I had bought it a year ago played for 10 hours and stopped playing for whatever reason. But I recently decided to start it up again and I am very glad I did. The game is fantastic; Challenging turn-based tactical combat with lots of abilities and spells to acquire, great exploration with lots of secrets to uncover, and a decent story / lore. Dialogue is fairly minimal (it uses a keyword system) but enjoyable. The focus of the game is on the combat, progressing with your character, and acquiring new equipment. Some of the sidequests are a bit uninspired (e.g., "bring me 5 monster tails") but since the game focuses on combat so much I suppose that is to be expected. I highly recommend the game to everyone. It is a hidden gem and a bargain for the price. My only real complaint is that it left me wanting more. Here's hoping for a DLC or sequel.
Mechanics: The character creation system is pretty deep and seems to be inspired by D&D. It was hard to choose a class as I kind of wanted to play them all. I eventually settled on Armsmaster. Visuals: While some love the retro look, I know the low res / pixelated graphics will turn some people off. For me it's not exactly a plus, but I can tolerate it as long as I can tell what's going on, which I usually can. Initially it's a bit difficult to distinguish between characters in combat, but I got used to it after awhile. I've seen some complain about having a hard time reading the pixelated text but with the customization options I didn't find it to be a problem. Audio: The music is really cool. SFX are great as well. No complaints there. Story: Excellent! Better than average writing for sure. It's a fairly dark fantasy game with cosmic horror (i.e., Lovecraftian) elements. Cons: I found the game to be a bit too easy even though I played on hard difficulty. In particular I would love to see the final battle tweaked to be much harder. Probably my only other complaint with the game is a design decision: when one of your party members is downed during combat they won't get XP for that encounter, meaning squishy characters can lag behind your warriors in terms of leveling up. It makes players want to reload every time someone is knocked out. Very annoying IMO. Fortunately, I'm not the only one who dislikes this and the developer implied that he'll probably make this an optional setting in an upcoming patch. Final thoughts: I love this game and it left me wanting more. Here's hoping for DLC / sequel of some sort.
I've finished Colony Ship several times now... (It's a relatively short game made for doing multiple runs). If you do a stealth / diplomatic run you can finish it quite quickly. Combat oriented runs extend the play time quite a bit. I'd call it dystopian sci-fi. Not exactly cyberpunk but plenty of cyberpunk elements. The story centers around conflict between the various factions on the ship. At first it was a bit confusing keeping track of the various factions and NPCs, but everything became clear as I played through. Won't say more on this as to not spoil anything but it was good enough to hold my interest. Combat is very challenging but addictive and seldom feels unfair. (You have to expect a fight is going to be tough if you're outnumbered / outgunned). To win on the highest difficulty (underdog mode) you need to frequently utilize consumables like grenades and combat stims, and all the gadgets (e.g., cloaking device, distortion field) and tactics at your disposal. I've managed to succeed at some tough battles but there's still a few I have no clue how to beat... yet. Fortunately, pretty much every fight is optional / avoidable. The ruleset / character building mechanics are pretty familiar if you played Age of Decadence or Dungeon Rats. The big change is that instead of gaining skill points that you spend, your skills increase by using them. I really like this approach as in AoD it's tempting to hoard points until you need them. Can't do that here. I struggle to find anything to complain about. I guess I just wish it was longer. There is talk of the possibility of a sequel that would take place a few decades after this game. But for that the game needs to sell well. So I highly recommend buying it.
The game is fantastic and I do recommend you buy the game if you like turn-based tactical combat, but not on GOG. The 1.4.1 update was released on the other game distribution site on May 16th. Here we are two and half months later and the update still is not posted available to GOG users. The explanation given from both GOG and THQN is simply that "We're aware of the issue and looking into it". There's no indication why it's taking so long or even when to expect it. AFAIK the update just fixes a few bugs so it's not that the game isn't playable in it's current state, but if you want the most polished up-to-date version, don't buy it here. Sadly being treated like a second class citizen is becoming far too common on this site. I'll update this review to the 4 stars the game deserves if we ever get the update GOG customers deserve.
