Is this game good? I've read one detailed review that spelled out why it wasn't that good. all the other reviews praise it but don't really go into any detail.
I liked it, but it seems to be polarizing. It's definitely harder than your average CRPG.
>>4135337Yes. It's good but punishing in a sort of bullshit way. you find yourself in a lot of no-win situations if you don't pass checks so you end up reloading and doing something else. the combat system is great and had fun tradeoffs with the non-combat skills. short and highly replayable
>>4135337It's a relatively short game, you can play it yourself and form your own opinion.Personally I like it quite a lot.
>>4135337It's good but flawed. Worth playing regardless.The combat mechanics are nice, but the combat sucks because you only control a single unit so there're barely any tactics to it (and this is why I prefer the Dungeon Rats spinoff).It's very open ended and many parts of the game are gated by skill checks. This encourages metagaming, keeping your skill points unspent so you'll reload after meeting a skill check you want to pass and then spend your skill points.As >>4135346 says, it's a short game, so play it blind and try to avoid savescumming fuckery. Leave that for repeated playthroughs as it's a fairly replayable game.
I think a lot of people don't like it because failure is an integral part of the experience
>>4135337Unplayable without a save editor.Mitsoda aka VD is a retarded vaginal discharge unfit for any decision making in game development. He ignored feedback about game breaking issues for 5 years.
>>4135353>This encourages metagaming, keeping your skill points unspent so you'll reload after meeting a skill check you want to pass and then spend your skill points.Calling it "flawed" is an understatement. There are CYOAs with better flow than this crapware.
>>4135337>all the other reviews praise it but don't really go into any detail.Because it's rpgcodex:the game all positive reviews are written by VD's dicksuckers from rpgc.
>>4135337There are many brilliant things about it, but also quite a few tedious things as well.
It offers more genuine branching choices than most games (it's also not particularly long as a result of that), but it has basically no memorable characters other than the conman guy so it's hard to care about anything if you actually want a story. I also feel like there's too much incentive to just avoid spending exp until you need to make some check instead of just improving whatever suits your character freely, but some people love games that are all about save scumming like Underrail so maybe that's not a flaw to everyone idk
>>4135337Its one of the best RPGs released in the last decade. It's biggest problem is the XP system where if you're spending XP as you get it you can softlock yourself. >>4135355Yeah but "Oh you didn't level throwing on your thief character? Looks like you're fucking dead reload to an earlier save where you have XP" is not fun. Colony ship fixed the softlocking issue.
>>4135337Age of Decadence and Colony Ship(in a bit lesser extent, but still) - are one of my favorite wrpg text-wise. Gameplay sucks because of being too hardcoresloppish tho.
>>4135380The conman chink was well written only because it's fucking Mitsoda making self insert into the story
>>4135486I forgot about him, but that was another good one. I think my problem with the cast is that if everyone notable is just some sociopath schemer it makes it really hard for anyone to stand out. Those two are basically just the two funniest ones because they're complete imposters
>>4135337I loved it, but I always made sure to save a few skill points for emergencies. As long as you don't stray far from your "route" spending your points on the skills the game recommends for you is generally going to be enough to get to an ending. And once you play the game a few times you quickly learn what you'll need to mix and match and where you'll have to deviate to get to the secret endings. Also you can kite pretty much everything with a bow/crossbow, and what you can't, you probably can still kite if you have some throwables on you.
>>4135337You're supposed to play this game in a very specific and unintuitive way, i.e. you hoard skill points instead of spending them, run into a skill check you can't pass, reload and spend the points. Otherwise you will softlock your playthrough, there's no leeway at all, the game supports a handful of archetypes (warrior, diplomat, assassin etc) and if you stray from what the dev planned out for that archetype you're fucked.Overall, it's incredibly autistic and made by one of the RPG Codex founders (and that place is a loony bin if you're not aware).
>>4135337Yes. Setting is very unique and not generic fantasy like the rest of them, which I really appreciated, writing was ok too. Combat tho, it's too autistic for me, and the whole hoarding of skill points in general.
>>4135746>there's no leeway at all, the game supports a handful of archetypes >if you stray from what the dev planned out for that archetype you're fuckedBingo. It's a CYOA with the insanely rigid paths through the linear story.Not an RPG.
>>4136367It's RPG turned into a CYOA and being really bad at it.This moron VD tried to make up for his incompetence at making a clone of Fallout with CYOA mechanics: teleporting between scenes in different locations, no real freedom of movement, no real exploration.It starts as an ugly clone of Fallout, then you get the AOD experience, if you haven't seen this yet, it's just a matter of time>you go to a place>you talk to the NPC>without any warning you get "teleported" somewhere far far away right into the combat>there was no warning>you were not prepared>you die
>>4135337Designed by a crank who thinks the passive act of spending skills points will decide where the games goes in its branching paths (those paths are not dependent on your actual decisions since you aren't prescient and they are predicated entirely on the skill point distributions you do in an inventory screen), basically the player has almost no actual agency in this game, it plays itself out
>>4135422>Yeah but "Oh you didn't level throwing on your thief character? Looks like you're fucking dead reload to an earlier save where you have XP" is not fun.Thief line is definitely the worst about it, you could go all the way to Ganezzar to suddenly find out that you need to level traps. Incredible breadth of random skills necessary. On the other hand trader plays itself and combat queslines are usually straightforward.>Colony ship fixed the softlocking issue.Colony Ship has its own problems. It has little to no leeway in how you do things because the way the game is built pushes you to vacuum all the skill points available. You'll say AoD was the same and you'd be right, but AoD also had more freedom to tackle things unlike CS.
>>4137506>On the other hand trader plays itself and combat queslines are usually straightforwardBecause if you don't go full warrior build, talker build is your only chance and talking skills are obvious choice for a merchant.I believe loremaster is not much better than a thief when it comes to skill distribution.
>>4137527Loremaster doesn't really have a well defined questline, but if we're talking about visiting and taking advantage of every lore-related place, then it's even worse than thieves' guild (Abyss stat recs alone are a problem).
>>4135337It’s alright a 7/10 or so? My biggest complaint would be that it really punishes you for developing your character as you think would fit your RP, and not holding skill points for the load->invest to pass check, style meta gaming which it heavily incentivises.I enjoyed it playing a cha/social skills based build, but not enough to replay it a secound time with some other build. Even though the game clearly has significant replayability in the different solutions offered to acts and how they affect the story.Among the wierd stuff is that you’re playing age of decadence but you can’t actually be much of a degenerate yourself. But i guess that’s just a minor quibble.The game is cheap and worth a playthrough for sure. Assuming you’re willing to save, fail and load to allocate the nessecery skillpoints, that is.
>>4135337>Is this game good?No.>t. played it
>>4143525>It’s alright a 7/10 or so?No, the gameplay is fundamentally broke, just as you have described:>not holding skill points for the load->invest to pass check, style meta gaming which it heavily incentivises6/10 used to be that controversial score given to very flawed games which still have some highlights, that would be the AOD.
>>4135337I think the game is great, interesting setting and story. The gameplay is where it's going to be 50/50 for others, I thought it was fine considering that I've played a bunch of CRPGs so I'm used to it. The game can be ballbusting at certain points so explore around, talk to people and be a murder hobo. I would recommend looking up builds to help you get an idea on what kind of character you want to play. First playthrough I went with the assassins and by late game I was wrecking machines and men alike with my dagger.
>have you played thisYes, from start to finish.>is this game goodABSOLUTELY NOT. Even ignoring the atrocious engine they used, most of the design philosophy of Vince is an abject failure that ends up centering around the most savescum oriented gameplay (you can't evade this, sorry) I've ever seen.Colony Ship is a better game, but it still suffers from the same delusional gameplay design beliefs. Vince is kinda a hack fraud.
>>4135337I really liked it, but I also play crpgs on the hardest difficulty settings. People who don't like it are too retarded to rtfm. There's an in-game manual that explains what you need to know.
what I did was I cheated so I had max stats in everything, then its awesome KEK you just run around killing everything, and the writing is bretty good/fun
