I got Starcrawlers v1.0.3 and as someone who's been hooked on dungeon crawlers since discovering dungeon master on atari ST I was looking forward to play starcrawlers. First I thought the game was missing a library, it did not launch a window at all after 30 secs or so. So I killed it, rebooted and retried a few times, looked for help on the internet, try to guess what library could be missing. Tturns out on a core i5 16GB RAM 500GB top end SSD it takes about a minute or two to open the game window... wow! Game starts, I make my character skipping through the loads of mystery meat navigation required to get an idea of what skills a class has and I jump in with the first class. I get a to select a background story which is nice. Then more mystery meat navigation and I find out that there is a lot of text which I would not mind if the font had been suited for reading which it is not. Instead of burning my eyes I skip the text and start my first mission: the tutorial. After a 30-45 seconds wait for the level to load... yup for real, I get in a room with a door and I'm looking for an obvious button, which is obvious but not clickable. After a while of randomly clicking everywhere the button is activated, and every clickable item will have a misaligned and moving click zone making the game barely playable and most item unusable (see screenshots here: https://imgur.com/a/Qm09d ) I eventually finish the tutorial, go through the first real mission unable to pick items and activate most interactive element and fight a boss who will spend 3 turns charging an attack that will do a whooping 6pts of damage to a 388 HP character. Next mission is for level 1 and I have now 2 level 2 characters but they'll be both dead before exploring half the mission due to 90% accuracy attacks missing up to 4 times in a row and enemies all focusing on the same characters fight after fight. This could have been an interesting game if it was not about random guesses of where to click.
When I find myself force quitting (alt+F4) to restart the game because it is way faster than watching my character getting killed painfully slowly and having to wait (on a core i5 with 16 GB RAM and a 500GB SSD) for the ending animation to load that I cannot skip and then waiting again for the second part to load and play it is usually not a good sign. When a wrong dialog choice can lead to being killed by any character this is not funny. So this game is about struggling with the interface, you'll find yourself zooming out to try to see the whole scene and zooming in to be able to see and click on the various game element. The only way to have a chance in this game is by running around which is double clicking where to go, but depending on the zoom level some click do not register and some register at the wrong place. My kid is dying and I have 4 hours to give the medicine that I have in my inventory to my wife that I can see in her room but it is impossible to interact with her while she's in her room and she did not leave until time and kid were expired. At times you have to knock at doors to be able to talk to tenants but the wrong tenant will come to the door and each time he/she will come so slow that you have enough time to run to the basement pass a couple phone calls and run to the street to buy some stuff from the black market vendor then run to the pot to collect blackmail money before the tenant gets to its door. Localized translation is approximate at places and I found no option to switch to english. Also this game drains my laptop battery about 3-4x times faster than usual for no apparent reason. I did put 3 stars because you can actually endure the game and finish it, though I recommend buying something else, like papers please which has a similar atmosphere but is a good game.
Having played and enjoyed kingdom of loathing a lot, I was eager to give my money for west of loathing. I was not disappointed, the game is well rounded, well designed, funny and meant to be replayed. I found the game easy and lacking a challenge on the default setting and recommend activating the hard mode. While at it also disable the auto-level mechanism and enable the walking funny when you get it. West of loathing reuses some of kingdom of loathing identity but in a far west setting and designed for a larger audience. The story is well written with much humor (though less than KoL) and has several plots you can explore or not. WoL like KoL has his share of clever references all along the story with much attention to detail. WoL offers a rich world with a lot of encounters, places, items, quests and the downside is that you can lose track of what and where, and sometimes get lost in your inventory. Other than that there is not much downside to this game. The game worked for me and I enjoyed the immersive story(ies) as I felt a connection and caring about the various characters met along the game. I definitely recommend it to everyone as long as you are not reluctant to read as this game has a lot of text to read to tell you its stories.
I bought this game based on the first page reviews and average ratings. I play on linux and this game is a huge disappointment. First It is a flash game, had I known that I would have kept away from wasting my money on this. So this games is based on an outdated flash version, none of the keys work, it does not stay in fullscreen, it is hard to decipher (fonts are too small), among a bunch of others issues. Then it will pop the flash window asking for more storage space, and it will ask for flash cookies. At that point I quit the game and will not return to it ever. Too bad, this could have been an interesting game
Punch Club is a management game with a background story. Carefully choose daily actions to balance between income, rest, training in order to build skills and stats to become a better fighter and advancing the story line as you go. Choose your skill tree wisely as this will determine your success in combat. Focus on one main stat and a secondary one, do not attempt to raise all three. Sadly the interface falls a bit short and is not exactly appropriate for this kind of gameplay: the buttons you have to click are moving around from one screen to the next making it impossible to just click in place, you have to move the pointer around before being able to click making the repetitive part of the game slow and annoying. No keyboard shortcuts either. There are bugs, from minor to highly annoying. Sometimes you just cannot click anything anymore, sometimes a badly initialized variable will trigger a difficult endurance fight instead of the end combat and from there you'll have a robot in every screen and every combat will turn into an endurance fight against robots. Luckily quitting and reloading would clear this bug. The gameplay evolves as the story line advances, at first you struggle to make money, by the end you have so much money that you do not need to rest anymore and indulge in loads of energy drinks instead. Some element such as maintaining the girlfriend relationship by giving gifts is very basic when it could have used a more realistic mechanism like the one with her brother (you have to chill or help with repairing his car to unlock the useful actions). Locations and characters are mostly borrowed from popular culture (TMNT, hollywood movies, etc.) a double edged sword, by borrowing too much the game lacks its own identity. Not to mention that most of the places and characters will be mostly useless throughout the game, and going there / talking again to them is a waste of time. The ending being really botched and does not do justice to the storyline
I discovered this when it was a single screen playable demo, I played it and got intrigued. I learned it had been turned into a full game and I wanted to give it a try. I have played and endured the game till the end but oh boy ! it is tedious ! This game feels amateurish done, sure it has nice visuals and an interesting concept and story but the way its done shows that the people behind the wheel lack experience in game design. Lacking in interface and controls, the random element is omnipresent and at times it feels winning or losing is more a matter of chance than anything. No way to skip the dialogues during intro (you can click to skip to the next dialogue, there are a lot of dialogues so be prepared to click a lot, you can skip some cutscenes by going back to the menu and selecting skip cutscenes only to get another cutscenes). This turned the game in a tedious repetitive mindless experience preventing any form of immersion in the story which sadly is not bad. The game is mostly a succession of stages made of one screen where your character is put into a situation where you have to interact by clicking to open menus and clicking to open sub menus and clicking to select an action (no shortkeys). Your first steps will be figuring out what each action does what. Each mistake means you will lose and have to start again. By the time you have figured out what does what, you have to choose what action to do next according to the current state of the game usually based on visual cues and body language. Once a stage is won you get stats on other players choices and you could retry it to do it differently but I was so fed up with the repetitive and random death that I would not replay any stage to explore this missed opportunity at replayability. The last boss battle is about hoping he will not throw series of his move that you have to counter by moving back. In the end it feels like the game has played me and that I wasted a lot of time due to design flaws.
