No quest markers leading you by the nose, which means you're expected to comprehend hints and information given to you in-game. If it's your first playthrough and you don't want to consult a walkthrough, you'll need to make notes.
Everspace 2 is highly polished and quite possibly the best game of its genre to date. There are some light RPG elements in choosing a ship type and customising its loadout. The campaign is pretty meaty and there are a sidequests and other activities to keep you busy. After completing the story, there are challenges available which really test your skills and loadout. There's no AAA slop to be found here at all - its all preem stuff.
Encased is heavily influenced by classic CRPGs like Fallout 1 & 2, and if the aim of the developers was to create a modernised successor, they have succeeded. The ruleset by which the game determines whether you succeed or fail is fairly stat-heavy, but transparent, which I appreciate. Unlike certain CRPGs, which give you a vague indication what something does or how a perk improves your character, Encased generally gives you full information. However, it's pretty easy to cheese one's way through the game by investing maximally into a particular ability, so if you don't like cheese, you'll need a degree of self-control to avoid exploiting it. Like some of its predecessors, the game has companions, but they're not well developed and don't have their own quest chains. It seems like a feature that was added to tick a box without being properly developed. I didn't bother with them on my second playthrough. As far as production values go, graphics and art style are not photorealistic, but are nonetheless of high quality, being fully 3D-modelled. For this type of game, they are more than adequate. NPCs are generally not voice acted, but there is a narrator who is. It works well enough, and for the small studio that developed the game, it's a sensible approach. The developers faced quite a lot of controversy and backlash for some decisions they made during Early Access, one of which was accepting funding from a major publisher. From the perspective of somebody who did not participate in Early Access, I believe the backlash was not justified and the developers have delivered a very good game.
In Kenshi, the player begins as a near-useless nobody in a dangerous post-post-apocalyptic world. The goal is simply to survive and become somebody, and how you do that is up to you. Strangers can be recruited, corpses can be looted for valuables to sell, animals can be hunted for food and eventually you'll build your own stronghold (and defend it). There is a streak of black humour in the game world and lore, with several interesting ways to meet your end. Combat is physics based, with an RPG-like stats system dictating how well your characters fight, with more advanced fighting techniques unlocked as they gain in skill. It's very different to pretty much every other game out there, and works pretty well. There are a number of fairly intricate systems in the game, like detailed tracking of limb damage and amputation, and lost limbs can be replaced by prosthetic ones. I predict that Kenshi will turn out to be quite an influential game, and even if not outright copied, some of its systems will be borrowed by other game developers. Graphically, the game is not cutting edge, but the world is original and can be quite scenic in the right place at the right time of day. Kenshi 2 is now in development, and I'm very much looking forward to it.
Mechanically, the game is pretty decent in terms of the ruleset. Technically it's alright too - a bit old-fashioned technology-wise compared to CRPGs that have fully 3D engines, and the backgrounds to the maps look pretty good for the most part. I found the writing to be excrutiatingly overdone, as if the writers somehow felt compelled to write everything in some kind of flowery, simile-ridden language. The game takes itself very seriously with very serious lore. Then there's having to camp all the time to recover spells and abilities. This seems to be a growing trend in modern CRPGs, but personally I find it tiresome. It turns gameplay away from tactics and more towards resource management. My other gripe is the prissy, easily-offended bell-ends who are the player character's companions. As the player character, you have to figure out which conversation lines trigger them and which ones stroke their egos, as well as keeping them well away from other companions with whom their personality conflicts. If you don't pay attention to this, they might take a huff and leave the party for good. One of the biggest problems with this system is that the reactions of companions to particular conversation lines rarely make much sense.
It's pretty obvious that the developers are a small indie outfit without a lot of resources, but they've managed to create an excellent CRPG with a decent amount of content for the price. The graphics are serviceable to good (in places) with some weird-looking faces, and on the whole it's easy on the eyes. It is, apparently, a pretty faithful adaption of tabletop D&D 5th edition (not that I know much about that). I'm not a big fan of the D&D-style mechanics such having to rest to recover spell slots etc. but despite this I had a lot of fun with the game, especially attempting to optimise my party's equipment for the final battle. Difficulty is a bit inconsistent, with some encounters that feel like difficulty spikes and others that feel too easy. On the whole, I'd say the game has an inverted difficulty curve, and gets easier towards the end. I look forward to whatever Tactical Adventures does next - hopefully to continue the story.
Elex has the Piranha Bytes trademark inverted difficulty curve: very difficult at the beginning, but becomes rather easy once you find the OP guns that stunlock enemies. Even then, you can still get smashed in melee combat if you relent on self-discipline. The RPG rules are fairly familiar to anybody who has played a Piranha Bytes game, where stats gate use of stronger weapons. If you don't meet the requirements, you simply can't use a weapon. I'm not sure if higher stats increase damage dealt by weapons. The world is large and detailed with four distinct biomes. Exploration is worthwhile, and there are a few secret areas to find. Graphically, Elex was not spectucular when it was first released and even less so now. However, it's colourful and easy on the eyes. Voice acting is serviceable. I don't recall it crashing much, if at all, so technically it's pretty good. Whereas many games have a simplistic choice to be made near the end of the game that determines the ending, dialogue choices throughout a given playthrough of Elex are what determine the ending, by essentially shaping the personality of the main character. I don't why I enjoyed Elex so much, but I suppose it has most of what I personally enjoy in a game. As such, I recommend Elex without reservation.
The story is a simplistic tale about punishing a usurper who has taken over a throne in a coup, and I never much cared about the outcome. Missions are repetitive. Most of the time, the most viable strategy is to pack most of your squad to the gills with a high-DPS short-range weapons. Then, camp behind an obstacle and take out the bad guys as they come into view one by one. It's advisable to outfit one of your squad with multiple LRMs, so that you can counter mechs indirectly targeting you and/or knock high-threat targets, which makes them easy to finish off. Any other strategy is sub-optimal on almost all of the maps. There are a bunch of overpriced DLCs, for those who enjoy being fleeced. Given the production values and general lack of content, it's worth buying in a sale only.
Storytelling, dialogue, music and atmosphere are the major strong points of Cyberpunk 2077. Night City looks beautiful for the most part, especially at night, and for the first 20 hours of so my first playthough I didn't feel like using vehicles at all. I took my time to take in the views, get distracted by gang shooutouts and pick up side quests and activities. I should say a bit more about the dialogue and storytelling. It's superbly written, and I was really quite emotionally invested in the story. There are a lot of great characters, and the dialogue really makes them come alive. I've seen a lot of a criticism online about the endings, but personally I think such criticism is not warranted, and the endings fit the choices you make. Combat is pretty good, but the game is not a straightforward shooter; if, at low level, you wander into a high-level area of the city, you can expect to get crushed. Combat wasn't very challenging except for a couple of difficulty spikes, even on Hard difficulty. I suppose I'll have another playthrough in a year or so on Very Hard. Some systems feel unfinished; for example, NCPD: they magically appear nearby if you harm innocent civilians, but they never give chase. If you break line of sight with them, they're no threat at all. Another example: traffic does not know how to path around abandoned vehicles. I experienced a lot of minor bugs, the worst of which forced me to save, exit the game, and reload on occasion. I didn't experience a single crash, though. I encountered some amusing animation / physics bugs, such an NPC mime artist sitting on an invisible chair in the middle of a road, with another NPC using him as a chair. All in all, despite the bugs, Cyberpunk 2077 is a memorable experience, even if it does not quite live up to the stratospheric levels of hype, and I can't wait for some kind of expansion that hopefully continue's V's story.
