Galaxy says I've spent 115 hours before completing Rogue Trader (with the DLC), but it feels more. I haven't played an RPG with so much content in years. And it's very good content too! In short - the game is worth it. Details below: Story and setting: Excellent. It's W40K through and through. The writing, the lore, everything indicates that the game has been made by true fans. All of the characters fit very well and have interesting backstories and personal quests. There is A LOT to read and even though I don't mind reading at all, I found myself skipping a few lines every now and then. Seriously, there are probably hundreds of thousands, if not milions lines of text in there. Gameplay: Very Good. The mechanics could be somewhat overwhelming due to the huge amount of choices you have for a character advancement - so many, in fact, that you'll probably forget what you're trying to achieve. Multiply that by 10 or so (the party members). Add tons of items with similarly varied stats and effects. You have a lot to work with and have plenty of freedom to build each character (the downside of which is that you can have two distinctively different characters who perform very similar roles during combat). The battles could be interesting, but the difficulty on Normal is very low after the first few battles - raise it as soon as Chapter 2 if you want some sort of a challenge. Visuals and sound: Very Good. The graphics are nice enough for 2024, the animations could be something from 10 years ago or pretty contemporary. The sounds are great - bolters especially. Voice acting is nigh perfect. Be ready to move the camera a lot to navigate through the surroundings. Omnissiah's stuff: Good. I haven't encountered major bugs, plenty of minor ones though. Graphic glitches every now and then. The AI does pretty dumb things and should not be expected to challenge you on its own. Overall, something like 4,5/5, but it deserves a full 5 due to the faithfulness to the universe.
Depending on what one likes, this game can be a diamond or garbage. I personally play RPGs mostly for the story and the world, asking for sufficient amount of gameplay to deserve to be called a game and not a visual novel, so in this regard Insomnia certainly shines. The lore of the world is original, the story is multi-layered and makes you want to find out what's going on, the dialogue is smart and the few notable characters that you'll be interacting with, while not really Dostoevsky-tier, have a nice (although maybe unintentional) psychological depth. 5/5 so far. The problems that cut 1.5 - 2 stars are with the tools which you have to work with to go through the story and this is normally where the fun and the interactive challenge should be injected to get the real game. While it is very clear that the devs tried hard to deliver in this department, it's equally clear that they didn't have the time, budget or both to deliver something polished. The bugs are numerous and typically of the nuisance type (I have not encountered game-breaking ones though), the AI is stupid, the combat sits on the no man's land between tactical and frustrating due to the weird controls, the journal is confusing to follow, clicking on things doesn't always result in what you expect from the first try, etc. The game does a terrible job at explaining you its core mechanics and even though you have lots of stats to deal with, you'll hardly know what each one does, except the most obvious ones like "Health". The travel is SLOW both on foot at each level and on the world map and seems to get slower when you're encumbered, fast travel of sorts is available only when you enter a given location. There's a ton of stuff to collect and you never know what is useful - normally you find out that you should not have discarded some obvious junk after you do it - so you end up like a pack mule. And many more. In short - it's worth it if you are looking for a good story and have some patience.
In case you're wondering if this is DD with a different skin, it is not. Yes, there are many similarities, yes, it's clearly inspired by the (already classic) Lovecraftian mental endurance tester and yes, it stands its ground as a separate product. Main reasons for the latter are: - Battles are less RNG-dependent and more focused on correct skill usage and combos; - Each battle is generally its own thing and your goal is to win it with minimal losses (of minions' health or surviving minions, whichever is possible). The opponents are typically both tougher and deal higher damage than your party but have exploitable weaknesses. You get to "rest" after each battle, heal the survivors and is you want - send another, healthier party with different composition to fight the next group of opponents. - Resource management is not only a mean to upgrade your camp, it's actually required to progress. You "build" your minions with parts found after the battles (and some extracted from structures in your camp) and the number of parts is finite. No parts - no minions. Moreover, you create level 1 minions by default no matter how far you have progressed and in order to make them strong enough to face the current challenges, you need brains - which are also finite. - There's an extra dimension during battles via spellcasting. Many spells are only marginally useful but with the correct usage could help turn the tide. - You're playing the bad guys who can stress their opponents, not the other way around. Arguably that's not very easy, but it's far from useless. Killing the enemies the traditional way is typically easier though. Combos of stressers and cutthroats are quite interesting. In terms of atmosphere, Iratus is nowhere near as good as DD, Iratus' voice actor can't hold a candle for the Ancestor (pun intended), but the game doesn't lack personality and you may grow fond of some of your minions... which of course usually die during the next battle. Try it out.
In case you're still wondering - yes, the game is very much like FTL. You're advancing through sectors consisting of star systems, can choose between several paths and are chased by an enemy fleet which can quickly wipe you out if you decide to take the scenery route or run out of fuel prematurely. The combat is pausable real-time with some rock-scissor-paper mechanics and arguably more chaotic than FTL but otherwise feels quite similar. You spend your resources (scrap) to upgrade ship systems, hangar and weapons, as well as for repairs and crew recruitment/replacement. Sounds quite familiar so far, right? The major difference is that this game tries to tell a story. "Tries" I believe is the most accurate word because it partially delivers in that area but it's a bit chaotic like the combat and seemingly can't decide how serious it wants to be. It's a mix between well-known universes and if you're a sci-fi fan you'll find a lot of references and recycled concepts. That's done decently enough, mind you, given the scope of the whole product, just don't expect anything really original. Some other differences from FTL are the exploration of star systems (i.e. you could have multiple encounters in each one, should you decide to spend some fuel for investigation) and the "planet events" - in the latter case you're sending a group of soldiers commanded by some of your officers to look at some point of interest on some of the planets you encounter and depending on the hazards of that planet and the officer's skills you end up either with a lot of loot or with casualties (rarely significant though, soldiers are easily replaceable). The game is definitely fun to play, even though it's not really groundbreaking in any sense. It's easier than FTL too which could be attractive or repuslive to you, depending on what you like. Recommended overall.
The game has its charm. The thing is... it's hard to tell if it's its own or just borrowed from the first two Fallout games which are more than inspiration for this one. It's obvious that the devs liked the classics a lot, so much that they forgot that they're making a new game. Replace California with some Russian wilderness, redneck and tribal names with their Slav counterparts, change some of the gear to be more Warsaw Pact but keep everything else pretty much the same... in the end some major details don't fit very well. If you've played S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or live in a former Eastern Bloc country, you've seen a painfully accurate depiction of a post-apocalyptic landscape which looks genuine for this part of the world. Compared to it, ATOM looks like a lift and shift of the old Fallouts' landscape to a should-be post-war USSR but the result is somewhere between deliberately nostalgic and forced. When it comes to the RPG part, the dialogues are a major immersion-breaker and whoever wrote them clearly skipped the most important rule when you're telling a story related to the real world - "what would a real person say or do in this situation?" You're listening the tale of a small outpost commander, surrounded by his armed men, how some thug killed his entire family in front of him and one of the responses you can choose is something like "That guy was a hero, you deserve what happened to you". Eh? You've been speaking with a guy you've never met before for 5 minutes and already talking suicidal psychopathic nonsense to him? And that's with a character who has 8/10 Intelligence... There are many such dialogue choices who're there only to blatantly show that you're either a compassionate care bare, a tough guy totally under control of his emotions or a violent lunatic and they all lack subtlety. And then there are always NPCs who're waiting to be asked how's life and what are the rumours... As for the gameplay - it's engaging enough. You've already played Fallout, right?
It's impossible to write a review which does the game justice with only 2000 characters so I'll try to do my laconic best. Most importantly, why 5 stars? Because as a RPG, the game is unique. It does not give you the regular formula or main quest to explain why you're doing stuff + side quests to increase game time and maybe improve immersion, it rather gives you a rather vague main goal and throws you into a world of mystery where there is no "correct" path to follow if you want to find out what's going on. You will not have the answer when you complete the game for the first time or at best you will only have a clue - so you need to replay it at least 2-3 more times, with different characters builds, following different problem-solving approaches and interracting with different characters (which you can't do in a single run) to get a better picture, which may yet be incomplete. And trust me, in this game the lore is not just a clumsy padding written to excuse the world's existence, it's deep and complex and you WILL want to learn more of it. There's just no other game that presents its universe in such an interesting way and that alone makes it deserve the score. Then, the actual game. Apart from the excellent writing which is enough to keep you interested, you have quite some game in there. Your character can be of the violent or talkative type but he/she can't be both. You can go through the game without fighting once but do yourself a favour and make your first character a competent fighter so you can find out how the game works and what it wants from you if you decide to go the silver tongue route - because most problems can be resolved with killing people but if you fail the peaceful solution you usually have to fight anyway. The game is designed in such a way that even with a competent fighter you may have to restart quite a few battles numerous times and if you get your poorly trained and equipped merchant into a fight, well... Try AoD. At least try it.
First of all, the game is not short. If you spend less than 25 hours with it, you're just deliberately rushing it for the sake of it - just reading the dialogues probably takes at least 20 hours. The length is fairly good for what the game has to tell and show so you have to play it like Diablo to find it "short" - but then you should ask yourself why do you play a classic RPG like hack 'n slash, that's not the point, is it? Then, it's the actual game. It's good but it's nothing epochal. The combat is interesting, more diverse and less frustrating than Pillars of Eternity. The music is... adequate. The story keeps you interested and that alone makes it good but it's not all the original or devoid of cliches as you might expect. The setting is nice and unorthodox but not fully utilized - the alleged evil which has won the war against everybody but a few stubborn factions turns to be not-so-evil, it obviously can't keep order within its own camp all the while being explicitly obsessed with establishing global order, the characters - allies and enemies - can hardly be painted black or white and your own character is allowed to be a near-saint if you choose him/her to be. Even the most "evil" decisions you can take fall more in the category of selfish and even necessary depending on the circumstances so if you're expecting to blow Alderaan just to make an example of the rebel scum, look for another game, this one won't allow you to go nowhere near as far. Should you buy the game? Probably you should, if you like classic RPGs. There is a lot to read and most of the time its worth reading it, the combats are neither too frequent, nor too scarce (just about right) and the overall experience achieves what any game aims at - to entertain. Just don't expect to have your mind blown.
I have read quite a few reviews complaining mostly about the game's unfair difficulty. Having spent plenty of time with Darkest Dungeon - enough to draw conclusions which I can call objective - I can say that these complaints probably come from people who have not even tried to explore what the game offers to deal with this difficulty. And it offers just enough to reduce it to very reasonable level if you actually think in advance and plan every expedition. Each location has its set of enemies which are highly resistant to certain types of attacks but vulnerable to others. Each character can be built in numerous ways. If you send a random party of heroes with "whatever" skills on a mission, you will have casualties, probably will have to retreat or get your entire team slaughtered. And that will just get worse as the game progresses. If, however, you prepare Bounty Hunter X or Plague Doctor Y from their very initiation to be good specifically at task X or Y, you will be surprised how much more efficient they become. Build your parties having in mind what threats they can face on each mission and suddenly they start crushing the monstrous hordes which could lead you to despair just a few missions earlier when you just picked 4 martyrs, believing that most of them will never return. That said, the game is far fairer than some people will lead you to believe, provided that you actually spend some time thinking and exploring. That doesn't make it perfect though. The end game, the assault on the Darkest Dungeon itself, could turn into a very long grind because you need a well-equipped, max-leveled party to have a chance against the monsters which wait for you there. Every failed attack on the Darkest Dungeon costs you at least one hero, typically 2 or more and these veterans won't come back, you have to "produce" new ones. And that takes a while. Quite a while. Finally - the game is worth it. If anything, for the fact that you don't see many like it around these days.
