whole story, what little there was of it (you could play the story missions in about an hour and a half, maybe two hours) was a long string of off-the-shelf tropes. Even the "animations" that moved the story along were just still pictures that moved slowly across the screen, with a few smoke or sparks effects to give them life, accompanied by voice-over narration. They even did the old anime trope with a still picture of a guy holding a gun at another guy's head, then fade to white as a gunshot is heard. The story felt like it was just an excuse to send the player off to grind some more to get strong enough for the next story mission. That cost this game two stars.
Playing this game was like playing Deus Ex and Bioshock at the same time, and for the most part the blending was smooth. I did miss all the dialog options of Deus Ex, as Dishonored opted for a mute protagonist. But for the most part this combined the best of both worlds. Dishonored has its own story to tell though, not just a retread of previous games. From Deus Ex, Dishonored adopted almost everything: - Killing people is bad, knocking them unconscious is good. - The player is actually guilted into playing nonlethal. - A plague is killing people. - (SPOILER) The plague was introduced by the bad guy. - You have powers that make you superhuman relative to everybody else. - You spend most of the gameplay (if you do it nonlethal) hiding, crouching, moving around quietly, generally being as unseen as possible. - (SPOILER) The good guys betray and try to kill you and become the bad guys. From Bioshock, Dishonored pulled: - Everything you can add to your inventory or read is very shiny. Like, actively glistening. - The mute protagonist just goes through the story and doesn't say anything. Everything happens to and around him. - Basically the whole art style.
