The outline of a very emjoyable game is here, but at present it lacks a lot of polish. I still managed to get my money's worth of fun out of it in its current state though. As it is its really more like a tech demo than a game, you go play around with combat, check out some of the randomly created systems and missions. After that the game lost me. Currently everything is randomly generated which sorta makes everything feel the same. It takes too long to upgrade anything, which kinda makes sense from a balance perspective but that means i need to spend tens of hours grinding on randomly generated ground missions/space incursions/events/asteroid fields sp that i can move onto more randomly created content. At this stage there isn't really a reason to keep playing like a story or an overarching mission or a galaxy to conquer or business empire to build. I've rated it partially based on expectations as if this were a fully released game this would not be a good product. That said the developer appears to be working hard on it with lots of updates. If everything is implemented well going forward I'm hopeful that when it is released i may be able to upgrade my rating to five stars.
I'm bored in quarantine so im going through and reviewing old games. Basically the title. The "puzzles" have been so stripped down that there is not really any gameplay. The art is cute and well done. Professional voice acting is good. The writing is meh. The writing is what i find most offensive because it is pretty obvious that Double Fine think they are incredibly witty, so much so that they think no one will notice that there isnt actually a game here but a mediocre cartoon. I'm a big fan of Yahtzee Croshaw and very much agree that the most importatnt thing in a video game is the primary gameplay loop, or what the player is doing from moment to moment. In classic adventure games this consists of solving puzzles. In my opinion the puzzles are not any good, therefore this isn't a good game. I could basically post this review for about every Double fine game. even games that are quite good like psychonauts. They have really neat and cute, game worlds and/or mechanics but have failed to put the work in to make the primary gameplay as good as it needs to or should be. If i had to guess i would say there is a lack of discipline at the top of the company. They care more about the fun quirky creativity than they do about actually making a good playable game.
Disco Elysium is a unique RPG that rises above its simplicity and flaws due to its excellent writing. It is one of the best video games I have played. One possible negative is the gameplay is simplistic. The gameplay mostly takes place in text boxes from which you make decisions and pass(or fail) skill checks. Your decisions on where to assign skill points affects your odds of passing said checks and other actions you may have performed can also improve or hinder your odds, but once a check is made you simply pass or fail based entirely on RNG. So if you were willing to save scum you could pass all checks without putting any points into improving skills. Apparently on launch it was a buggy mess. The developers have worked many of those bugs out so that by the time i got it I didn't run into any bugs that were any more than just annoying. Even still the game is riddled with typos and at best questionable decisions(are quests and repeatable checks that i can’t actually access anymore supposed to still show on my map?). Also, the game is actually quite small. It has a decent play time but that is spent running back and forth over the same ground talking to a relatively small number of people. All of this only adds up to a minor annoyance for me however as the writing is so f**** good. The setting and characters are well fleshed out, the people feel like real people Martinaise feels like a real town. At one point I failed a skill check that put Kim, my partner, in danger and i felt real fear for this fictional character in a way that I never have before in a game. Also the level of freedom is stunning. You can choose to be a psychopath hedonist that manipulates everyone around him, simply a drunk loser, a straight and narrow by the book cop, a communist fundamentalist, or any crazy combination of these. The game manages to make different thoughts and actions available based on how you are playing your character so that all of this feels incredibly meaningful.
