The man who is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theater, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes' palaces, the high priests' temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum.This- some say -confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up. ========== Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)
First half of the game is a solid, simple Zelda clone with nice graphics and some neat little gimmicks. Slowly piecing together the game's manual (most of which you can't read) makes for an interesting slow reveal, the map is packed with little secret items to scavenger-hunt, and most of the difficulty comes from anticipating boss attack patterns and timing your dodge rolls precisely (which the game is pretty unforgiving about). Unfortunately that all falls apart towards the late game, where all the mechanics you were mastering before are abandoned in favor of a sequence of dozens of 'puzzles' where you just tap in inputs with zero feedback from the game, with no idea whether nothing's happening because you did it wrong or an input missed or the sequence timed out after a second's delay or the game simply bugged out, and no recourse but to sit around and wiggle your controller at an unresponsive screen for another fifteen minutes in the hopes that something eventually happens or simply uninstall the stupid thing and go find something better to do with your time.
Well-designed game with singleplayer hampered by extremely slow progression. Once you unlock your options for stealth and support and double agents and all the assorted gimmick weapons tactical engagements are quite deep and fun, and sneaking around invisibly activating sleepers and grabbing secret documents behind guards' backs is great, but that's dozens of hours into the game and until that point it just plays like a very simplified XCom/Silent Storm. The core of the game is short, randomly generated tactical assaults where you eliminate an enemy agent/plant a bomb/grab somebody to sneak off to your secret lair and bail out as soon as anyone notices you skulking around, and you will be doing A LOT of them through the course of a campaign. While there's a good variety of maps it seems like the game only regularly uses maybe a third to half of them - you'll see a huge elaborate-looking scenario you've never seen before once, in a very short 'extract the lone agent before he dies in four turns' scenario, and then go back to raiding the same damn drug lab four times in a row. May be a better buy for the multiplayer, if you have a couple friends who are into violent noir hide-and-seek, though naturally pulling off the stealth parts is much harder against a human.
It's Master of Orion 2, down to the tech tree being nearly word-for-word identical, minus some races, the semi-plotline underpinning MOO with Orion/Antarans, and some other minor flavor. An updated MOO2 that didn't require persuading all your buddies to pull some hacker nonsense to play multiplayer woulda been incredible... but this one's singleplayer only. Real shame.
I got this on the strength of Sir, You Are Being Hunted and a handful of reviews that painted a picture of it being an atmospheric game about picking through the wreckage of a ruined world trying to unpack its mysteries. And there sort of is that, but buried under a game that's about 95% the same ten minutes of bad early-2000s shooter repeated indefinitely. Every hundred feet there's another fortress of bad robots, take your pick of the four guns in the game (each repeated a dozen times with marginally higher stats, so you can feel like you're progressing somehow) and shoot the four bad robots hanging out around the fort, who will oblige by standing right in the open a few yards away shooting back. Victory claimed, push a button to scan the spinny geometry thingy for that sector and get your snippet of vaguely ominous text, and then repeat in the next zone. For hours. The rare hints at something more interesting, where you find yourself in a maze that's quietly teleporting you around in circles or encountering something much nastier than the generic bad robots in the radioactive wreckage of an ancient spaceship, only last long enough to frustrate you when scant seconds later you're dumped back zapping them four bad robots for another hour or three. There's the core of a really fascinating game in there, but Big Robot padded the margins and played with the font size and threw in every adjective in the thesaurus to stretch it out to $20 of "fun", and in the process ruined the good thing they had.
