Pros: Really great and dark art style. The concept of drawing on a huge pool of expendable characters for a Rogue-like dungeon crawl, using them up in a meatgrinder as they die or go insane is a fresh and fun sounding idea. Upgrading the town instead of your party was also a neat idea. Cons: All those great ideas quickly fall apart. Biggest issue is TIME and GRIND. This is NOT a typical Rogue-like where you can finish a run in 1-2 hours. The grinding is horrendous. Even after over 10 hours you still won't have a stable roster of max level party members. This becomes an issue because your characters die (or must be retired) so easily. It's common to lose party members in 2-3 hits out of sheer bad luck that you cannot avoid. This only gets worse as you climb in levels because of how imbalanced the scaling is. Your level 6 characters in a level 6 dungeon are going to die more often than level 1s in a 1 dungeon, yet they're infinitely less replaceable. Get an unlucky high level party wipe? That'll be 10 more hours of grind to get them back. The 2nd biggest issue is the game never changes. No new strategies, no new mechanics are opened up as you advance. Level 1 characters have the exact same skills as max level. The only thing that changes is the numbers get slightly bigger. 4-5 damage instead of 3-4! But the enemy numbers get bigger too so what's the point? Actually the enemies always outpace you. Gone is any sense of advancement like your ship gaining crazy new abilities in FTL. The first hour is exactly like the 20th. There's other things: the town economy is whack (trinkets are a waste of money, the only upgrade item that matters is deeds), bleed/blight become crap as the game goes on yet the game acts like it's still viable with high physical resist enemies, a lot of the trait/quirk mechanics are poorly explained, the classes aren't balanced well but you're stuck with what you randomly get. tl:dr- Too much grind, not enough sense of advancement
This is one of the most gorgeous platformers ever made. If you're getting this for anything, it's the graphics. Too many shortcomings though. It's only 3-4 hours, and 1.5 of those hours are in one of the worst sewer levels ever made. The game takes a break from being chased by hordes of zombies and helicopters to spending ONE-THIRD of the game time letting a crazy hermit run you through a boring obstacle course in the sewers going *plink plink* with a slingshot. It's like being dumped into an hour long Zelda tutorial in the middle of the game. The story is terrible. Skip every single cutscene and diary entry. So much of the gameplay hinges on taking running jumps to grab ledges, yet it's very hard to tell what's a ledge you can grab and what's just background. Feels like half the jumps are leaps of faith, quickload if you guess wrong. When the game's good, it's running through hordes of zombies and dodging helicopter strafing runs. When it's bad, it's falling through trick ledges and spending ONE-THIRD OF THE GAME in a sewer obstacle course. I would only pick it up on a $5 sale just to see how good the graphics are.
Telltale's last real adventure game before The Walking Dead turned them into an animated comic book assembly line, Back to the Future: The Game features actual puzzles! Going back and seeing actual puzzles in a Telltale game must be like a youngster going back and seeing Bill Murray doing comedies. Anyway, the puzzles are okay. I never got stuck (except the stupid dog/spraypaint puzzle) nor were they insultingly easy, just logical. The production is amazing. Scenarios that could be straight out of a sequel to the movies. The classic music and sound effects that will send nostalgia thrills. All the actors doing voices with an amazingly dead on Michael J Fox impersonation (a huge chunk of what makes BttF work is "distressed Marty" and he nails it). However, one snag is just the lack of humor. While the scenarios are great and delivered well, there just aren't any actual funny jokes in the thing. I remember laughing once at a line delivery and that's it. So in the end, absolute must buy if you're a BttF fan, and you'll get some decent puzzles as a bonus. The lack of jokes is more than made up for by the production and nostalgia.
This is going to sound incredibly petty, so feel free to downvote this and slap on an extra 3 stars for nostalgia, but it is my duty to report my nostalgia-free experience (I never played it back in the day). Very first puzzle in the game: you must find your wallet. I walked around my apartment, clicked on my pet rat's cage to pet it, picked up some mail and a screwdriver. There's my wallet under the couch! But my character cannot reach it. Despite being a fully grown man who could easily move a couch, this would take some creative puzzle solving! Use screwdriver? Nope. Use mail? Yeah didn't think that would work. Next is..uhhh...uhhhh, I'm out of items. I probably missed a hotspot to click on. *explores some more* Nope nothing. How do I get my wallet under a couch that A GROWN MAN COULD EASILY MOVE? Oh, I have to get my pet rat to fetch it since he's the one who put it there? So my GROWN MAN NOT EASILY MOVING A COUCH was a conscious decision by my character to teach a little discipline to a pet with a 3 year life expectancy? If I click on the rat cage again, THIS time I pick him up as an item? Oh, it's going to be one of THOSE adventure games where you can't pick up certain items until trigger events. With the prospect of facing an entire game of that, plus having to sit through a 5-10 second cutscene for every single click and action my character took (I don't need to WATCH him walk down the hall every time I move or ACT OUT picking up an item every time I click on one) made me lose interest. There are some adventure game conventions that just remind you why the genre died.
First off, this is not a detective game. You will not be taking copious notes trying to catch this murder suspect in a lie or story slip ups. Here is the entire game. You start with a couple 5-45 second video clips, then use those to type in keywords to make more clips show up. For some reason, this 1994 database cannot display all its files by date, but CAN let you search by audio words inside video clips. Then for some reason, it can only display the first five results. It's two layers of arbitrary limitations just to jumble the story timeline because otherwise the unbroken, chronological story is extremely boring on its own. Remember how Gone Home relied entirely on false dread in order to mask the dull story underneath? Exact same thing here. Her Story is 2015's Gone Home. Theoretically, the jumbled timeline means that you'll get a big "WHOAH!" when you eventually figure out the twist by piecing together everything you see. In reality, it usually plays out by stumbling across the big reveal extremely early (possibly half a dozen searches in) and going, "Seriously? For real? They went with that?" I thought surely they weren't going to go with something so cliche and that a 2nd twist was going to be revealed, but nope. Looking up other reviews, most people seemed to have looked up the story conclusion thinking , "It couldn't possibly be this, could it?...nope, it was." Big pass on this. Even if it was free it's not worth the 60 minutes of your life.
It gets 2 stars for looking good and that's the only positive thing to say about it. This game marked when Telltale decided to full out movie. No puzzles, no choices that matter. Just listening to dialog and quick time events. The only gameplay is clicking the mouse to keep the movie playing. ZERO choices matter in this game. Responses may or may not cause someone to silently frown at you with a "so-and-so will remember that" caption. Some choices SEEM like they would matter, like "arrest him" or "take the bribe", but ALWAYS something will immediately happen before your character carries out either choice. One segment where you're chasing 2 villains who split up and you get the choice who to follow, A or B, but it invalidates your choice and you always follow B, because it's a movie and they dont even bother to disguise the fact there. So you're left with the writing, and it's not good. First, it gets everything wrong about the Fables comic: the character personalities, the tone, everything. The comic is mostly whimsical with a modern twist. The game tries to be Chinatown meets Taken. If you don't care about the source material? The writing is still not good. The mystery is so straightforward that I swore it was a cover to a bigger twist...there was no bigger twist. You show up to a crime scene, go "hmmmm" to a lot of obvious clues, question someone who refuses to talk, then get into a pointless fist fight as an excuse for another QTE. Repeat until game ends. The mystery is one of those where you figure it out long before the characters. There is obviously a magic spell at work, the main character has an entire department of wizards at his disposal who deal with that kind of spell, yet never asks them about it. It's like watching a detective show where they have the suspect's license plate and never think to check the DMV. Check out Life is Strange instead, an example of where the genre should be heading and save us all from the dreck Telltale has become.
Long story short: this is 95% the exact...same...game as MOO2, except it's missing a lot of functionality, requires more strategic micromanagement busywork, and introduces a couple...questionable changes. When I say exact, I mean EXACT. Same planet setup, same population management, same buildings, etc. Missing? Tooltips for half the stuff. Half the races. Customization. Leaders. Boarding parties. etc. This is the area I'd forgive the most since it's early access. More strategic busywork. Pollution is back, but instead of automatically cleaning it, it builds up over time and you must shift planetary production queue to "cleanup", which works like trade goods in that it goes indefinitely. It will continue to go even after pollution is reduced to zero and it will not notify you of this. You must remember to check back. Very annoying. Another micromanagement nightmare is how population transfer now works. Remember how MOO2 had an abstracted freighter pool and you could automatically transfer population from the empire screen as long as you had the available freighter capacity? Now you must construct a "civil transport" which will subtract 1 population to give you a ship, which you must manually move to the destination planet, then select "deploy" once it reaches the planet to add one population. You must do this for every single population. Who thought this was an improvement? It's a nightmare and it can't be explained away with "early access". It's just horrible design. The new changes are questionable. Combat is now RTS, but has no functionality. Hardly any difference between participating in combat and auto resolve. There are now "star lanes" connecting stars you must follow, creating chokepoints and doing away with range. The game now simply ends after a certain number of turns with winner determined by score. So right now it's an incomplete version of MOO2 with no promising innovations in sight and a few changes for the worse.
Funnyb's review already accurately described the frustrating "listen to entire conversations over again to trigger a memory in a patient" aspect. Usually every time you do that, the patient has a flashback. It starts out as some creepy tense stuff. They're in a weird place, not sure how they got there, and have a vague sense of being chased. From there each flashback goes to earlier events, so the whole thing plays out in reverse sort of like the movie Memento. The problem is, the story gets less interesting the more of it is revealed. Starts off creepy, almost Silent Hill like, and by the end turns into some lame techno thriller plot. Another downside is the psychologist main character. He gets his own side story and it does nothing but detract from the main plot. You think maybe it's going to develop into something, or tie into the main plot somehow. Nope. It just wastes time going nowhere. So with this game you're getting a mystery that starts out strong, but requires a tedious mechanic (playback conversations) to advance it, and it ends up getting lamer as it progresses. Then the psychologist's story further mucks it up. I think I paid $10 for this in a bargain bin 5 years ago. Paying $15 for it now is insane. Wait for a sale if you're a diehard adventure fan.
