This retro style game is created to mimic older style point and click adventure games, but with improved 32bit graphics, and modernized audio and UI. It is refreshing to play a modern take on the older style of game, and Resonance is best described as a retro game with a modern touch. Gameplay itself is quite interesting, the story is immersive, and you feel emotionally attached to the characters. The game goes a step beyond a simple inventory system and text based dialogue by adding long term memory and short term memory mechanics. Essentially, while talking to a character you can drag a catalogued object or topic from your LTM or STM onto the dialogue menu to ask that character about said topic or object. The graphics are low res, but wonderfully done. Although they resemble retro graphics, they are more "modern" in design, have higher bit depth and contain more modern elements, such as complex animation and particles. Audio is also very good. Voice acting is believable and very well done. The soundtrack is also quite good with the exception of the "elevator music" loop in the hospital, which I believe the point of which is to wear at the players sanity level. My only complaint about the game would be how short it is. I may just be good at figuring out point and click games, but for me, it only took one day (~10h of playing) to finish the game. I have to admit that I did use a walk-through briefly at one point because I could not find where to get Moreales' will and was wandering about aimlessly for over an hour, and also to see if there were different endings. But other than that I had completed the storyline without help. Regardless, Resonance is still a great game and well worth playing. :3
[Spoilers] Cryostasis is an interesting mix of survival horror and first person shooter. But although it is an interesting game it has some flaws that ruin the experience. [Bugs] Before I start the review I want to point out that one of the biggest flaws to Cryostasis is it's tendency to crash frequently. This happens mostly around mid-game and peaks near the end. At one point the game crashed on average every 10 min, forcing me to relaunch and load the previous save-game, which quickly became quite tedious. [Compatibility options were used while running under under win7, yet it still crashed.] [Spoilers!!!!] The storyline is interesting, but very confusing. You start off the game with no idea what is happening (you literally awaken in a crevasse), then you find a note explaining that you are a meteorologist scheduled to rendezvous with a nuclear ice breaker. Once you enter the icebreaker you quickly realize that it has suffered some sort of accident as the hull and interior is badly damaged, there are no signs of the crew, and the area is frozen over. After some quick tutorial areas and some ghostly recollections/visions of the time leading up to you awakening in the crevasse, you finally find a crew member, dead and frozen solid while climbing a staircase. Freezing and near death yourself, you turn on lights and a generator, but when you go back to the staircase the crewman is gone. After this the frozen crewman appears, now a frozen undead zombie creature, chasing you with a shovel and obvious intentions. Soon after you also obtain the ability to save some of the crews life by reliving their last moments and changing events using a "mental-echo" ability, which you obtain spontaneously and for no apparent reason (until the end of the game). Throughout the whole game the sequence of events seem to stay the same. turn on lights, generators, switches, and anything which generates heat so that you can keep warm. then get attacked by frozen undead crew. It is the same thing from room to room and it gets rather tedious and repetitive. The game also uses warmth as a health bar, and getting shot does not produce any injury, but rather drains your warmth, adding yet another mystery for you to solve (why don't I bleed!?). Throughout the entire game you also have ghostly encounters and visions, as well as finding corpses and reliving the crew member's last moments to save their life. You find odd notes and photographs depicting events that happen to the ice-breaker, but some of them change to images of an old sailing ship, etc. Things keep getting stranger and stranger, and the story only becomes more unclear with every new anomaly or encounter and it is hard to place the exact details of what is happening. (you get the vague idea that you are time travelling and possibly dead or in an alternate reality though, but it is frustrating to try to piece together the puzzle from all of the random and varied events) The crew starts to not only attack you, but actually mutate. In late game you are attacked by frozen-moth-men-mutants, and other strange oddities. Creatures materialize out of thin air to attack you, and the game turns into a sort of haunted-house of anomalies, while keeping the story very vague. You slowly learn what happened to the ship by reliving the last days of the crew through visions and mental-echos, but until the very end of the game it is very hard to piece together what is happening to "YOU". The game switches between elements of zombies, ghosts, mutants, time travel, psychic abilities, survival, avoiding cold, finding heat, reliving events, strange anomalies and glowing cracks in reality, and finally what appears to be a "magical" aspect, that it becomes too confusing to be enjoyable. Only at the end when you fight "Chronos" (as in greek mythology, the god of time) do you realize that you are trying to save the ship by traveling back into the crews past using the mental-echo ability. And even then you are left to figure this out on your own as the game does not point this out. By the end you may be left with ~ a dozen different theories and speculations. This itself could have been unique, but the constant anomalies and changing themes make it very unclear exactly what is going on until the very end, and then throwing in the greek god of time ruins the mood somewhat. Basically a very unique game, but the story could have been told in a somewhat more logical manner, and the game does suffer from some degree of repetitiveness.
I'd decided to purchase this game despite the bad reviews since I had enjoyed Master of Orion 2. Bad Idea. The game focuses too much on it's hundreds of checkboxes, options, and tabs, taking most of the fun out of the gameplay. If you don't want to micro manage every single aspect of the game you can instead turn on AI to control aspects such as production. The problem with this is that the ai will usually not do what you would normally choose to do and may not act according to your chosen strategy. This also detriments gameplay in other ways since you wouldn't control production. Imagine commanding whatever fleets the AI decides to spit out. Not always a very good strategy and honestly quite annoying, especially when the AI decides to build a somewhat useless ship for no apparent reason. Unlike the previous MOO games, you cannot choose your research directly, again limitng your strategy. The game also requires so much micro management and attention to diplomatic events, that the pace of the game is unbearably slow. For example, I'd only managed to make it to turn 50 after over 2 hours into a round. The game literally can give you over a dozen messages and notifications every time you hit the "turn" button. Basically the game gives you little choice in what to do unless you manage every tiny detail. Even then your choices can be limited. Every aspect of the game interface is a pain, there are so many radio boxes and options that need to be attended to every turn that the game just isn't fun. You will be too busy micromanaging to actually play or even move forward. Get one of the newer Galactic Civilizations games or Master of Orion 2 instead. Much better control, yet more fluid gameplay in terms of management.
