Like another reviewer said, this game tries to walk the line between traditional early 90s adventure games and a modern Telltale game and fails to capitalize on the strengths of either. The puzzles are minimal and the story nothing special. Puzzles- You will almost never have more than 1 item at a time and its use will be super obvious. We're talking brain twisters like "use screwdriver on screws" or "use brick on window that a character just told you to smash". Not once was there a "oh that was clever" moment. This game is strictly story first, puzzles afterthought affair, which is a problem because... Story- Since the puzzles are so minimal, the story needed to carry the game, and it falls short. It's painfully obvious that they got a Bioware writer to do this. You're going through the exact same beats as Knights of the Old Republic with the exact same character templates but without any of the charm. They're just going down the formula checklist, including a TWIST shoehorned in that changes nothing about the story. Setting- Wasted potential. This could have been a spiritual sequel to old adventure game Bureau 13 where you use a cast of supernatural X-Files type team and their crazy abilities to investigate. But half the cast have no powers (the protagonist, and a character whose special power is making phone calls to ask other people for favors), and the half that do are used for boring stuff. You have a half-genie sword master with superhuman agility, but you literally never use her for anything but prying things open with her sword (I seriously can't remember a single time she was used for anything else). You have a fire mage, but 90% of his use is just reading old burned documents. They're just a glorified crowbar and kindle reader. If you dont take the genie one mission, they spawn a butter knife to pry a puzzle object. She is so lame she is literally interchangeable with a butter knife. It can be an OKAY way to kill time, but its a weak entry for Wadjet.
Both KQ 7 & 8 came out during a dark time in PC gaming and an even darker one for Sierra. When CD-ROMs came out, Sierra went through a "look, we're Disney!" phase with attempts at Don Bluth style cartoon animation, and the animation quality was to Disney cartoons what early FMV quality was to actual Hollywood movies. They pumped out KQ 7 and Space Quest 6 in this style, and both were the worst of the franchise. Embarrassingly shoddy animation that has aged as well as early FMV and 3D, cringe worthy voice acting back when company employees did all the voices. Then came KQ 8 to make fans nostalgic for 7. This came out during the dark days of early 3D as it was replacing 2D sprites yet looked vastly uglier, lifeless, and charmless. Sierra pumped out a couple of these that all earned "worst of franchise" status: KQ8, Gabriel Knight 3, and Quest for Glory 5. In addition to the atrocious graphics, KQ 8 also made the inexplicable decision to stop being a puzzle based adventure game and become an ugly clunky first person RPG which made about as much sense as Tetris becoming an RTS. Check out ANY other Sierra adventure before ever daring to dwell here.
Frostpunk plays out like a survival Sim City with harsh conditions of feeding both your people and the furnace that pushes back the deadly cold constantly threatening to kill your people. The graphics and atmosphere are gorgeous. They convey a sense of horrendous cold on par with the train scene in Doctor Zhivago. The Sim City stuff seems great...at first. I had a blast for the first 3 hours but then started losing interest. First, the game is entirely scripted and every playthrough will play out the exact same way. It doesn't take long to figure out the trick, and once you do there's no challenge for all future plays. You're looking at an atmosphere heavy Sim City game with a lifespan of 5-7 hours and no replay value beyond that. Up to you if you think that's worth $30, but be warned. The difficulty curve is also a parabola in that the beginning is easy (as it should be), the mid game is ROUGH as you struggle with constantly running out of resources, then the final third of the game is fast forwarding on auto-pilot. Late game you just horde your abundance of resources for an hour (the biggest challenge is spamming depots to store it all) then more fast forwarding as you wait out a huge blizzard that shuts down your city and all you can do is watch your resources numbers count down. Reach the end of the blizzard before they hit 0 and you win! Fun? The work schedule and day/night cycle gets annoying, demanding unfun micromanagement (toggle job switches and longer shifts at just the right second every day). Why couldn't this be abstracted? It also leads to the silly scenario where your town transforms into the Warhammer 40k imperial inquisition in just 2 weeks. If they had just abstracted the work schedule, they would have cut down on tedious micromanagement AND used a more fitting time scale. So yeah, a flawed but fun 3-7 hours for $30. Choice is yours.
So everything everyone says is true. This is one of the worst optimized games I've ever seen (how does a turn based game with a max of 4 units run ten times worse and have ten times the loadtime as the Witcher 3 at max settings?). The tutorial is a dumpster fire of uselessness. It doesn't explain ANYTHING and just briefly glosses over some very important features without going into specifics. In fact the tutorial spends one-third of its time demonstrating how water cools mechs faster, then none of the following levels have any water! Why focus on teaching a mechanic that never comes up but never explain the most basic interface stuff? Prompts constantly tell you how important "stability" is, yet it NEVER tells you the slightest hint on how it works. Good thing they dedicated all that time to talking about water that never shows up instead... I would say it's a typical Hairbrained product that you should wait for the director's cut on, but I don't think patches will save this. Beyond the optimization and garbage tutorial, it's just not very fun. Way too many missions are designed to be 30% fighting, 70% sloooowly traveling to the next waypoint, like someone decided to design every mission around the most tedious aspect of X-COM battles. At least your squad moved quickly in X-COM, not like this game's slow clunkiness. Tons of interface and design issues too. How it hit chance determined? What ranged are each weapon best at? The game does not tell you. Why can the enemy run around and melee me from behind, yet my only melee option is a straight charge and hit from the front? Why is a helpless, knocked down battlemech at point blank range harder to hit than a moving mech at medium range? I quit in boredom on the 3rd mission of stuttering between empty waypoint paths. I was never a fan of Mech Commander, but firing that up would be more fun right now than this. Maybe check it out once it's optimized, but even that may not save it.
So everything everyone says is true. This is one of the worst optimized games I've ever seen (how does a turn based game with a max of 4 units run ten times worse and have ten times the loadtime as the Witcher 3 at max settings?). The tutorial is a dumpster fire of uselessness. It doesn't explain ANYTHING and just briefly glosses over some very important features without going into specifics. In fact the tutorial spends one-third of its time demonstrating how water cools mechs faster, then none of the following levels have any water! Why focus on teaching a mechanic that never comes up but never explain the most basic interface stuff? Prompts constantly tell you how important "stability" is, yet it NEVER tells you the slightest hint on how it works. Good thing they dedicated all that time to talking about water that never shows up instead... I would say it's a typical Hairbrained product that you should wait for the director's cut on, but I don't think patches will save this. Beyond the optimization and garbage tutorial, it's just not very fun. Way too many missions are designed to be 30% fighting, 70% sloooowly traveling to the next waypoint, like someone decided to design every mission around the most tedious aspect of X-COM battles. At least your squad moved quickly in X-COM, not like this game's slow clunkiness. Tons of interface and design issues too. How it hit chance determined? What ranged are each weapon best at? The game does not tell you. Why can the enemy run around and melee me from behind, yet my only melee option is a straight charge and hit from the front? Why is a helpless, knocked down battlemech at point blank range harder to hit than a moving mech at medium range? I quit in boredom on the 3rd mission of stuttering between empty waypoint paths. I was never a fan of Mech Commander, but firing that up would be more fun right now than this. Maybe check it out once it's optimized, but even that may not save it.
I was a big fan of FTL so of course I checked this out. Sadly, it's not that enjoyable. It's your mechs vs monsters. You have to stop the monsters from destroying buildings. It will tell you what spaces the monsters will attack next turn, most of your attacks push the monsters back which can disrupt their attacks. Survive all the turns. The main thing is that it falls into this unsatisfying limbo between a tactical battle game like Advance Wars, and a pure block pushing puzzle game. It's not AW because it's more about figuring out where to push pieces on the board (try to get monsters to attack each other, push them into the ocean for instant kills, etc). But it's also not a pure puzzle game because there are so many factors you can't plan for. While you're told where monsters are going to shoot, you don't know where they're going to move. Also monsters take a turn they instant they spawn from the ground, so you don't know where they're going to move OR even what type they are and their capabilities. You can't possibly be in a position to cover all possibilities, and often you don't know until it's too late. A puzzle game should have that satisfying "ah ha!" moment when you figure out a perfect solution, but too often you won't be in a position to do anything about an attack because there's not enough information to plan around. You WILL lose buildings. Which is a problem because it's so punishing long term. Destroyed buildings take away power. Run out of power and it's game over for the whole run. You can spend resources to recovery power, but unlike repairing in FTL the cost is ridiculous. Just one bad battle can screw you over. Imagine spending 2 whole sectors worth of scrap to repair one bad battle. That's how punishing ItB is. There are different difficulties. Easy is way too easy. Normal is too frustrating. I beat easy quickly and had no desire to continue. There's just not much else to the game. The puzzle and tactical fan in me was disappointed.
I was around, but never played this back in the day. It's famous for being a best seller as pretty much the first big hit on the flashy new CD-ROM format in 1993. FMV hadn't really been a thing until then, with CD-ROM being used mostly for educational encyclopedia discs. People were blown away by the video. So with nostalgia out of the way, I have to say this has aged only slightly less worse than Rebel Assault. It's basically a hub world puzzle game like Professor Layton...if Professor Layton had less than 20 puzzles, a clunky interface, and awful FMV. Puzzles: some are okay, but too many of them don't even give you a hint about what you're even trying to do. In fact, half of them you're trying to form a sentence out of letters and it never tells you that you're trying to form a sentence. There is one GOD AWFUl puzzle and that is the maze. Do yourself a favor and just use a walkthrough for that. It's too confusing and prone to getting lost even if you draw a map. FMV: from the early days of FMV when companies would just throw their employees in cheap costumes to ham it up for grainy video designed to play on single speed CD-ROM drives. Interface: this is what really sinks the game. All of the transitions are PAINFULLY slow. Turning around, moving to rooms, making puzzle moves. Agonizingly slow stuff that you cannot skip. You can't even skip the cutscenes (be sure to save your game immediately on starting or you have to sit through the unskippable 10 minute intro again). The menu is terrible designed where it looks like the cursor is pointing to the top of the icon but it's actually located in the middle, and the quit button is right below resume, so you'll quit when you meant to say resume. These issues really add up over time to make it intolerable. Verdict: the genre has done so much better since then. Just go pick up a Professor Layton game unless you're dying for nostalgia.
The core of Thea is like X-Com meets Age of Wonders with King of Dragon Pass style encounters thrown in. You have your base where you construct buildings, items, and research like in X-Com. You send parties out to forage and fight, like Age of Wonders. Sounds awesome! And it is!...the idea anyway I can't remember the last game that had a worse interface, inventory, and ease of understanding than Thea. So many design decisions that would seem obvious are absent. An option to equip the strongest available item in a category? Nope. The slightest hint as to what different crafting ingredients can affect? Nope. Easy to tell at a glance what a party member's stats are going to be in a challenge? Nope. Easy to understand stats? Nope. Meaningful information on how tough an encounter is going to be before you decide to commit? Nope, nope, nope. Every time you want to form a new party is a total chore. Every tedious encounter that you can beat without taking any damage can't be auto-resolved because there's always a slight chance the AI will fuck you during auto-resolve and kill your experienced party members which is an instant game over for your 12-15 hour effort (unlike X-Com, high level characters are mandatory rather than a bonus and they cannot be easily replaced with recruits). Some "combat" events you can choose to sneak or talk instead of fight, but that's risky because unlike fighting, the game will not tell you how good the party is at that challenge; there is a social challenge but no social stat. You have to make a guess based on multiple stats (speech, attractiveness,..."feint"? wtf?) that you had no idea about and the game won't let you look at before deciding to accept a challenge. The game explains nothing. The tutorials are terrible, the tooltips mostly absent, random events will pop up to totally fuck you over until you give up and start save scumming. I wanted to like this so bad but gave up after the 20th frustrating UI issue. Only buy on a big sale.
