The game has an original premise going for it, great atmosphere, and great visuals. What mars this review is the short story (can beat in under a week) and unoriginal, repetitive game mechanics (I'm looking at you robotic arm).
I have only one jewel CD case on my computer desk, and it is this game.
Basically a survival horror game for people too scared to play survival horror games. Instead of controlling a lone gunmen, you control a small party of four which you can freely switch between (like in Summoner 2). While a third person shooter, I’ve never known a shooter that allows active party switching. Thank god it doesn’t have the inventory management crap most party RPGs have. The game is more of a puzzler and shooter than a platformer that the Core team is famous for. While this reduces the gameplay to be linear, the puzzles are fairly challenging but intuitive such that you won’t need a game guide for most of it. Yep, no BS key fetching quests here (okay maybe one). While the opening of the game is a cake walk, latter you will find it critical how you position your party members as they will shot on sight but won’t flee. And even if you do mess up, there is no gameover screen here, your hero’s are discretely transported back to your spawn point before they die. However this doesn’t keep the game from being any more scary as it warns regen points and power will get less reliable as you go deeper. The premise is fairly simple as cyberpunk games go. Something is going bump in the basement and you are charged with figuring out what it is. You won’t be exploring high tech neon landscapes, but rather you will be doing urban exploration into the ancient yet familiar city scape. While the graphics are dated, the ambient sounds are superb, just like you are hearing a rail car passing several stories above you. Add this to the dark surroundings being pierced by your squads’ flash lights, you will feel like you going down into someone’s basement.
A great strategy game. Your tasks will range from managing the economy of your castle to defending it from invaders. The campaign/tutorial works very well in introducing the gameplay mechanisms. While the game is hard, there are a number of ways for it to go south so it never gets frustrating with bottlenecks. It’s more like keeping a train wreck from happening in slow motion. Plus the soundtrack is nice and the graphics are gorgeous in watching a tree rustle with the wind. If there is one thing I hate most though is that the moat digging AI is dumb, which makes offensive mission difficult.
Not terribly deep in gameplay, but the story and atmosphere are original and can run on systems with surprisingly low specs. It is one of those good management games that discourages you from micromanaging but encourages you to focus on the larger strategy, specifically in that your units are quite capable of defending themselves, though their position can be compromised if larger strategy isn’t working. My only compliant is the game play isn’t deeper, the tech choices are obvious, and your darwinia’s airn’t that autonomous as the game hype them up to be. Otherwise it is quite the treat.
Starts off fun. Tried to make my super base in the side of a mount (not like I have a choice). Most of the fun was in building hallways, however when I started running out of money that is when the game went to crap. So as the micro world is base building, your macro world is the “world map” where you spread your minions over the world like a dumbed down version of Risk. This is not a good macro world interface like XCom, and more time should have been put into it as money is your primary means of survival. Then the agents start coming in, but its cool. Your one henchman (one henchman) takes care of them at first, but then they start arriving on the island in groups all over it. Now you could diversify your minion base to deal better with this multiplying threat, but to do so you must “interrogate” either a civilian or a secret agent in order to gain their skill (srly, you need to interrogate a cleaning lady to learn how to clean your base). While capturing is manageable, it’s not clear how you are supposed to assign a minion to interrogate a subject, or how you are supposed to get the subject to the interrogation chair. Somehow I got it to work once but could never figure out how. After two hours I raged quit this game.
Could have been a fun concept, but your minions die far too easily. You'll find farming for souls (required to produce minions) difficult as there are few places to farm, and the one place where you can farm reliably becomes quickly repetitive and tedious (farming can result in minion loss if not done carefully). You only have 20 or so minions and are stuck with that number, and even trying to swarm an opponent will result in them all dying. Sure the game included strategy mechanics like different kinds of minions, ability to give commands, and your own ability to use magic or hack and slash, but all these extras were poorly executed. Having different kind of minions means you have to kill a particular kind of animal for each type, making you have to backtrack to really annoying levels just so you can farm more blue soul, for example. While the commands are diverse and interesting, they mostly boil down to "move here" or "attack this thing". It helps even less that a poorly executed command can result a lot of your minions dying, making you less likely to take risks in order to learn the game mechanics. The hack and slash is sort of fun if you couldn't get killed so easily (which the minions will allow if you don't send for them). The magic ability could have made up for all this if it was as easy to cast fireballs as it was in Fable, but your mana is limited and can only be recovered by scrounging for potions or sacrificing minions on an alter (which again would have been fun if farming minions wasn't so mind numbing). I also greatly dislike a game toting you as evil that still has a moral compasses system. You can choose to be a kind lord with a bunch of ugly minions while being made fun of, or you can be an evil lord where your minions are constantly dying because people attack them. Maybe having sex with your mistresses can make up for that, but make sure you save before you see the slut.
