I want to enjoy this game. You want to experience it and fully explore it. The theme and feel is there. Unfortunately... The game just gets in the way of itself and keeps knocking you out of enjoying it by the really awful combat balancing, punitive world elements, and lack of basic testing. The installer is just a file copier without any mechanisms to really detect if any of the files are the correct versions. To make the mod functional you have to install more mods, which you would think would have been included with their installer. This is a large project, I understand. But, to have such failure with just installing the mod correctly with a supposed installer, showcases the lack of even basic testing the devs had in place. Did no one do a few test installs in different environments? Did they not check to see if the installer did its job? With the mod "installed", there's still oddball crashes at different points. Even with a fresh, clean install of Fallout 4: GOTY edition and using the Fallout: London installer, I ran into every major crash and had to use all kinds of work-arounds to get out of the tutorial area. Just plainly not a great first impression. Exiting the tutorial/starting area, you try to sink into the game and engage with it. Then, you notice how punitive combat is. Not punishing, punitive. It's difficulty of the sake of difficulty. You run out of ammo all the time because enemies are very much bullet sponges, and you don't feel like you can ever do any real damage. It doesn't feel fair. There's no real challenge in combat, just fighting bad dev math. There's many developer "gotcha" elements. Despite it being many years after the bombs dropped, being around a river that dumps out into the ocean, somehow all pools of clean/clear looking water does 200+ rads a second. That's just touching the edge of the water briefly. This mod may have content to enjoy, but developers have a flawed understanding of what makes a game play well.
I wanted to enjoy this game all the way. It has style, a neat storyline, really cool characters, and the world feel is great. Then, the combat system shows up and completely kills it. It waits awhile before doing so. Midway through the game, you'll start to feel like you aren't progressing properly. You'll think you've been doing what you should to play through the areas like you should. You upgrade your weapons and abilities according to the knowledge you have so far in the game... But, the areas just get worse and worse, and demand more and more perfection. You have to do stealth kills by systematically hitting stragglers otherwise you'll trigger the ENTIRE MAP of enemies with three to four times your health and pay no attention to even the best cover you find. Enemies with some of the same abilities as you, but NONE of the limitations you have to suffer. Soon you realize you aren't playing a role playing game... You never were: This is a "Turn-based Min-Maxer Perfectionist Puzzle" game masquerading as an role-playing game. Simply put, there are only a few viable routes to play the game. Otherwise you'll reach a point you will not be able to progress and you'll have to restart all over to undo the mistakes you unknowingly made... Because the game never indicated or told you they were mistakes, and even presented them a good options. There's limited scrap, limited parts, and limited skill points. There's weapons you shouldn't upgrade, skills you should not get, and XP you HAVE to get. And, the RNG has been decided the moment you started a new game and will not change. The combat system is similar to modern X-Com's... And that's a bad thing. Takes the core of that system and amplifies the worst parts of it, and then couples it with a limited economy to devastating results. Simply put: If you don't play this game perfectly you will hit the wall hard, and will have to restart all over again. So much good, wasted by very awful gameplay designers.
For the price, it's a nice enjoyable experience. Fun gameplay, good style, and it's one of those games that's short and sweet. You get the hang of the mechanics and work your way up from there. I do wish it was a little longer and the puzzles had a bit more challenge, mostly because it I could really get into a similar style game with trickier levels. Overall, it leaves you wanting just a bit more, which I tend to prefer over never wanting to touch it again... that some games suffer from.
It's just a fun game. It's not going to set any records or elevate any new standards. But, it didn't set out to do so. The developers set out to create a fun game that minimizes the frustrations, provides good, all around challenge, and keeps you engaged the whole time. The game ramps up the difficulty at a good pace, encourages you to use the game mechanics, and provides you many options to play the game as you see fit. The graphics are fine. The engine utilizes some neat features to tweak that even keep the frame nice on my Nvidia 1050Ti in my elderly i7 920. It looks good. The gameplay is great with many options to customize Lo Wang's abilities, weaponry, and powers to how you want to play the game. And the weapon variety is just fun to explore. The plot line continues where the new era Shadow Warrior left off, and feels competently written. It is worked into the flow of the game in an unobtrusive manner that you make you want pay attention to, rather than it being thrust upon you relentlessly. Overall, for the price point, you can easily get your money's worth and enjoy the experience as you please.
There are many elements within this game that sorted out to their own games would be phenomenally great games to play. Unfortunately, together in a very rough, incomplete mix... It's hard to recommend this game. There's an honestly interesting start to a good classic role-playing game that is undone by the incomplete survival grind game. There's a decent plot and world you want to explore and learn more about, but you rarely get the chance to do so because you are too busy attempting to fight against a permanent death survival system. But, when you do manage to survive decently, the RPG component is extremely railroading and old provides an illusion that skills chosen can make a unique difference in the end outcome. You want to engage more with the world, but you quickly find out that despite the initial setup of the world... there's just not that much of the world that can engage you back. And there are a few parts, where the game seems to actively punish you for attempting to engage further than what it presents. Overall, a frustrating jaunt where the survival component shaded out a promising role-playing game. Admittedly, it does have it's own unique aesthetic that is very intriguing. But, be warned, the game is written in Flash compiled to an independent bundled player. It functions fine, but it's a strange thing this day and age to see something like it.
After playing this game for some time, despite how much I want to like the game, I simply can't. It bills itself as an economic strategy game. But, there really isn't any strategy after a certain point. It's all about luck and the AI basically out-optimizing you with solutions that would NEVER work in a properly balanced game. As for economics? I doubt the developers ever took an honest economics class in their life. The major flaw with this game is that the planet market is unlimited. There is no hard cap on the number of resources that can be bought or sold and the prices are completely arbitrary after a point. Last I checked, doesn't this take place on a world with limited available resources? This means the AI can do counter-intuitive optimizations that don't make ANY sense in a proper market simulation. The tile claim system is STIFLING. It just serves to punish players further when other players or the AI screw you over and prevents you from using your resources to save yourself. The Black Market is an unpredictable mess, usually granting half useless items and maybe a few good useful power ups. Also... The Black Market for some reason cares about your Bond rating. Why would a group that deals with cash care about your debt? Again, another measure to screw over the player for no reason. In a game, where the tutorial goes to great lengths to teach you to learn to live with debt, let's punish the players for using it by denying them a valid means to get out of it. Prices are unpredictable since you don't know the quantity being moved AND the colony you are working around does it's own thing without rhyme or reason, putting it's own stresses on the arbitrary system at hand. As for the Offworld market that's touted to be route for great cash and typically the ultimate goal, there have been many times when that has proven to be complete waste with shipping goods being barely profitable. Stay away from this DLC-a-thon game that is poorly executed.
