Legolas_Katarn
BACKER
2019
Beautiful looking action/puzzle/platformer, even with all the decaying bodies, Controls well, good action, environments and how you interact with them is frequently changing, animations of enemy creatures and details in the backgrounds make the locations feel a bit more alive. Play as a blob that can stick to surfaces and heads to control enemies before learning new powers. Main story is a mostly uninteresting one of science gone wrong and betrayal, but reading the thoughts of infected creatures and seeing the images of past events play out is a good use of the mechanics and environment.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1203535179404365829?s=20
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1203535179404365829?s=20
Sigma Theory has you choose a team of four agents each with an intelligence and strength skill and passive traits that make them better or worse in different areas. Each playable country is trying to acquire scientist to research technology that will greatly push forward advancement in different areas. You can hack other countries to lower their alert levels, find what scientists they have through hacking or having your agents travel and investigate, convince scientists to become double agents, extract or capture them on short missions that give you a few decisions that will make things easier or harder on your agent, and if you want to use researched technology yourself or give it to powerful secret factions for less victory points and probably terrible results for humanity but bonuses in other areas.
It's an interesting idea but it is all way to limited. You usually only have two choices, they are often luck based, difficult to guess what will happen, and sometimes its hard to tell what is even being asked of you. Faction missions will always play out the same way, extractions are limited, your agents might have some detail in their backgrounds but will almost never say or do anything interesting in the game and have no relationships among each other, the research plotline makes the game short and the game would probably be more interesting without it and the focused moved to expanded character and mission interaction. It gives you no real information about the actual numbers behind outcomes making it difficult to judge how effective some things are, many of the agents you could use seem like they would basically be useless, and intelligence and hacking abilities is so much more useful than anything else that there is little reason to go with any other type of agent as your game has no real reason not to play out in almost the same way every time once you know what to do.
Some good ideas and amusing every now and then but way too limited in everything it does and an even worse job explaining or making use of many of its own systems.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1205795812778754048?s=20
It's an interesting idea but it is all way to limited. You usually only have two choices, they are often luck based, difficult to guess what will happen, and sometimes its hard to tell what is even being asked of you. Faction missions will always play out the same way, extractions are limited, your agents might have some detail in their backgrounds but will almost never say or do anything interesting in the game and have no relationships among each other, the research plotline makes the game short and the game would probably be more interesting without it and the focused moved to expanded character and mission interaction. It gives you no real information about the actual numbers behind outcomes making it difficult to judge how effective some things are, many of the agents you could use seem like they would basically be useless, and intelligence and hacking abilities is so much more useful than anything else that there is little reason to go with any other type of agent as your game has no real reason not to play out in almost the same way every time once you know what to do.
Some good ideas and amusing every now and then but way too limited in everything it does and an even worse job explaining or making use of many of its own systems.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1205795812778754048?s=20
2018
Cyberpunk arena combat game where you fight a wave of 100 enemies before the boss enemy appears, killing them starts the next wave. You have a sword, gun, block, and dash move and can do two special attacks when your adrenaline meter fills. You can unlock different swords with new abilities, guns, shoes to change your dash style, accessories, and cigarettes to change your dash color by completing different challenges. Fun well made simple game. More options would be nice just to make some custom runs by changing up enemy types, effects, skill, or enemy amounts.
2016
A 2D action/stealth game similar in style to Gunpoint but allows you to take a more action orientated approach. Shoot, use melee, or sneak your way through killing all enemies or reach the objective in each stage. Good atmosphere and music, a variety of enemy and weapon types, a hard mode that changes up the stages quite a bit, and community made workshop levels giving you even more options when the main game is done.
The worst in a trilogy of games that was fairly mediocre to begin with. Continues to do nothing for Lara as a character, mostly just continues to put her back to where she was before. A forgettable story that once again has Lara showing up in an ancient hidden culture and becoming the most important figure for two groups of people. The majority of the game has almost no combat and is entirely focused on simplistic puzzles and climbing. This makes her, once a game, murderous rampage welcome D action movie entertainment. The series continues to be bad or just average at everything it does, never providing interesting combat locations or weapons, continuing to have awkward melee combat and dodges, the guns continue to feel weak to shoot even with the low health most enemies have, your stealth kills are the same slow and awkward looking attacks she has been doing since the first game and her refusal to properly move and hide the bodies when you are in cover is a weird choice, and you are pretty much invincible in what little combat there is if you just make use of the herbs you gather all the time. Hilariously bad chase sequences where dozens of people/vehicles will fire machine guns, rifles, arrows at you and somehow not hit you as you slowly climb walls or you outrun massive catastrophes with the entire city falling and ground giving way all around you. Platforming has the same issue the rest of the series has with alternating between Lara being capable of jumping anywhere between five feet or 30 feet depending on how the game feels. Series is still very into Lara's constant pain. Upgrade tree and buy weapons to regain the same abilities you have been using all trilogy.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1213857667698970625?s=20
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1213857667698970625?s=20
2016
Four episode point and click adventure game showing important moments in the lives of a composer, painter, mathematician, and the people they effected before the outbreak of WWI. Short, well written, and beautifully drawn. Though your choices and the effects they have on the other stories really don't amount to much and the first episode is pretty limited compared to the 2nd and 3rd that were longer and more interesting character wise and thematically.
2020
Isometric adventure game with a science fiction setting. Two estranged brothers and a robotic military dog are thrown into a mostly desolate future from the late 80s by an alien device that had been rapidly advance human technology over the last 10 years. Characters and factions also often being estranged family or parts of a whole with you having to help them come together, accept that they are better apart, or to destroy the other while figuring out how to feel about your own brother. Great visuals, well written, and good voice acting and pathfinding. Talking to characters goes into a Fallout 1 and 2 style close up screen that is always a strong fit for the setting and shows off the varied character types well.
What few actual puzzles there are are poor, most of the game is going to the right place and remembering the people or spot that makes sense to get an item or to continue the narrative. Near pixel hunting required to find some objects, most not needed luckily.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1254027762907574272
What few actual puzzles there are are poor, most of the game is going to the right place and remembering the people or spot that makes sense to get an item or to continue the narrative. Near pixel hunting required to find some objects, most not needed luckily.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1254027762907574272
2019
Play as a doctor who uses period medical knowledge and astronomy to diagnose, treat, and give life advice to his patients in a choose your own black comedy (and partial chorus musical) based on the life of Simon Forman. Gameplay involves choosing between 2-3 options with each visit and trying to gain the favor of patients for letters of recommendations to be given a real medical license. Well written, well acted, successful at being funny and a period piece with bits of contemporary satire.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1254797518438711302
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1254797518438711302
2020
It was about halfway through the game that I thought it should end and the last quarter of it was just going through missions with characters far to powerful to ever come close to losing (it was an easy enough game even before that on the hard difficulty).
The characters have some good ability synergy, they have improved the rag doll style deaths from the previous games, and the breaching mechanics are in theory a good idea, hurt by the nonsensical auto cover taking done by your characters which wouldn't be a problem if not for the new turn style of the game where each character and each enemy take turns instead of switching side to side. So, it's great when they run in completely surrounded and leave themselves flanked by multiple enemies who will move before them.
The overworld gameplay of paying intel to create field teams that do nothing narratively but get you resources and managing city panic is basically pointless and offers nothing interesting (at least it isn't actively bad like the original XCOM's randomness). The close quarter style of maps means that you will fight in very similar locations (sometimes literally the exact same map, once even twice in a row). Some elements of the game feel unfinished, you can capture enemies with nonlethal melee or tranq rounds but they do nothing but give you extra intel, even capturing faction leaders does nothing. Equipment seems extremely limited, androids that can fill spots in your team if someone is downed are basically useless and unless you are playing on a difficulty higher than what you should be should never be used.
Mostly dull equipment and poor and extremely limited mission objectives, most that don't even work due to the small size of the maps. Disarm the bomb isn't very difficult when anyone can spend one turn walking to it to instantly disarm it. No idea why so many missions have enemy reinforcements, ever seen a robbery where after the SWAT team goes in reinforcement robbers start breaching through the walls and crashing through windows?
They likely launched the game early to beat Gears Tactics because in addition to usual XCOM visual issues and feeling unfinished in some areas there are a very large number of bugs, AI, and UI issues. I've had loaded games cancel enemy reinforcements or saves change into other past saves until the game was reset. It removed people from training when I put other people in the second. APC slots vanish, menus would open the wrong menus. Overwatch has shot downed enemies that would have moved if they were alive. Enemies that run into corners and do nothing. Enemies that flank with one action then do nothing with the other. Enemies that use attacks that can't effect (or that might even heal certain characters) only to spend the next two turns doing the same thing again. Terrible ability descriptions on top of abilities and achievements sometimes just not working correctly.
The lack of variety is not helped by each playthrough only allowing you to recruit four additional characters on top of the four that you start with preventing you from having the full roster of 11 character. Losing the ability variety and one of the only amusing things about the game which is the personalities of the characters. It even does that member selection incompetently by giving you three to pick from each time, so if you might not be able to choose who you want when you want them and because there will be four left on the last pick it might not even give you the option of the one that you wanted.
The characters have some good ability synergy, they have improved the rag doll style deaths from the previous games, and the breaching mechanics are in theory a good idea, hurt by the nonsensical auto cover taking done by your characters which wouldn't be a problem if not for the new turn style of the game where each character and each enemy take turns instead of switching side to side. So, it's great when they run in completely surrounded and leave themselves flanked by multiple enemies who will move before them.
The overworld gameplay of paying intel to create field teams that do nothing narratively but get you resources and managing city panic is basically pointless and offers nothing interesting (at least it isn't actively bad like the original XCOM's randomness). The close quarter style of maps means that you will fight in very similar locations (sometimes literally the exact same map, once even twice in a row). Some elements of the game feel unfinished, you can capture enemies with nonlethal melee or tranq rounds but they do nothing but give you extra intel, even capturing faction leaders does nothing. Equipment seems extremely limited, androids that can fill spots in your team if someone is downed are basically useless and unless you are playing on a difficulty higher than what you should be should never be used.
Mostly dull equipment and poor and extremely limited mission objectives, most that don't even work due to the small size of the maps. Disarm the bomb isn't very difficult when anyone can spend one turn walking to it to instantly disarm it. No idea why so many missions have enemy reinforcements, ever seen a robbery where after the SWAT team goes in reinforcement robbers start breaching through the walls and crashing through windows?
They likely launched the game early to beat Gears Tactics because in addition to usual XCOM visual issues and feeling unfinished in some areas there are a very large number of bugs, AI, and UI issues. I've had loaded games cancel enemy reinforcements or saves change into other past saves until the game was reset. It removed people from training when I put other people in the second. APC slots vanish, menus would open the wrong menus. Overwatch has shot downed enemies that would have moved if they were alive. Enemies that run into corners and do nothing. Enemies that flank with one action then do nothing with the other. Enemies that use attacks that can't effect (or that might even heal certain characters) only to spend the next two turns doing the same thing again. Terrible ability descriptions on top of abilities and achievements sometimes just not working correctly.
The lack of variety is not helped by each playthrough only allowing you to recruit four additional characters on top of the four that you start with preventing you from having the full roster of 11 character. Losing the ability variety and one of the only amusing things about the game which is the personalities of the characters. It even does that member selection incompetently by giving you three to pick from each time, so if you might not be able to choose who you want when you want them and because there will be four left on the last pick it might not even give you the option of the one that you wanted.
Based on the gamebook of the same name written by Ian Livingstone but instead of reading through the pages it is all narrated to you by Eddie Marsan with images from the book appearing on screen at times. Well voiced, with appropriate sound effects added as well to fit the situations, and the art shown from the book is good. Entertaining and fairly well written as most of these tend to be. But the actual context and plot isn't as good as many of the other similar game's that have had PC versions made of them.
Like many of these has random instant death situations, luck (even a luck stat that influences things that it would have made more sense for your skill to), and choices with no real information to help you, but a lot of save points are made that you can go back to to try other paths. A lot of the instant death moments just seem to come from your character suddenly being written as an idiot. Poor ending, both just because your actual prize and the overall plot aren't interesting and because you suddenly are required to have found three specific gems out of the six you can find and lose instantly if you don't have them, even having them requires you to play an odd puzzle where you need to place them in the correct order while taking damage when you are wrong.
Cool that it was acted out well, though they could have done better with subtitles and a pause feature, but it seems more to hide the lower quality of this book and what I believe was also a shorter length to make it to the end compared to some similar titles. Worth checking out for the fairly low price though if you like these kind of games or find it on sale.
Like many of these has random instant death situations, luck (even a luck stat that influences things that it would have made more sense for your skill to), and choices with no real information to help you, but a lot of save points are made that you can go back to to try other paths. A lot of the instant death moments just seem to come from your character suddenly being written as an idiot. Poor ending, both just because your actual prize and the overall plot aren't interesting and because you suddenly are required to have found three specific gems out of the six you can find and lose instantly if you don't have them, even having them requires you to play an odd puzzle where you need to place them in the correct order while taking damage when you are wrong.
Cool that it was acted out well, though they could have done better with subtitles and a pause feature, but it seems more to hide the lower quality of this book and what I believe was also a shorter length to make it to the end compared to some similar titles. Worth checking out for the fairly low price though if you like these kind of games or find it on sale.
2020
CARRION has both beautiful and horrific artwork, a fun theme, and some good ideas for mechanics, unfortunately, none of it comes together that well. The game plays like an almost completely linear Metroidvania over a length of about 4-5 hours, over the course of which you will learn new abilities to bypass blockages and closed doors, solve very easy puzzles, eat people, engage in poor awkward fights against soldiers/piloted mechs/drones, and over time gain the ability to transform between three different sizes.
The way that almost all the puzzle work is a simple use of one of your abilities, which may be locked to a certain size of the creature you control. You shift between sizes by dropping off some of your mass at a certain colored pool of water to shrink a size and you eat people and return to save points to gain health and grow again. For example, you might need to get through a tripwire that will close a door if it detects you, so you stop at a nearby pool to shift to your smallest form which can turn invisible if you have absorbed energy. You might need the mid sized form to bash through obstacles or the large form to pull strong objects and to morph into a more defensive state to survive sticky bombs that you can then move next to certain walls to destroy. It would be an ok system if it wasn't always so simplistic, there aren't going to be multiple answers, and if you need to shift to a smaller form for what is needed the pool of water you need is always going to be right near the obstacle. You gain a few other abilities like growing spikes to help you fight or sending out a tendril that can be used to take control of a human to get them to open switches or shoot at other characters.
The way your creature moves is both entertaining and would certainly be unsettling to see in real life, floating around by rapidly firing out tendrils to stick and scale walls, very quickly in your smallest form and much slower in the larger. Though the larger you get the more awkward it becomes to control as there is so much mass sliding around taking up a large area it becomes difficult to guess how much you need to move before the next direction press will actually take you where you need to go. It can be very strange to control the large form in narrow areas where your body might be moving through different tubes, still wrapped up in a former area, all while you're trying to go one way not sure if you have fully moved enough in that direction (or if you moved too much in a direction) for everything to follow you correctly instead of pushing yourself in the wrong direction.
You will eat and fight a lot of people over the course of the game, and it just isn't fun. Eating people has you use the right stick (assuming a controller is being used) to aim a tendril before pressing another button to grab them, you can then flail them around and when you get them towards your mouth (or one of your mouths) half the body will be eaten and then you will need to grab the other half. There really isn't any amusing or horrific animations for this just the same mouth open and biting and the entire way you grab things is never intuitive. You will grab the wrong objects, things will get in the way, you can't eat certain enemy types because they might be needed for puzzles in some areas, and in the largest form it is difficult to even tell where and from what angle the tendril is going to be coming from. It quickly loses any sense of fun or body horror to it and there usually isn't even a gameplay reason to eat anyone when it it is faster to just ram them or shoot tendrils at them in the larger forms. All this also makes combat unwieldy. You can brute force your way through things in the larger forms with your ramming and tendril spearing/pulling abilities but some enemies you will need to move up behind or wait for them to turn their backs to avoid the annoying shields they like to deploy.
Two of the best animations come from your control ability where a regular person, as opposed to the soldiers whose bodies can't be removed, will have you exploding out of them to take up the space they were in once you are done moving them around, the other comes from certain enemies making use of flamethrowers to set small or large parts of your body on fire as you quickly have to dash back to water to put yourself out.
CARRION is too simple for a puzzle game, too unwieldy and basic to be a fun action game, and as unique and fun (and well animated) as it can be to control a creature like this even the act of moving around and eating people just wasn't made enjoyable after the first couple times. For a game with a lot of the same elements (controlling a creature, body horror, puzzles, taking control of your enemies, mechs, etc), that is also longer, controls better, and has a more interesting story I would recommend checking out MO: Astray before this.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1297621597398786048
The way that almost all the puzzle work is a simple use of one of your abilities, which may be locked to a certain size of the creature you control. You shift between sizes by dropping off some of your mass at a certain colored pool of water to shrink a size and you eat people and return to save points to gain health and grow again. For example, you might need to get through a tripwire that will close a door if it detects you, so you stop at a nearby pool to shift to your smallest form which can turn invisible if you have absorbed energy. You might need the mid sized form to bash through obstacles or the large form to pull strong objects and to morph into a more defensive state to survive sticky bombs that you can then move next to certain walls to destroy. It would be an ok system if it wasn't always so simplistic, there aren't going to be multiple answers, and if you need to shift to a smaller form for what is needed the pool of water you need is always going to be right near the obstacle. You gain a few other abilities like growing spikes to help you fight or sending out a tendril that can be used to take control of a human to get them to open switches or shoot at other characters.
The way your creature moves is both entertaining and would certainly be unsettling to see in real life, floating around by rapidly firing out tendrils to stick and scale walls, very quickly in your smallest form and much slower in the larger. Though the larger you get the more awkward it becomes to control as there is so much mass sliding around taking up a large area it becomes difficult to guess how much you need to move before the next direction press will actually take you where you need to go. It can be very strange to control the large form in narrow areas where your body might be moving through different tubes, still wrapped up in a former area, all while you're trying to go one way not sure if you have fully moved enough in that direction (or if you moved too much in a direction) for everything to follow you correctly instead of pushing yourself in the wrong direction.
You will eat and fight a lot of people over the course of the game, and it just isn't fun. Eating people has you use the right stick (assuming a controller is being used) to aim a tendril before pressing another button to grab them, you can then flail them around and when you get them towards your mouth (or one of your mouths) half the body will be eaten and then you will need to grab the other half. There really isn't any amusing or horrific animations for this just the same mouth open and biting and the entire way you grab things is never intuitive. You will grab the wrong objects, things will get in the way, you can't eat certain enemy types because they might be needed for puzzles in some areas, and in the largest form it is difficult to even tell where and from what angle the tendril is going to be coming from. It quickly loses any sense of fun or body horror to it and there usually isn't even a gameplay reason to eat anyone when it it is faster to just ram them or shoot tendrils at them in the larger forms. All this also makes combat unwieldy. You can brute force your way through things in the larger forms with your ramming and tendril spearing/pulling abilities but some enemies you will need to move up behind or wait for them to turn their backs to avoid the annoying shields they like to deploy.
Two of the best animations come from your control ability where a regular person, as opposed to the soldiers whose bodies can't be removed, will have you exploding out of them to take up the space they were in once you are done moving them around, the other comes from certain enemies making use of flamethrowers to set small or large parts of your body on fire as you quickly have to dash back to water to put yourself out.
CARRION is too simple for a puzzle game, too unwieldy and basic to be a fun action game, and as unique and fun (and well animated) as it can be to control a creature like this even the act of moving around and eating people just wasn't made enjoyable after the first couple times. For a game with a lot of the same elements (controlling a creature, body horror, puzzles, taking control of your enemies, mechs, etc), that is also longer, controls better, and has a more interesting story I would recommend checking out MO: Astray before this.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1297621597398786048
2020
Wasteland 3 makes a few improvements to the gameplay of the previous title. There is better skill and weapon balance, attributes are now balanced so any character without a high intelligence score is no longer worthless, and the traits that you can choose at character creation are no longer as overpowered or useless as they were in the directors cut version of Wasteland 2. They removed some of the more Tabletop style RPG features like percentage failures for doing things like lockpicking or different attribute ratings coming together to effect stats but it wasn't really handled in an interesting way in the previous game and just simplifying it was for the best. There are combat abilities that characters can learn that can chain together well, some skills might do bonus damage to bleeding, stunned, or otherwise status effect characters.
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491
Although, even with those skills, there are no real interesting character builds like you might find in Pathfinder Kingmaker/Pillars of Eternity/etc, just things you should know in advance to set a character up well (knowing toaster repair is an important skill if you want your character to use a flamethrower, that the nerd stuff skill that allows you to hack robots might not be a good skill for your sniper that wants to stay away from the frontline, if you are going to want weird science to use armor or weapons that you will find later, how much AP you are likely to want from coordination before focusing on other attributes, give your sniper the stealth skill, knowing that the initiative and detection stats are basically completely worthless, etc).
The characters that can join your party have been limited to two this time around instead of three, giving you a total of four created rangers and two NPCs that you can have join you. The number of recruitable characters is much smaller but they tend to be more talkative this time around and some have a lot more to do with the overall plot and characters that you meet.
The plot, level of violence, and some dialogue can be a bit juvenile and the game is never one for subtlety. It's not a narrative you will play to reflect on what is going on like you would Planescape or Disco Elysium, the commentary of Fallout, and not one where you are likely to build much of a connection with the characters, groups, or world like in Divinity or Pillars of Eternity. Narratively often doing little more than an attempt to amuse with the absurdity of situations and characters, never giving any quests or options that end up even being as memorable as some of the ones found in Wasteland 2.
The animal whisperer skill and random robots/animals/followers you can obtain still allows you to amass an army of followers for your party, at one point in addition to my six party members I also had three robots, seven animals, and a guy following me around and joining us in combat. You can pet all of your animals (or attempt to) and it is probably one of the more amusing elements of the game. Getting to destroy a cult and AI supercar dedicated to Ronald Reagan was also a high point. The close up shots they use with some of the more important character models when you meet them are fun to watch, extremely expressive without being overly cartoon like.
The ending is a rushed mess that not only hurts the end of the game but makes a lot of your decisions prior to it pointless as well. Your choices so far made regarding the main story end up meaning nothing when it comes to how you have followed the order of the ruler of Colorado, your choices regarding how you have been following another character mean nothing (and one of the main things she wants you to do doesn't even make sense or fit her character and seems to happen as an ending slide to one of your characters even if your actions should have prevented it), only your reputation with one of the game's factions (the Hundred Families) really matters and that requires you to be at the loved the rank, your skills suddenly become useless as you have no way to talk sense into characters with some of them even assigning nonsensical values and actions to your characters that might be the direct opposite of what you have been doing, you have essentially been the leader of the rangers in Colorado and are at no point able to make any logical decisions to prevent negative things from happening, one of the factions trying to take over Colorado at the game's end is completely ridiculous and should be impossible without following through with other quest options (going with Wasteland 2 and 3's terrible and annoying usual stance of everyone in the world is completely useless except for your party), there is a machine faction that is given almost no role in the game and could logically step in to fill the role of another faction if you destroyed them but you aren't even given the option to bring this possibility up with them. Any choices just leads to a laughable boss fight before you make your final decisions with some of them being just as poorly thought out. You can make a less than maximum speech check to just casually have the rangers abandon Arizona and the people there to die after sections of not being able to convince people of anything. If you aren't loved by the rich families one ending might have them going back to their roots as guerrilla fighters living off the land fighting a war against you to regain power, as if the pampered bunch of losers you have met throughout the game are anything like the families were 50+ years ago when they were taking over Colorado.
I thought some of the ending parts of Wasteland 2 were a little, dumb, but the ending and ending sections of Wasteland 3 are massive hits against the game's quality. From the small amount of forces and low stakes ending areas to just completely removing any point of the main story choices and your RPG abilities to use your skills or find solutions to the end game problems.
I finished the game on hard which basically made both armor and health almost useless. Even my characters with the best armor in the game, maxed out strength for the most health, and one of them having a quirk from character creation giving them even more health would still see themselves getting downed by a single enemy that at times may have done around twice their total HP value in damage. This lead to an odd type of game where we would start a fight, kill most enemies, have the remaining enemies down a few characters but with all the doctors and medical equipment to heal afterwards it just never really mattering, and then killing them with our followers or on our next turn or two.
A bit buggy, though I never ran into anything game breaking or that couldn't be fixed with a reload or some thought, and it can have some fairly long load times that can be made worse when you need to quickly travel through multiple separate areas to get where you are going.
With some patches and if found at a lower price point it can be a decent purchase with some funny moments and decent mechanics but the combat and plot don't come close to meeting the better games in the genre and the terrible ending sections and taking so little interest in what you have done or what your skills and allies should allow for really hurt the game.
(There has been updates since I played it that may have improved on certain things)
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1308599051747647491
It's like if you took the Super Robot Wars series, focused it entirely on Gundam series, included a massive selection of characters and mobile suits to pilot where anyone could pilot anything, and then made it worse in every other way.
The story of the game is retelling different series, films, and manga covering the Wing, Seed, 00, and Iron Blooded Orphan timelines for a total of 13 different series of missions. Three for Gundam, five for Seed, three for 00, and two for Iron Blooded Orphans. The problem with that is if you know the story you are getting a very dull retelling and if you don't know the story you are missing massive amounts of context and characterization (and sometimes entire characters). It also means that the battles you fight would be limited to units from the scenario, except that you can take a group attached to a warship (9 units and the base) and a raid unit (8 units) that you select the pilots and mechs for over the course of the entire game. The actual maps aren't done very well either, as many of the represented battles didn't actually even have many units in the plot, leading to maps just throwing random generic enemy units in all corners just to give you something to do.
This, of course, means that there is absolutely no balance to this game and you will easily destroy everything even when selecting the harder difficulty and even without making use of funds and obtained skills to make your pilots and mechs even stronger (upgrading pilots being the normal way to completely break SRW series games). Adding to the lack of balance is the raid attacks both groups are capable of that could easily take out 2-9 units just from one action. You can switch to pilots and mechs that are of lower level but then you are probably just using things that you don't want to use.
The actual combat just isn't as good as the SRW series with the much more limited focus on skills, lack of secrets, not having you switch your lineup, and with inferior combat animations. The strangest combat animations comes from the first shot or shots always visually missing before later shots hit even when certain attack should only have fired once, always looking terrible and not even making sense in some situations. The Wing Gundam missing the first twin beam rifle shot or a sniper unit missing a massive capital ship after their character says a line about taking one shot only to then fire two more shots that hit the target. A lot of units basically end up with similar weapons or moving in a similar way giving you little reason to want to bother with anything but the more unique and strongest units that are available.
The stories are rarely told well in even the combat scenarios with limited plot cutscenes or combat animations and character deaths often left out, sometimes being available only if you intentionally get them killed. Iron Blooded Orphans is even missing a major battle, antagonist, and important story moment for some reason. Though that series was often handled the best with some more unique scenarios and better story focus.
There is an almost mobile game style feature to gain money and items where you send one or two of your available built groups out to complete missions from a large list. After the assigned time (possibly a couple hours to close to a full day) the group will be available again with some extra XP and you will get your item rewards. Each of these missions has a short description but you don't even get any kind of information about how they completed the task. Each could easily have been made into a side mission (especially when the game doesn't care at all about balance which is the only real difficult part of making missions in a game like this) but instead they serve only to go along with the game's odd need to continue to obtain money in order to not only build mobile suits but to buy the pilots you have unlocked that you want to use.
If you are a big Gundam fan using all the characters and suits can be fun and it's nice to see scenarios for a lot of the side stories but it's just never very fun to play and does nothing interesting with the material.
The story of the game is retelling different series, films, and manga covering the Wing, Seed, 00, and Iron Blooded Orphan timelines for a total of 13 different series of missions. Three for Gundam, five for Seed, three for 00, and two for Iron Blooded Orphans. The problem with that is if you know the story you are getting a very dull retelling and if you don't know the story you are missing massive amounts of context and characterization (and sometimes entire characters). It also means that the battles you fight would be limited to units from the scenario, except that you can take a group attached to a warship (9 units and the base) and a raid unit (8 units) that you select the pilots and mechs for over the course of the entire game. The actual maps aren't done very well either, as many of the represented battles didn't actually even have many units in the plot, leading to maps just throwing random generic enemy units in all corners just to give you something to do.
This, of course, means that there is absolutely no balance to this game and you will easily destroy everything even when selecting the harder difficulty and even without making use of funds and obtained skills to make your pilots and mechs even stronger (upgrading pilots being the normal way to completely break SRW series games). Adding to the lack of balance is the raid attacks both groups are capable of that could easily take out 2-9 units just from one action. You can switch to pilots and mechs that are of lower level but then you are probably just using things that you don't want to use.
The actual combat just isn't as good as the SRW series with the much more limited focus on skills, lack of secrets, not having you switch your lineup, and with inferior combat animations. The strangest combat animations comes from the first shot or shots always visually missing before later shots hit even when certain attack should only have fired once, always looking terrible and not even making sense in some situations. The Wing Gundam missing the first twin beam rifle shot or a sniper unit missing a massive capital ship after their character says a line about taking one shot only to then fire two more shots that hit the target. A lot of units basically end up with similar weapons or moving in a similar way giving you little reason to want to bother with anything but the more unique and strongest units that are available.
The stories are rarely told well in even the combat scenarios with limited plot cutscenes or combat animations and character deaths often left out, sometimes being available only if you intentionally get them killed. Iron Blooded Orphans is even missing a major battle, antagonist, and important story moment for some reason. Though that series was often handled the best with some more unique scenarios and better story focus.
There is an almost mobile game style feature to gain money and items where you send one or two of your available built groups out to complete missions from a large list. After the assigned time (possibly a couple hours to close to a full day) the group will be available again with some extra XP and you will get your item rewards. Each of these missions has a short description but you don't even get any kind of information about how they completed the task. Each could easily have been made into a side mission (especially when the game doesn't care at all about balance which is the only real difficult part of making missions in a game like this) but instead they serve only to go along with the game's odd need to continue to obtain money in order to not only build mobile suits but to buy the pilots you have unlocked that you want to use.
If you are a big Gundam fan using all the characters and suits can be fun and it's nice to see scenarios for a lot of the side stories but it's just never very fun to play and does nothing interesting with the material.
Map and level design allows for skilled players and those with the right upgrades attached to make use of different strategies to progress in many sections. Excellent mobility with triple jumps, dashes, bouncing off enemies and projectiles, and abilities that further enhance it. Beautiful game, though very similar the previous.
Poor less emotional more cliché story, no major improvements to the style of game, no new stand out music tracks, worse escape sections that are so easy I would end up dying by getting too far ahead of something that is supposed to break open my path as it draws closer, wastes potential of having Ori and the Owl work together outside of one short segment. Side quests are basically just fetch activities, and there just isn't much reason for some of the abilities. Often had some framerate drops a few minutes after starting that would later just go away as it remained open.
Still very good and easily recommended for people that liked the first one, but it's mostly just more of that while also being both less and now familiar.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1317836126216802305
Poor less emotional more cliché story, no major improvements to the style of game, no new stand out music tracks, worse escape sections that are so easy I would end up dying by getting too far ahead of something that is supposed to break open my path as it draws closer, wastes potential of having Ori and the Owl work together outside of one short segment. Side quests are basically just fetch activities, and there just isn't much reason for some of the abilities. Often had some framerate drops a few minutes after starting that would later just go away as it remained open.
Still very good and easily recommended for people that liked the first one, but it's mostly just more of that while also being both less and now familiar.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1317836126216802305
The greatest mess in gaming. Deadly Premonition is a mystery action adventure game with a town and characters inspired by media like Twin Peaks and a tone that can shift from brutal and bloody to light and absurdly humorous.
Poor graphics, poor controls, poor driving, poor UI, annoying timed event system, bugs, dull and slow combat (though with some ok enemy designs), all dated in every way (even for when the game first released in 2010). But it is the story, characters, the town itself, the often catchy and good music, and the awkward dialogue and acting that all come together in a way that just works perfectly that makes the game worth playing even with all the other problems, at times even making some of those downsides almost charming.
In many ways a terrible game, but even with the over 3,000 games I've played, Deadly Premonition is one of my favorites with one of the best settings and most memorable protagonists I've experienced.
Better played on one of the consoles for stability if you are able to.
Poor graphics, poor controls, poor driving, poor UI, annoying timed event system, bugs, dull and slow combat (though with some ok enemy designs), all dated in every way (even for when the game first released in 2010). But it is the story, characters, the town itself, the often catchy and good music, and the awkward dialogue and acting that all come together in a way that just works perfectly that makes the game worth playing even with all the other problems, at times even making some of those downsides almost charming.
In many ways a terrible game, but even with the over 3,000 games I've played, Deadly Premonition is one of my favorites with one of the best settings and most memorable protagonists I've experienced.
Better played on one of the consoles for stability if you are able to.