heavy stealth is just pefect
gg
very cute
I took about 42 hours to get near the end of this game, completing all the quests that I could find. It's a really good game! The quests are interesting and nuanced, the storylines are well done, the choices are important from a personal perspective (even if they're not all world-changing choices). I enjoyed it greatly. I didn't finish it. From Act 3 onwards, it becomes a bit of a grind-fest of battle after battle after battle, and the battle with Gorilla was the straw that broke the camel's back. By that point, I'd completed all the quests except for the very last one, and the very last choice was hidden behind pointless waves of unavoidable enemies. I honestly don't know why this otherwise-competent RPG would want to do that. All the fun of making different choices, with a bit of battle thrown in, suddenly becomes unskippable retry-after-retry grindy-battle-mashing with the hope of returning to RPG later on. About half an hour from the end, I just went onto YouTube and streamed the appropriate ending so I could see what happened. Button-mashing isn't why I picked this game up, so that was disappointing. If I had to play it again, I'd play it on "Easy" difficulty to make the last few hours more tolerable. I'm NOT deducting a star because I think that, had I made a better choice of difficulty setting, I'd probably have completed the whole game myself. Other than that, this game was great fun and I recommend it.
This is a game where you start from very little and gradually, slowly, build up to something that's satisfactory. There are no disasters or fires or jails. There is no invasion or threat of invasion. There is no timer. There isn't even a "win condition". If you want any of these things, then this game is not for you. Instead, there's the quiet ebb and flow of life as citizens calmly go about their assigned roles in the vast, beautiful sandbox that is Banished. You decide how to play it, and you decide when you're done. That doesn't mean that it's not a difficult game, mind you. You'll face some hard winters. Once the easily-accessible iron is gone, you'd better have planned ahead and have a mine. A quarry will be needed, but it'll scar the land. When the nomads come, will you welcome them (after all, you were refugees once!) or turn them away? And I hope that you've traded well so that you can start those farms that you'd like to have. You won't lose the game because of a spontaneous fire that wrecks everything, but you will lose the game because you didn't consider all the consequences when you delayed getting a blacksmith. It's a marvelous game of consequence and understanding, very different in many respects from SimCity and its ilk. Give it a try.
This is a good game which is marred only by the developers' choice to make permadeath the default option. The environment is immersive, the choices are fascinating, the number of different plot threads that you could follow are so numerous that you're spoiled for choice, and the factions are all very different and unique. With that said, it's important for new players to realize some important things so that they aren't disappointed. (1) You shouldn't play with permadeath on - not for the first 30+ hours of gameplay, anyway. Your choices can have unpredictable consequences that become more predictable once you've invested some thought in understanding the different factions and characters. If you play with permadeath on, then dying feels utterly unfair. You had no way of knowing what would happen. Once you have some idea of where to find fuel, where you can pick up coin, which deals to take, how many supplies to estimate for a trip, and so on ... well, by all means, go ironman. (2) It's NOT a shoot-em-up. Your little boat is hopelessly outclassed by almost everything. This is, if anything, a STEALTH game. Switch your light off when you need to - yes, the terror will build, but that's preferable to getting killed now - and run away. Lovecraftian environments ALWAYS involve running away. You'll get good at it. (3) Get a Scion. That'll make dying less painful. Yes, sometimes you'll die, and when a series of bad decisions have led to that, then just accept it and go. It makes the game interesting to start over. Lastly: this is a game with lots and lots of text. You'll either enjoy reading, or you won't enjoy the game!
Bugs first. Did you know that in the skirmish mode, you can upgrade your fleet to insane levels? And I really do mean "insane". It's obvious that the devs never expected anyone to be able to afford certain upgrades, so they never tested anything with them. That means that using my laser actually costs -1 points (which gets interpreted as 1 point anyway) and I can one-shot most things with it. And then I exited skirmish mode and, look at that, the same insane upgrades remain on my fleet in a real battle. Buggy much? You can also sell some of the absurdly-priced upgrades to have an effectively infinite amount of money. And then the Blackjack and Liberty ryders disappeared from all the battles. Which would be fine, except for the game-ending bug around Mission 10 where the Blackjack needs to be removed from the fleet and ... is not there. Oops. The pilot's still there, all the lines are still there, but the actual ryder is missing. The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes of one-dimensional stereotypes, but maybe that's to be expected. Nobody has a serious backstory and there are plot holes that you could drive the Titanic through. So there's this 2000-year-old repository of Amazing Lost Technology that everyone knows about, but you're somehow the first one to go there? Uh-huh. Sounds legit. The dialogue tree doesn't exist in any real way, and the dialogue doesn't keep track of what you've already asked. The conversations often don't matter and are sometimes buggy (for example, I didn't choose the "become a pirate" option, and then I find my character asking whether my pirate gear is ready ... what?). In frustration, I made the mistake at looking at the code. Let's just say that I now understand why the game is buggy and forgets things. Frankly, it's a miracle that the whole thing works at all...
What a fun way to spend a day! OK, pros: ✔ an amusing computer companion (unvoiced), who will happily critique your intention to destroy a planet and then let you live with the consequences ✔ plenty of different ways to win (brute force? science? being everyone's friend? sure! all of these, and more!) ✔ your choices actually mean something - there's no "get out of jail free" card that you can absolve yourself with ✔ different political systems, so many different variables to juggle, but despite all that the game makes the consequences of every choice crystal clear Now the cons: ✘ the combat, which is OK, but can get really busy really easily, making it difficult to figure out exactly what you want to do in the next turn. Overall: buy it. It's a better reformed-tyrant-Hydra experience than you'll find elsewhere, that's for sure.
Transistor is a strategic game, graphically rich, with an interesting, somewhat emotional story. I liked the fact that the protagonist is entirely silent, and all the commentary has to be provided by the Transistor itself. The ending is especially good. It's not much of an RPG ... you follow a wholly linear path, most of the battles are pre-ordained, and your "choice" is mainly about which skill to select when you go up a "level". There's no exploration or item discovery or anything like that. It's a curated experience and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm giving it 5 stars because Transistor is, independent of other games which may exist, a good game ... it wasn't awkward or frustrating or difficult, but it wasn't trivially easy or boring either. A very pleasant way to spend a bunch of hours, spread over a few weeks, gaming. The battles require a bit of thought and foresight, and a bit of preparation beforehand, and they reward exploration of the skill tree and trying out different combinations. I do wish that it was a bit easier to see the result of a combination without so much clicking around, but that was just about the only frustrating part of the game. The levels are very well designed, the enemies are interesting and varied, and progression occurs at well-defined intervals. It's an easy game to get into and the storyline will stick in your head. If you're on the fence about whether to buy this game, go and look at some YouTube videos about the battle system - that's what will keep you coming back for more! I enjoyed tinkering around with different combinations a lot. If that's not your thing, then this game isn't for you. If it is, then buy it now!
Ghost Master is an OK game with a reasonable interface. But accomplishing some of the missions is a real pain, partly due to bugs, and partly due to how difficult it is to really do things your own way. The bug that really stands out for me is on a ship level - half the time, you do everything right and the cutscene plays, but you don't get your reward. Very annoying, and there's nothing to do except restart and write off 20 minutes. When you're given a mission, you have to choose a team - but you have to choose that team BEFORE you see the layout, the characters, or the objectives! So you go in completely blind. Sometimes you'll just NEED to have an electrical storm, and you don't have that ghost anywhere. There's really nothing to do except write off 30 minutes of playtime and restart with a different team, which is very frustrating. How, exactly, to achieve something is also difficult to figure out. Sometimes you just need a mortal to walk in, and chasing/attracting that mortal there can be very difficult. So you spend your time hoping it'll happen, but without any direct way to make it happen. Ghost Master is an interesting game. But it can also be a frustrating time-sink. I'm not unhappy that I picked it up (I got it on special), and I think that any horror genre aficionado will enjoy the movie references.
