This game seems to deliver exactly as advertised. While playing, I routinely stopped to tell people, "I'm a badger!" I quickly devolved into saying, "I'm a horrible mother badger...." Nature picked off my young one at a time and I still don't know if there was anything I could have done to prevent it. Was it a no-win scenario? Hmm. The controls are simple. No gamepads here, just classic WASD. It starts you off in a cave to fumble around and learn what to do. Occasional pictures pop up as you go to point how to get food -- your badger instincts. I really don't want to go into detail of the gameplay since discovering it adds to the experience. It was quite fulfilling. The game gave a brief experience of thinking like a small woodland creature. Well, more a medium woodland creature I guess. There were several nice touches throughout. I'm tempted to play through again to see if I can figure out a way to get past those obstacles that *murdered my babies* the first time. I did take off one star because it seemed short and I wanted to interact with the cubs more. $9 seems reasonable for a starting price. I could see it settling down to $3 later. Great example of a pleasant indie game here.
I played this game after playing the masterpieces that were the Planescape: Torment and Baldur's Gate games. The combat and feel of the game are on par with those in classic Black Isle fashion, but there's a problem.. There's no character development! You have to make up your own party for this game. There is no banter between party members. There's no cute scottish-sounding tiefling girl to flirt with. There's no space hamster. They took all the fanfare reward for progression out of the game! Instead it's just a mix of killing mobs, looting corpses, and occasionally returning back to the city to sell stuff and get pointed to the next level full of mobs. So it's the perfect game if you love the strategy of luring people in to your party and beating them up. It's not good if you like character development. I don't recall it being open-ended either. Reading the book doesn't help the experience because that just makes the lack of characters hurt even more. I give it a 3rd star for good music. I will sometimes listen to the soundtrack, it's good.
I got this game back when it was brand new after following the development with great interest. I'd never heard of World of Darkness at the time. As such, most of the dialog about the politics of the vampire world went over my head with the first playthrough. I did a bit better on the 2nd. By the end of the 4th playthrough, I had finally memorized the groups. It's a linear game. There are no sidequests. You can go wherever you want, but advancing the storyline requires you to just follow the quest log. There are shops to buy arms and armor. You get to upgrade skills as you go. There is a ready to go multiplayer mode for those who want to play their own custom tabletop feeling game, but I never got into it. The setting of the game starts during the crusades and jumps forward to the new millennium. The storyline associated with the jump is amazing! It's fun to see the character try to adapt to the new situation as well. I've read several World of Darkness books since playing this game, and I must say, this one has the best plot and main character by far. The folks saying "Bloodlines is better" have some merit. The graphics in Bloodlines is better. The quest variety is better. The plot and character development though, this one wins without contest. Buy this game. Play it. Play it again years later and still enjoy it.
I've played through most of the scenarios now and think this game is definitely worth the $10. The place where this game truly shines is in the trading system. There are a couple types of towns in the game (colonial and governor) which are dependent on each other for goods. This gives you definite trading routes that almost always give you profit, and they aren't hard to spot. The most pleasant part of the trading though is when you don't have to do it: once your captain reaches a high enough experience level, you can send him off to do trading while you go do something else with another convoy. This is implemented really nicely too, only requiring you to tell the guy what towns to visit in his trading circle. Another nice feature is the ability to build businesses. There is nothing really novel here. If you impress the viceroys, you can even manage your own town. This is where building your own businesses really picks up. You're the only one who can build in this town, so you have a monopoly on everything. This also means you have to supply the town with all the goods they need, which can be a bother. But if you have a captain or two going around on an automatic trade route, he'll take care of it for you! You can also give convoys to different governments and pirates. This activates AI control over them, changing the political climate of the region noticeably. I think its really unique to be able to give birth to a new AI player in the game, and wish it'd get more attention. But maybe that's just me wishing to heck to have an AI ally in a few RTS games where I get stuck mopping up... Unfortunately, the ship combat could use some work in the game. It isn't too tough to convert your ships into warships by adding cannons and boarding parties. It takes too much coin for the starting player, but it can be very lucrative to capture and sell goods. The ship combat can be VERY hard if you don't have the difficulty setting turned down. You can only take one ship into battle at a time, while the computer can bring in 5. Ugh. Further, attacking a town is a pain because the harbor cannons have to be taken down. On cannon is enough to take down the best warship, and again, it's usually 5 on 1. To make this even more annoying, you CAN'T LOWER YOUR SAILS!! Your ship goes flying by the cannon, and you only get off a couple shots before you have to turn around. Meanwhile, the cannon (and his buddies) get half a dozen. So that's it. 5 stars for a trading game with swell AI features. -1 star for annoyingly hard combat.
