Deadfire is a pretty good game. I like the pirate setting and the turn-based mode. There are some interesting characters too. Overall the game feels a little flat/bland however. It could use some stronger emotions and stronger flavor. (Hard to explain.) There are a few irritating things: 1. loading times between areas are super long 2. the ship combat is strange and simplistic, so I simply boarded every vessel I came across instead
I bought the game on Steam several years ago, and have spent a few dozen or so hours playing the game. Here are a few (mostly negative) observations. 1. The ground combat is slow-ish and involves a lot of pixel hunting. 2. There is no movement grid on the ground, so you will frequently end up placing a character in a weird spot with no way to "undo" the move. 3. Space travel is restricted to a two-dimensional plane. I don't see the point of why they bothered creating 3D polygonal ship/planet/solar system models when they could have just made space travel 2D completely. 4. I was hoping for (and felt like I was promised) space travel/combat more like the Homeworld or Star Wolves series. I am disappoint. 5. There is a lot of gear with similar stats, so it sometimes feels like there is no point having all these choices. It just makes the game more tedious. AFAIK, there are also no bonuses for collecting gear in the same complete "set" (but I may be wrong). That is all.
I can't recommend this game enough! It feels very comfortable after having played Fallout 1 & 2 and similar games since then. I thought the translation was very well done. I don't get why people are complaining. The game feels very polished to me. There are a lot of quality of life improvements over F1 and F2 that I appreciate. The first 10 or so hours are tough I admit, but you really need to stick with it. I love this game!
There's nothing really bad about this game... ...except the long loading times. Reloading is not a problem in a tactical game like this, but there is a whole lot of it, and the loading times are really long. I had to ragequit. I no longer have interest in completing this game.
I bought this game a long time ago when it was released on disc along with the JA2 source code. The maps in this expansion are really great! I think they are better than vanilla JA2. If you want to have a lot of fun, play the JA2 1.13 mod using this expansion's maps!
This is a solid game. There are mainly two flaws IMO. First, you only control 4 characters in combat. I don't know why this has turned into such a trend (D:OS, KotC, TToN, Blackguards, SRR), but it needs to stop! 6 characters is the ideal number for player-controlled parties. You can't customize you characters to the same degree if there are only 4 of them. Having 6 characters used to be the standard for CRPGs. I don't know this has changed! (Though I suppose it's better than JRPGs that limit you to 3 characters...) Secondly, the GUI is not that great. You can't see your characters' attributes from within the shelter. The characters have to be in your party, and you need to be traveling in order to see the stats. Also, in the shelter, you can only see your characters' skills from the job board -- not when outfitting them with gear. So you have to remember which characters are best in combat, and whether their skill in ranged combat is higher than melee. Lastly, when in the shelter, you can't see how much HP your characters have until you've built the infirmary. This is not well-designed IMO. Otherwise the game is really great! Since I played the Reanimated version, the bugs must all have been squashed. (The game only crashed once.) So, that's a big plus!
I like pretty much everything about this game. However, I think the developers went overboard with skill checks and "choices & consequences". I don't think it would have hurt the game to be a little more linear. Instead, I spend a lot of my time watching loading screens following choices whose consequences were a little opaque. You really can't play and enjoy this game without a walkthrough, especially in the beginning.
