I tried this with both mouse and keyboard and an xbox controller. No matter what control scheme I tried, the camera control is awful. NPC's can easily outmaneuver you and shoot at you with good accuracy, while your falcon turns like a boat and you are desperately fighting the camera to keep your target locked and return fire. I don't know why the camera is so bad. It is worse than N64 camera control. You can fly okay when you're not fighting but as soon as you lock a target, the camera just goes spastic. I tried over and over, searched for different settings to turn off, and nothing seemed to work. The camera control is worse than poop. I want to use more harsh language here, but I don't want my review to get removed. Like I've played Mario 64, Pilotwings 64, Goldeneye, Star Fox 64. I can deal with the camera clipping through a wall, or getting shoved up against you inside a tight corridor. No problem. But this? The camera in Falconeer seems like it's trying to sabotage you when you lock on to an enemy, and turn away at random directions instead of follow the target. I can't deal with it. No. I just can't. I have better things to do with my time than get this frustrated. Also the mouse and keyboard controls only give you WASD camera, and mouse to turn the falcon. I think if I could control the camera with the mouse, and not have it do anything except stay fixed the direction I look with the mouse, it might be playable. But I think the reason the developer only uses buttons for camera control is because he did make the camera fight against you, and I think using buttons to move the camera is deliberately janky to maximize the frustration. So yeah if you don't like the sound of that, just skip this. I got it on sale 80% off, and I'm pursuing a refund. I don't think this is worth even 80% off.
I loved Human Revolution, and that game was rock solid. Mankind Divided seems to have a decent story, I liked the cinematics, but the mouse control in this game is all screwed up. The sensitivity is way way too high when you're exploring and you have to crank it down close to 0 to control Alex. But wait until you get in a firefight, and then it decreases the sensitivity so you turn like a slug and adds mouse acceleration so your movements become erratic and jerky. Why would they do this? I have no idea. But it makes the game unplayable. How they could nail every other aspect of the game but absolutely ruin a core mechanic to all FPS is beyond me. The one thing you need to get right is mouse movement, and they ruined it. Why?
The game is all about crushing RNG. I wasted my whole weekend playing game after game and getting nowhere. Apparently you can make your god stronger by winning but that seems impossible. Something as simple as village placement is absurd and dependent on resource nodes randomly distributed on the map. You need wood, coal, and good crafting materials. Not the low quality stuff, either. You want to scout for good stuff, but then you die long before finding a good spot. You only get one village so you have to make it count. The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm glas I got it on sale but I begrudge even the pittance I paid for it.
I'm glad I got it on sale and IMO it's worth exactly the $4 I paid for it. While it was fun unlocking all the different empires you can play as, the game has little replay value because if you want to play at higher difficulties the AI doesn't play by the same rules that you do. It will spam units with little to no economy while you struggle to gather resources for your army. It's so bad that it's incredibly obvious what's going on and it makes me wonder "Why am I doing this? Why am I playing this horrible game?" If the higher difficulties had smarter AI rather than bonus resources I might enjoy it more. But as it is I've unlocked everything and now I'm done with it.
I've been pre-ordering Harebrained Scheme's games for a while now. Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong. I loved them all and they were 5-star games with great gameplay and story. I thought this would be awesome too. Unfortunately Battletech is just really slow-paced and the difficulty is crushing. I love turn based games, and beat each of the shadowrun games and enjoyed the entire experience. But you spend way too much time watching the enemy take their turns in Battletech. The animations are far too long, and it's just frustrating waiting for your turn to come around. I rarely felt frustrated in SRR (and never this much) so that surprised me. Then the difficulty. I gave up when you rescuse the princess from the pirate base on some moon (one of the first story missions) because it was just ridiculous. It was described as a low difficulty mission, and the boss pirate mech was described as being made of junk. The junk pirate boss destroyed two of my mediums, and tore the arms off my remaining medium. My last medium mech got into a kicking fight with the boss after this because she had lost her arms too. The repair bill, combined with waiting for repairs, completely sucked up the million dollar payout and then some, leaving me with little money left and I eventually hit bankruptcy and lost the game. If that was an easy battle, I dread what hard ones would be like. I also question the repair costs, medical bay downtime, and repair downtime. I just don't think it's balanced well at all. Basically it's not fun to play, and I regret buying this ahead of time. I did so based on my previous good experiences with games by HBS, but won't be doing that again.
I've been pre-ordering Harebrained Scheme's games for a while now. Shadowrun Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong. I loved them all and they were 5-star games with great gameplay and story. I thought this would be awesome too. Unfortunately Battletech is just really slow-paced and the difficulty is crushing. I love turn based games, and beat each of the shadowrun games and enjoyed the entire experience. But you spend way too much time watching the enemy take their turns in Battletech. The animations are far too long, and it's just frustrating waiting for your turn to come around. I rarely felt frustrated in SRR (and never this much) so that surprised me. Then the difficulty. I gave up when you rescuse the princess from the pirate base on some moon (one of the first story missions) because it was just ridiculous. It was described as a low difficulty mission, and the boss pirate mech was described as being made of junk. The junk pirate boss destroyed two of my mediums, and tore the arms off my remaining medium. My last medium mech got into a kicking fight with the boss after this because she had lost her arms too. The repair bill, combined with waiting for repairs, completely sucked up the million dollar payout and then some, leaving me with little money left and I eventually hit bankruptcy and lost the game. If that was an easy battle, I dread what hard ones would be like. I also question the repair costs, medical bay downtime, and repair downtime. I just don't think it's balanced well at all. Basically it's not fun to play, and I regret buying this ahead of time. I did so based on my previous good experiences with games by HBS, but won't be doing that again.
I like that it's cyberpunk and it has a great atmosphere. I don't like that some of the most interesting characters in the game aren't developed at all by the end of the novel and you're left with a lot of questions. There's a hologram that the main character can only see that shows up at odd times and teases her. You never learn who it is or why they're there. There's a terrorist attack on a bank that one of your customers was involved in. It's never really explained who carried out the attack or why. All you learn is that some servers there were hacked and that there was a huge data leak. That's it. No further development. There's messages being sent to Lilim throughout the city and they're all acting odd and glitching out during this time. It all blows over like nothing happened and it's not explained what the messages were about. The plot focuses on the main character's love life. She's a bisexual and broke up with a girlfriend years ago. The game ends when her ex's sister shows up to talk with you and you reconcile. This makes the game kind of shallow. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in this world but the writer seemed to be focused on making a dystopian future where everyone is gay or bisexual or dates sex robots. All that other interesting stuff be damned. This makes the whole game disappointing. It looks like this studio had a great team except for the writer. If you're going to make a visual novel, you first need a good writer.
I've been playing 4x space strategy games for a long time. MoO2, MoO3, Sword of the Stars, Galactic Civilizations, Space Empires IV and V, and Endless Space to name a few. I've enjoyed them all. I just can't get into Distant Worlds. The UI is horrid. Even more horrid than the UI in MoO3, and that's saying something. With difficulty I figured out MoO3 and came to enjoy it. Distant Worlds is on a whole different level of ugliness. I just can't. I'm sorry. Another gripe: you can't customize your race. That's a cornerstone of 4x. You get a big pool of traits to pick from and cobble together your own super-powered species of awesomeness and conquer the galaxy with it. You can't do that here. You only pick prebuilt races and the victory conditions are odd. "Colonize the 3 largest swamp planets in the galaxy". Uhm... okay. Apparently some people like it, but I don't.
The game is short, I finished it in just under 3 hours. However I enjoyed the experience and I appreciate that the devs were trying something new. I think the price is a little steep for a 3 hour game, but I got a bunch of other games for free when I bought it, and the pack of games was worth the price. There is literally no combat. This isn't a shooter. It's a pure exploration experience. So if your looking for action look elsewhere. It was relaxing to play for the most part (there were a couple jump scares, but nothing major).
I love cyberpunk games, but the difficulty curve on Dex is too steep. I just never had enough money or enough skill points to effectively fight bad guys or finish matrix runs. If you're a masochist maybe you will appreciate it more. I guess I need a cakewalk mode where I can just enjoy the story.
