I come from a background of dwarf fortress, Age of Empires, & lots more so the budget graphics don't worry me. I only count gameplay in such titles. That said this relaxed medievil management game fails on a number of fronts in it's current release. You cannot prioritize food, so workers will mine stone till they either leave from unhappiness or die; causing a more passive version of Dwarf Fortresses tantrum spiral. It sorely needs sliders for such things as world gen size (which as it is; is fixed), more control over worldgen, No. of work slots for buildings available. There also doesn't seem to be upgrades for lumber yards, and while you can turn buildings off; you can't for with the 5 worker hog treasury that will kill your flegling fort just as an example. Fires break out randomly; while I accept they posed real threat in medievil times; patches of untilled dirt did not catch fire every 2 days. I don't see any reason why this title needs to be single player and it's crying out for competitive action to alleviate it's dull plodding pace (even at max speed). House upgrades are ludicrous netting +1 worker at a significant complexity cost, while you lose flexible placement. Cannot fertilize land from what I can tell, nor grow new forest tiles. Wow this is actually getting to be a pretty big list of negatives now that I stop to think about it. Clouds need more settings, they look great but they need less frequency and larger area of aversion, faster dissipation at cursor. Buildings need Isomer settings to allow mirroring. Game has some weird blueing when you zoom out (probably simulating atmosphere, but it's annoying). No tutorial, which is weird when game clearly has some pitfalls to progression. You need roads everywhere and it seems like an unnecessary design choice; that doesn't reflect the fact that peasants don't use carts or horses for goods making them mute as a house sized laneway. Considering they allow only 3 spaces away they just detract from the game.
No time warp Not like kerbal controls as in no keyboard Not enough minerals on entire planets nor combined minerals like galena or combined storage when solids (-realism) Innacurate mission risk One chance encounters for things like opening a derelict *rolls eyes. Poor explanation of modules; who knows what a biotic coating does when the thing that needs it is the lander. Nice animated gifts play when docking, but actual gameplay is no better than the GOG refused game 'infinite space: sea of stars' that arguably only differentiates itself by a more casualized focus. 2d platformer world wrap is handled by a black out for reasons I cannot fathom. Lander is so cheaply thrown into the game that they do not even bother with a turn around animation. No trivial coding effort put into customisation of ship, crew (there's 8, come on did a guy work a single weekend to make them?) No zoom out for space trajectory even with useless mathematician. Ship only has inertia in space screen not in asteroid fields where it has dampening for no probable cause. Not rogue like as you do not have any real progression in skills or ship/'s. All module damage is random with no 'cause'. Races seem very one track and unoriginal (ferengi anyone?). No way to check stellar map without warping, and no exiting map when you find out you're at where you need to be. Paralax forefield obscures the 2d planet map at crucial moments like landing (poor design). Console controllers only a big miss when the game is obviously designed for the console market (hates key~+mouse). Ship faces cursor for movement but fires from sides conflicts with directing travel and maintaining focus on angle of gunfire. Planets can have life forms 'none' but are heavily infested with the parasitic plant species *rolls eyes. You have a refinery scientist and engineer but you cant turn mined elements into useful items. Mined Elements seem to have arbitrary value and there is no real sense of a trading economy. Thrust is linked to hyperdrive WTF!?! Edge traverse can completely stop inertia (bug). No map but zoomed right in everywhere (for what reason? *shrugs) Things that shouldn't get expended like a tool chest are one use only :P . Tainted goods cannot be sold for cred even though the race has no way of knowing and can be proven as such during customs checks. Price is horrendously high for what is a slightly upgraded browser game.
I bought this at $7AU and i still feel ripped off. A quick shell copy of redemption to cash in. They might of had big ideas when they went to make it, but if none of it seems to have come to the end product, does it even still count? I even replayed for the Malkavian story... it's the exact same story with the cookie cutter responses jumbled around a little... FAIL. I don't buy games for what developers wished they could put in them.
Lets start with the god, I guess it's art style does forgive it's low poly count for a modern game. My main issues we're that it drops sound when the window loses focus (due to a pop up). There is no windowed mode to get around this' a borderless window mode comes standard with most modern games. There is no manual saving which means if you have issues you have to get to an ill defined save point before you can do anything about it. The whole game is basically a nature grind, not really what i would call survival; survival games usually give you solid indicators for hunger & thirst (maybe even wounds). Well Shelter doesn't seem to be anywhere near in depth enough for your charges to be injured; there seems there is only death... usually by hawk. Another thing how come the few varieties of bird are basically very low fliers? Realism out the window right there. Don't get me wrong there is barely a game there and it does feel good to basically attack everything but bears, run it down and chomp it to bits; I just really hate the railroad bits where you have to follow some magical stars bull-plop; Oh and the clippings are atrociously terrible.
It follows the trend in modern game play to replace substance with more glamour. From start to finish I found the game to be simply tedious, & ultimately boring for 90% of the time. The story line ends up being what you bother playing for and quite simply if you play this game you will be rewarded by rushing through it on god mode because the narrative is too spread apart with the daily grind otherwise.
Yes after playing it on minimal sleep for 2 days straight there are some fun moments, but ultimately M&B warband dies because of the thousands of minutia it IS doing wrong. Overland Map: Autocenters (no turning off), wants you to use edge of screen mouse moves AND keyboard... why?!?, design by a retarded monkey, no easy way to locate points of interest (encyclopedia sans region image), no speedup function (tedious), and site name tag issues. Combat: AI extremely dumb, obvious rock paper scizzors but range is piss weak, enemy that pop in and out of existence. combat placed along invsible border :P, clippings, hitbox issues, floaty unintuitive controls, combat favours ai's cheat of more units then leadership would allow, said cheat means crap autocombat meaning combat & bandits tedious, terrain strategy limited to town combat, troops ignoring commands, commands boil down to fuck around or go kill shit, AI archers shoot at ranges you simply cannot 'arc' the shot over reliably (essentially making them all hawkeye), no weapon hotkey, & because there are no 'units' only 'unit' mounted heroes rush doom themselves. side note: combat needs better blood then 'red tan' Factions: No way to improve standing as warlord (send an emissary but doesn't improve relations), frequent quest is to ruin relations with everybody, quest timeout too short (creates negative influence), quests upon quest meaning a constant loss of standing (respond to marshall while siegeing :P); speaking of siegeing 100 days food supply GTFO (fact MOST often in history castle weren't breached but starved out), seeming i vote for me fief allocation system, little really to do (do you have a random quest for my +1 inf), and diminished 'ronin' army recruits based on faction hate wtf do you mean my moneys not good here?!? Oh and courtesan call from provinces your at war with :P (yeah baby sure i'll come seige the capital to say hi do you like the 5 peices of poetry in existence). Personalization: Obtruse/bland
You don't know what I mean? Go play Spaceforce Rogue Universe I played an entire day in sandbox mode on easy, because hey I just wanted to be an asteroid miner so cut me some slack. The game doesn't come across very clear on the 'How' of doing things as it seems content to just throw you an encyclopedia that revolves around numbering dots. The interface is plain terrible for figuring out whats going on & Cluttered. I still don't know where my shield strength is suppose to be and that should not take an encyclopedia pop up to enlighten you in a space combat game. Did i mention space is cramped? The map tiny as it is in what 64x64 hexes is LITTERED with worm holes and T-Gates. That being the case you'd think why would anyone ever travel in the depths of space; but do so and over about 20 hexes you will find yourself with nary a moments peace. In fact space seems more populated than any of the planets in the game as there never seems to be traffic to and from their nearest station. You try to mine an asteroid bam 3 hostile ships closing on your position before you've even got a quarter of it's health down. I don't know if ships are meant to look huge or the weapons meant to be weak, but I could piss out a stream of justice further than weapons in this game shoot. Because of the floaty controls combat tends to be a warp in park ship in neutral and hope your strong enough, If not engage engine plus cloak & don't worry about it. Ship upgrades aren't engaging: A list of different names with energy this and crit dam that, but it's hard to care when it's just so generic looking and you have an exhorbitantly priced actual cargo ship to a)find & b)sell an entire stations worth of kidneys for. Finding a ship yard is almost impossible and they seem to hold only 1 ship, funny when there seems to be an almost limitless amount of stations around (albiet most of them hostile). You also start as the arch nemesis to entire galactic empires, go figure. Trust me buy spaceforce
The original exile series was better. Mainly because of the amount of customization. the whole series by Spiderweb Software has gone down from there & is the Epitome of lazy programming. If I wanted a graphic novel where I can make a few railroaded choices along the line I'd buy a choose your own adventure book.
You are a sir/madam being hunted essentially by gentleman killbots. Most of the country seems quite open and barren. If you one shot kill 'killbots' you can see they were cheating because they were hunting with a broken rifle all too often for them to of ever posed a serious threat. I don't care how much you stack the odds in favour of them 'ye olde game designer', even going so far as to have them anticipate getting blown away and as such only carrying 2 bullets on their person, but to reward effort & risk with arbitrary negation of the reward in order to fudge the books on difficulty is simply not on.
