Halfway

released on Jul 22, 2014

Halfway is a turn-based strategy RPG taking place a few hundred years into the future. Humanity has started colonising new worlds. Until now, they were alone ...


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Wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Halfway is an XCOM-like. It's a difficult turn based strategy rpg set on a space ship that is mysteriously under attack from uncertain outside forces. You scavenge weapons and ammo, recruit and rescue colorful characters, and face down an ever changing cast of enemies in a fight for your lives.

The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.

The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.

I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.

Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.

For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.

There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.

There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.

The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.

However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.

Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.

You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.

If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.

Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.

So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.

Halfway is solid and straightforward turn-based strategy, with nice pixel art.

While it may be limited in terms of enemy and environment variety, its surprisingly engaging story and bite-sized levels make this non issue.

Overall, I had fun, and the game didn't overstay its welcome, so I recommend giving it a try.

Generic but fun. Main problem is the tiny icons you have to click to do anything. Secondary problem is the story, which falls between the stools of In Medias Res Arcade and any new or interesting narrative.