This is a great little indy game using an XCOM inspired formula for a dystopian reality TV romp. Each Episode of the show (episodes being the maps you play) is hand crafted and well made. Of course this means that there is nothing random. Once you have played through the game, you have likely seen everything. The only thing that changes is how you interact with fans and thus what sponsors you can choose for small bonuses. But that one run will be fun. The main improvement I would have liked, would have been more named, unique enemies. A boss fight at the end of each episode with an opponent who has personality. It would have given a chance for some more, fun exposition by the TV host.
Sadly on Win10 the game becomes too dark with the brightness slider not working. It is impossible to navigate the mines at the start of the game, even with a torch. There are compatibility workarounds and directx emulation things you can do, but you have to figure out how and put the work in to make the game playable.
The game promised to be a platformer with a twist. You'd be able to seamlessly change between the cute and dark versions of the world, and use this to solve platforming puzzles. And you can! Not only that, the music changes alongside it, without missing a beat. Of course, not being young anymore, I failed to beat this game. A gazillion attempts at beating the final boss but nope.
Eric is a very well written, humorous romp through a generic fantasy and not so fantasy world packed with easter eggs, references, and general silliness. It was one of Legend's later games, where you don't have to write out everything, instead can find all the right answers through the provided prompts. Though you shouldn't read this review. As anyone in the game who wasn't raised in a convent could tell you: reading puts you to sleep.
I first played this game the week it released, back then. Due to some bug I never finished it. Around 20 years later I did. Chaos Gate is surprisingly still a fun turn based tactics game. The graphics haven't aged too well, but they do their job. Large maps, walking forward, crouching, standing up, walking... missions can get a bit longer than necessary. Soldiers level up, but besides psychic powers for your librarian, you are not involved in this. Still, the game manages to give you a sense of progression, a joy of leveling up. Somehow, it all is simply a well functioning fun game - even acknowledging the nostalgia glasses. For 40K fans, probably one of the best games the IP ever got.
The promise was a game in the XCOM/UFO genre by the creator of that genre, pushing the boundaries. What is the genre? Squad based, turn based, tactical combat to defend humanity from an alien threat. The mutant creatures from the sea - a result of a terrifying virus - was to allow for an innovative system of evolving enemies. Sadly that concept was doomed for failure. The AI could only realize one thing: the most effective enemies - the ones who don't have their arms shot off by snipers the moment the player sees them - are bullet sponges. As a result, it became evident in the backer builds, that evolution would mean randomly armed enemies with increasingly high HP and armour. As the most important system failed, the devs were forced to do two things: force the conflict between human factions to the forefront and increasingly force the player to participate in this, to increase enemy variety, and to eventually abandon the idea of smart evolution completely, instead giving the pandorans a tech tree of their own. The later is a good thing, as at least it makes the pandorans work. Sadly that decision was made late, so as other reviewers said, the terror from the sea mutants quickly become repetitive. The other thing, blowing up the faction war, creates a narrative issue. True, the factions are to a large extend incompatible, but XCOM games were never about siding with parts of humanity to fight a civil war against the rest of humanity, ignoring the alien threat. You could not save everyone. You had to make sacrifices. But that was a result of the danger of the alien threat, not because humans were slaughtering each other left and right. Many bugs have been ironed out since the backer builds and since the one year on Epic. But the game is a shell of what was promised. Innovation that didn't work out, and a story that is dragged down by incorporating it in the wrong way in the gameplay.
