This is a much needed expansion that has added what this game should always have had, A gear cosmetic customization feature. No longer do I have to wear clashing equipment for the sake of decent states! Now I can design my looks freely and creatively, crafting my own personal badass monster slayer to kick ass while looking damn good doing it. Truly worth every penny.......oh, there's also apparently a whole new section of the world to explore, a new story, two new classes, and some other stuff, but what's important is gear customization baby!
It's an enjoyable game, but the combat is just too simple to be engaging. Abilities are very limited both in terms of function variety and how many your party can have (9 with 3 for each). This makes combat, as others say, easy. It's not that there are hard enemies, but the the difficulty is weighed almost solely on gear and level. If you're under leveled and poorly geared, you're going to have a bad time, if you're appropriately leveled and properly geared, you'll be fine with some basic strategy. As for other aspects of Role-Playing, it is on the lean side. Not too many choices, few skill checks and limited dialogue choice, though the dialogue itself is quite good. Small scale RPG, but worth it. I got it on a 75% off sale, so I'm satisfied. Maybe get this at least 25% off.
Yeah I said RPG, fight me. Okay okay, let me explain. The game's main draw for me is it's stories, it's form of questing as it were. You'll journey from island to island, collecting items, secrets, stories, and practicaly living the adventurous life of a Victorian England version of Sinbad...if Sinbad sailed in a Lovecraftian underground sea. Now why do I say it's an RPG, well, because it has one of the aspects that I value most about RPGs, choices and player involvement. You're not just following a single linear path, or fighting enemies and completing jobs. Much of the game is about how you choose to act, what you do, how you progress, and the kind of sea captain you want to be, all of which can have varying consequences, some of which determine the fate of entire civilizations, be it small civilizations. There's also a multitude of skill checks that unlock options to take, which reflect on how you build your character. Your skills are as follows: Iron: The game's version of strength. affects gun damage and your effectiveness in choices that require brute force or combat ability Mirrors: The game's version of Perception. Affects weapon charge up speed. has a kind of miscellaneous use when it comes to skill checks. Veils: The game's version of Dexterity. Affects how easy it is for enemies to spot you, and your effectiveness in choices involving speed, agility, and stealthy actions Papers: Intelligence. Affects how quickly you gain secrets (the game's main method of leveling and a valuable commodity overall), and your effectiveness in acts of intelligence, wit, and knowledge. Hearts: I guess it can be considered this game's version of willpower or endurance. Affects your effectiveness in actions that involve emotion, a strong constitutions (like eating) and will. Through much of the game, these skills come into play to determine failure or success in the choices you make, and thus affect what kind of choices you make. On top of this, you may also choose how you win the game, your personal victory condition, being either finding your missing father, getting fabulously rich, writing the ultimate adventure book (my favorite), and creating your own island nation. So, yeah, I'd say it's an RPG........fight me. Aside from that, it's a great game especially for those who like a good bit of reading, beautiful soundtrack, good visuals, fun gameplay though it can be slow during long voyages, and I wholly recommend it.
A very fun ARPG with about a 90-10 Action to RPG ratio. Gameplay is simple, but enjoyable, focusing on hack n' Slash Action gameplay with plenty of exploration and gear to sort through. It is Linear however, so don't expect something open like Elder Scrolls or Divine Divinity. Chapter based Linear adventure with some side-quests along the way. Little in terms of character cutomization, you choose skin and hair color, name, facial hair, and the color of his starting clothes (which are immediately changed for something better). Background is pre-defined too, as you are a normal guy from Earth teleported to Nox by the villainess's magic spell, so don't expect to make you own character. You get to choose between three classes, each with their own playstyles and abilities, as well as unique story plots. Graphics are quite good for the times, and were never boring for me to look at, and are clearly definable, so you're unlikely to get lost or miss things. Sound and music is the generic fantasy affair, nothing special, but it adds to the slightly satirical high-fantasy themes and atmosphere. Story, well, it's there, not really a main focus for most of the gameplay, and mostly just serves as a source of purpose for your actions. Now here's the thing, while the core gameplay is quite good, and could be great with some refinements and additions, and playing it made me realize I would enjoyed older titles like Elder Scrolls 1&2, and the original Fallouts if they played like this. But, I got this game on deep sale, at only about 90 cents, so despite my four stars, I would actually recommend this game at a cheaper price that it's full 6$. Maybe 2-3$. Also, I hear EA realeased the game for free on Origin, so if you're willing to use that service, you can get it there. Also, to note, and this is important, I neede a patch to run this game properly called Noxsolutions. It couldn't work otherwise, and I found many people had a similar problem, so if you can't get your copy to work, download that.
I recently played a great retro Adventure game. It was funny, thrilling, beautiful to look at, and played very well with plenty of well made puzzles and an excellent story to hold it all together. That game was Primordia and I wholly recommend it. Unfortunately, this is not Primordia. I really wanted to like this game, I really did, but oh how I just can’t. It just has so much of what I hate about these kinds of adventure games. Puzzles that rely on arbitrary order of execution to work right, or follow poorly explained (if explained at all) rules, slow as molasses animations that make actions take way too long to do, especially with ones you have to do multiple times, and just a non-engaging story. It started well enough, but after an hour or so, the problems began to creep up. Here’s one big problem. Say you’re stuck on a puzzle, or don’t know what to do or where to go. In Primordia, you talk to your sidekick friend, and he gives helpful little bits of info, like “Maybe we should go here”, or “Did you know I can do this thing when you use me?”. In Sam & Max, when you say you’re confused, Max just says he’s moreso. Gee that was helpful, especially since at certain points when you need to use Max on items, they never even hint that he can be used, and he is used for some outlandish purposes that you wouldn’t logically think of. And that is one big problem with this game. It doesn’t explain well what things do or how they can be used. It seems as if the classic method of guessing and testing answers to puzzles, and even simple item interactions was intended here. While there is a logic to puzzles (be it a cartoonish logic), It's poorly or not even explained, making it seem illogical. Another thing, as mentioned before, is the slow animation. There’s not really much to say about it, but man can it be bothersome. Some actions just take way too long, and certain situations require you to perform the same thing over and over again that just drag on and on. Even simply moving from one location to another can take unneeded amounts of time due to the method of transportation, or because you have to wait for you sidekick Max to catch up to you because he wonders around aimlessly instead of following you. It’s tedious, unnecessary, and not at all fun. Finally, the last thing I want to note is that this game suffers from the rough design styles of old Adventure games, such as making soooo much of the world available to explore. This makes it so you can be in areas, finding objects for puzzles you’re not even close to being ready to solve yet, and there’s not a good sense of direction. This can be especially problematic when it comes to items and the finding thereof. You may need an item you didn’t even notice or wouldn’t have guessed the location of that in a completely different location from the puzzle you need it for. Two necessary items, a light bulb and wad of cash, can be easily missed in the very beginning of the game if you don’t check for them, despite having no reason to at the time. This problem also results from the visual ambiguity of certain things. Significant items and intractable things don’t stick out sometimes, which can lead to not knowing what I needed to interact with. Also, inventory and action systems are needlessly complex, as you need to switch between five different actions (plus an item) with the proper keys or right clicking where just left click for interaction and using an item, and right click for analyzing objects would do. Instead, you have to cycle through to find the proper action required. It’s most annoying when you need to do something relatively quickly. Thankfully, a hint book comes with installation in the game folder, which helps the score, but man, after playing this, Day of the Tentacle, and the first two Monkey Island games, I cannot see why Lucasarts is so beloved for their adventure games. I say Telltales makes better adventure games, the guys who make Samorost make better Adventure Games, Wormwood Studios makes better Adventure games, and I could go on. I’ve played a good deal of Adventure games, and Lucasarts have probably been the worst of all of them in every aspect. Worst story, worst gameplay and controls, and worst puzzles. I’d give this one star, but the funny character dialogue and wacky themes, plus the great hintbook complete with comics and short stories are significant enough positives to save this game from being outright terrible to me and at least worth completing, but I am never buying another Lucasarts game again.
There are good Adventure games, and there are bad Adventure games, this, in my opinion, is a bad adventure game. First off, let me just say that the story and visuals for Syberia are great, love em. Dialogue is also entertaining, if sometimes nonsensical when you do dialogue choices in a certain order and the structuring of the conversation is designed for a completely different order of dialogue choices. However, this game does what I hate most about its genre, it makes playing the actually game part of this game a boring chore. Firstly, movement and actions are incredibly slow, making moving long distances, and even short treks from one side of the screen to the other quite the drag over time. It gets especially bad when you have to climb stairs of any kind, or perform repeated actions that just grind the pacing like the emergency break is stuck on. It wasn’t bad when I started, but after a while, it starts wearing on me, then it began to annoy me. Secondly, there’s a lot of hollow intractables, intractable items and doors that really don’t do anything. Nothing much to say about it, just like the items themselves. What makes them a problem is that they can be annoyingly confusing, as in adventure games, you’ll be looking for something to interact with to progress, and these pointless intractable things just waste time and focus. It becomes worse when the dialogue of these pointless interactables makes them out to be important, such as in one situation where when interacting with a door that doesn’t open, it says that you need to get in there. Finally, and primarily, the puzzles in the game are just tedious. They lack much puzzling challenge, but what Syberia lacks in frustrating puzzle design like its peers have, it makes up for it in it puzzles challenging your patience. Typical fetch questing that mostly involves walking around and finding objects to use on other objects, gameplay which is made worse by the afore mention crap movement. Once you have all the pieces in play, it’s not too hard to figure out what to do. However, what can be hard is finding all the pieces of the puzzle. Syberia has the hidden object situation, except you can have no clue what you’re looking for, what it looks like, or why you even need it. One early game puzzle is constructing a pair of hands and legs for an automaton, and that’s really all it tells you. Sure you’re also told the model number’s for the parts, but that information is about as useful as a third leg on you head. Thing is, the controls to build the appendages don’t specify what you’re building apart from an arbitrary wood type, which itself is only indicated by color. So all you can do is guess and test until you luck upon the right color of wood, a process which is made ridiculous by the repeated backtracking you have to do back to the automaton, saying, “Is this right? Is this right? Is this right?”, again until you finally get it right. The game has a good story, one I’d really like to experience, but even if I just walkthroughed my way through the game, I still couldn’t get over the molasses speed of it all, and the plain boringness of the gameplay.
