Completely broken, looking for Steam AppId. Go buy on Steam, not here
Considering how unusable Windows 10/11 are on older hardware, and the fact Windows 7 can support anything Windows 8 can do, the hardcoded refusal of the game to run on the legacy system is inexcusable. My bet guess is the devs accepted some M$ payoff to put it in. Disappointing
Leaving bugs aside for now. There's a lot to this game, I'll try to unpack my thoughts after finishing nearly everything and 100 hours of play. It's fun running around, hacking and customising your character. If you stick to moving between the objective markers on your map, it feels pretty satisfying. Though outside that, NC is uninteractable with. The writing is pretty poor. Characters feel one dimensional, and/or emotionless. There are one or two exceptions, but it's not great. As someone who pores over entries in terminals in Fallout, etc, the equivalent here were huge blocks of text and I quickly stopped reading them. The driving is bad. It has the issue that I am not using a mechanical keyboard, so the throttle is always full on, but the gps window is too small to make the turns, the cars all handle pretty poorly and the driver AI is bad. Not to mention the horrible pop in you get with cars appearing from nowhere at high speeds and 2D sprites of traffic fading like a mirage making it hard to plan where to position yourself. The gunplay is okay. It's servicable. headshots are satisfying. The enemy AI is the standard stand and shoot dumb AI in many games. Hacking is fun when it works, but I'm pretty sure it's a little buggy at the moment and will get better. Most of the time avoiding combat is more fun than engaging. Leveling is pretty good, there are a decent amount of options, though I feel too much of the game requires a high body stat. Conversation options are lazy, uninspired and have almost no real choice. Rarely does anything your character says matter at all. The story is okay, kinda short and a bit unsatisfying, but the main issue with it are the cutscenes. They are just bad, feeling like a long slog and a waste of your time as they make you slowly walk in an empty hallway or listen to a boring, unskippable monologue. I had fun, but I love this setting, if I didn't, I'm not sure I would have invested as much time as I have.
It's not a BAD game, just done so much better in other games. 0 progression between runs. 0 explanation outside of the basic controls. The art is nice, there's a good variety of different guns. Actually, far too much variety. Most are useless or some minor variation on another gun. Cover is kind of cool, but often missing when you actually need it. The entire game kind of feels like I'm just rolling dice to see if I have a good run. Very little of what I do seems to actually matter outside of not dying. Wouldn't reccommend unless you're just looking for a mindless bullet hell game or the art style or puns really grab you. Try Nuclear Throne or Starward Rogue instead.
So as the title says, this game is great. A kind of more open exploration version of Darkest Dungeon with more generous loot, a different, imo, more interesting combat system and no mental stress mechanic. The balance is good and the game is a lot of fun to play, so definitely worth a go if the issues below aren't deal breakers for you. I'm playing on Windows 7 64bit and the game crashes every time I alt tab or it loses focus for any reason. Autosaves are reasonably frequent and you can also manually save, so not too much of an issue unless you need to alt tab a lot or are used to watching Netflix whilst playing (like me :P). Workaround I use is to save and quit instead of alt+tab. The learning curve is a bit steep. A LOT of game terms aren't really explained (off the top of my head; recycling, focus and what the stats do is not obvious to a new player and explanations are hard to come by). In addition, some item effects use a keyword that might not be obvious to a new player and they're not explained. Honestly, apart from those minor niggles, I'm having a blast and would recommend people pick this game up.
Pros: -Good music -Good voice acting -Great art. -Some really great ideas ruined by strange balancing issues and complete lack of informed choices. Cons: -You get one action per character. So does the enemy, meaning they are pretty much just as lethal throughout a battle. This sucks because your characters have long term penalties for dying in battle whereas your enemies don't -Spell cards don't really get better as you go, the more powerful cards can't be cast til later in battles, but also get terrible drawbacks making them worse. -Travel choices are meaningless if not downright misleading. The most egregious being the first one you make, which has a 1 in 3 chance of you losing about 1/3 of your precious strixes. -It's too easy to lose the whole game if you make some unlucky non-choices. My first playthrough I lost the game after about an hour due to not getting any strixes (I never rested and didn't lose any on the first choce) meaning all my characters were useless in combat and quickly died. -Combat is incredibly swingy with some enemies having massive range and damage, some even ignoring defense. -Some characters will die in the story, without any obvious way to save them, which can result in you losing the character you invested the most time into levelling up. Conclusion: Overall I'd avoid unless you're a big Banner Saga fan and are looking for a game with similar flavour and are willing to put up with Ash's shorcomings
I'm going to start off with the good. The idea behind the combat abilities are good. The spell cards you start off with are well balanced and thought out. The world setting is interesting and immersive. The strix mechanic is cool, much like a food mechanic in other games and really makes you think about when to heal your wounds and when to press on. The art and soundtrack are really good and the voiceovers are a nice touch. Now onto the bad. The combat, which holds such promise, is completely undermined by a few mechanics. Each unit gets a turn, so if you focus down enemies, the remaining enemy units start acting more often. You can't use the same tactics against them, because allowing a unit to be reduced to 0 health means they'll gain a severe wound, reducing their combat effectiveness and costing you precious strixes to heal. More powerful spell cards have too many drawbacks to be useful (even though you need to wait more turns to use more powerful cards, many have large drawbacks in addition to this). The battles are often very swingy. Some enemies do massive damage at long range. Some even ignore your defense. Nearly all have spell cards that are equal or better than anything you can have, despite the lore painting them as rare. The travel is poorly done. You are offered blind choices. An example; one of the 3 paths you can take on the first travel choice you get in the game results in you losing about 1/3 of your strixes. Another fault is, if you make unlucky choices, you can run out of strixes. On my first playthrough, this happened to me and maybe an hour into the game all my characters were at death's door and I had to start all over again. Finally the conversations are pretty stilted and can be hard to follow who you are selecting choices for. Also suffers from the uninformed choices of the travel. Meaning you can select to wrong option and lose morale with a character, reducing their stats by 10%. All in all, I'd avoid unless you're a big Banner Saga fan.
