[Progress] Turn based September progress;

Hola,

Another month, another bunch of games cleared; Sadly, most of them have been squarely in the 'average' category. Last month's progress saw me knock out a 600 hour epic, I also posted too early evidently as I finished two more games:

• August extra completions: 2

• 2000 to 1: A Space Felony

• PC (WIN)

• Genre: Walking Sim.

• Rating: 4/10 Weak.

• 30th August, an hour or so.

• Review:

This is an indie game you can pick up at the developer’s official website for whatever you’re willing to pay. If you sub to HumbleBundle it is free on the Trove. Released in 2017, I think this is their first ever game and it is made on Unreal Engine. This is a snarky little game inspired by 2000:1 A Space Odyssey and HAL etc. Here, you play as a detective investigating a space flight run by an AI called MAL. Everyone’s been murdered, so you must go around taking photos of the bodies and evidence so that you can present these things to MAL and ‘contradict’ his explanations in order to get the truth.

It is a clear, simple game concept and it works relatively well. The mission control narrator is amusing, which helps – this was made with only three voice actors if I understand correctly. But as a first attempt there are a few technical issues that bring the game down. Controls are wonky, if you escape to the menu and then return to the game you cannot turn left anymore for some reason, and the last dialogue repeats, again for whatever reason. When I finished the game, I had to ALT+F4 to get out of the ending splash screen.

It is brutally short, there are some cohesion issues with the story in the dialogue and ultimately it doesn’t do enough to push it beyond simply an okay game, but that’s fine, I like okay games, it’s a good attempt and hopefully with some refinement in the future we might see some great things here. (IMO I wouldn’t pay for this, if you can get it for free though, do have a look if you’re into rough first-efforts.)

• Once Upon a Crime in the West
• PC (WIN)
• Genre: Walking Sim.
• Rating: 4/10 Weak.
• 30th August, an hour or so.
• Review:

Same developers are 2000 to 1, this is also free on the HB trove, which is where I picked it up. This is the second game and more modern release.

You sleuth over twelve days of Christmas putting together the whodunnits of a cabin where everyone ended up killing each other. Like A Space Felony, the game is amusing with interesting dialogue and wordplay. It is also better technically, with its own unique art style adding to its charm.

This time, you get a magical camera to take photos of the bodies (but not evidence) and you get to time travel back through the twelve days. Again, the let-down for this game is clumsy UI and a lack of polish. For example, time travel is done by scrolling through coloured bars representing each day, and it happens the moment you linger on a colour, no confirmation prompt or anything. This is bad because once you’ve seen a scene, or even part of a scene, you cannot rewind it at all. That’s a criminal oversight even for an indie game in my view. When the game finished its intro sequence, I wasn’t even aware it had actually started (not a good point), there’s a lack of identification of who is speaking in the subtitles, with character identification done by having their models colour coded. The animation is stiff and robotic, a deliberate design choice, but I think that this would have been fine for a sci-fi sort of setting but it is kind of at odds with the western ‘theme’ being presented here.

All in all, it’s okay, I might be being a bit harsh here, but I think with the first game I was happy to give some leeway to issues arising due to the newness of the developers, here I think more polish is required.A shame.

• September

Anyway, that was it for August, for September I started some big titles; HumbleBundle released Battletech as part of the box, so that took up a major part of my time.

• Tried and abandoned

• Equilinox (3/10 Bad.) (Abandoned 21st Sept 2019)

• Genre: World ‘painter’

Not much to say, Equilinox is misleading in the extreme, it looks like an eco-system builder. The problem is, the eco systems don't evolve naturally on its own. You have to paint the world in zones and plant the animals and plants yourself. Evolution is done by investing points into changing a colour here or a trait there, but the point requirements are like mobile games, so extreme that you're basically time gated. Just, be wary if you read the store page blurbs.

• Surviving Mars 4/10 Weak

• Genre: Planet-builder I guess.

It's basically building a colony on Mars, but the issue is the game is probably on the shallow side of things. Once you get into the groove of establishing a colony/money there's not that much to keep you going, it is basically as barren as Mars itself for features and gimmicks, so it just feels rather uninspired. Nothing really hooked me into staying into 'just one more hour' territory. TBH I wouldn't have got this if it wasn't with the HB boxes, but I'm throwing it on the abandoned heap anyway.

• Progress:

Go get a cup of coffee, there's two lengthy waffly reviews here. :P

• Battletech
• PC (Steam)
• Genre: Turn based tactics with management elements.
• Rating 6/10 Decent
• 16th September, 41 hours.
• Review:

I had to rewrite this review about three or four times as the game fluctuated between being great and just flat out annoying me, so apologies in advance if it comes across as a rambling mess.

So, this is a game which is part management, part shooting shit up with giant mechs. You manage a mercenary company in the BattleTech universe, where various factions of noble houses strive to gain power in the political scene. Hire and fire mercs, train them, build mechs for them to use etc.

The combat side of things is turn based, you control a lance of four mechs and that’s your lot. Although you can collect and store more than four, you’ll only ever bring four to the battlefield. Your enemies on the other hand, may bring as many as they like, plus reinforcements, plus in some cases static defences.

This imbalance forces you to use ‘tactics’, though is there anything less tactical than firing three thousand missiles into the enemy’s face?

The game offers an interesting story campaign – this is written by the same company that did the wonderful Shadowrun Trilogy and roleplaying is their forte. Expect plenty of dialogue choices and your background and origin story adding flavour and influence to some of these. Indeed, campaign events are interesting because of the RPG-story telling they layer into it, though if you dislike story you can go for a free roaming career mode instead.

These aspects alone, the serviceable combat, the okay management aspects and the RPG and story centric campaign are all decent enough to get the game ambling along to a 7/10 score, but then it has several horrific errors that bring it down.

Firstly, the tutorial only really teaches you how to move and shoot. Nothing is given about abilities, tactics (beyond ‘shoot them in the arse’ and ‘rotate your armour facing’), attributes, all kinds of things that would be useful to know in a turn-based system that is based on an established lore/world. If you google the tutorial you will find complaints about how crap it is from launch all the way to today, it is a major complaint that has been conveniently ignored; There are many topics on how new players, not just to the genre but to the world and mechanics, or casual players have been caught out by how difficult the game is, because they don’t understand the basics of the entire system the game is offering all thanks to the tutorial, including (assuming it’s true, not so) hilariously, one streamer who went bankrupt after the first initial tutorial mission due to the damage he took…

Secondly, the game is unoptimized in terms of loading. On an SSD I was regularly alt-tabbing out to read the news or whatever because loading times were taking so damn long it was just boring.

Thirdly, the turn-based battle aspect is very slow. And I mean, lethargically slow. Everything drags out, every movement and every shot has to have some follow up comment from the characters. It is novel when you first start but by hour 15 starts to grate and by hour 30 is all but forcing you to alt-tab when the enemy has several units to move at once. Even moving multiples of your own units takes too long to get going. There’s an option to speed up this stuff (patched in at some point) and yet, the game is still unbearably slow even with everything going at 250x speed.

Just to re-iterate… I’m playing the game on fast-forward mode and it’s still too slow. That should never, ever be a valid complaint, and yet it is one of the easiest complaints you will find if you google issues with the game, in addition to loading times and the shitty tutorial.

The speed of the game suffers because, as I noted earlier, enemies outnumber you. Nearly every fight has reinforcements against you, sometimes they spawn before you even reach the main host of enemies (working as intended according to the devs…) and thus, you will spend a lot of time waiting, or if you’re tired of doing so, alt-tabbing to something more fun whilst you wait for your turn.

I found the game challenging at parts, but not unbearably so, but these issues don’t help for when you do experience a bit of a difficulty spike as you might imagine. All these issues drag the game down, hence the score of 6, although I’m fairly tempted to whack it down to 5, I figured I might be being too mean.

All in all, there’s a decent game here, but it needs polish and optimising, not a season pass with expansions and more on the way. It should be whizzing along on an SSD and battles should be a brisk affair, but as it is, it chugs along like a heavy mech struggling to stomp out of a swamp, and for me, becomes a rather underwhelming game as a result.

• Champion of the Gods
• PC (Steam)
• Genre: Choose your own Adventure Book
• Rating: 5/10 So-So
• 22nd September, 2 hours (100%'d, replayed)

This is a CYOA book published by CYOA specialists Choice of Games. You play as a destined champion of the gods. You make choices as the story progresses to determine your character’s personality, motivation, love interests etc. It is decent, but doesn’t really break into new ground for the CYOA genre. I replayed this for the first time in a long while, and ended up gaining 100% achievements, which was a nice bonus!

• Lust for Darkness (18+)
• PC (Steam)
• Genre: Walking Simulator
• Rating: 3/10, Bad.
• 23rd September, 2 hours (100% - 70th game 100%'d)
• Review:

I’m a massive fan of Adult games, always have been, and the day a developer with AAA+ production values can get their hands on an adult title, is the day I might be a very happy man, because erotic and erotic horror imagery can be repulsive, sickening and compelling all in one package. The potential is amazing, but with some societies still getting uppity over nudity, I don’t think it will happen anytime soon, and thus we have to put up with low-tier indie efforts like this;

Lust for Darkness examines the occult, a cult and otherworldly dimensions linked around lust and carnal pleasures. The Cult of Ecstasy is all about having a good time with some orgies etc, hoping to get into the demon dimension of lust for more extra-dimensional sexual exploits. It goes about as well as anything involving demons does, with gigantic phallic instruments being used to mortally impale them rather than pleasure them.

The concept is good, the execution is just shit. Voice acting is awful, the way the protagonist drawls out his ‘fucks’ and ‘fucking’ is comedically childish in my opinion, but the plot is too thin to do the game any service. It is like a plot outline that hasn’t been filled in, the game opens in the middle of goodness knows where and you’re not fully informed of the background of the protagonist or his kidnapped wife, so you never really relate to them at all. You’re thrown in to investigating this cult with no real motivation or interest. Indeed, most of the historical-story is hidden in collectibles, of which there aren’t that many anyway, but seeking them out doesn’t really have any payoff.

As for the ‘adult’ part of this game, it is so tame I’d put it as 16+ in Europe to be honest with you, yes, there is nudity – you get to see some flaccid penises and some tits, but you won’t be seeing any vulva's or erect penises unless they’re art pieces on pottery or are part of the furniture. You have to strain to see one or two on the actual models of ‘humans’ within the game, and the issue is, the graphical quality is so poor it is like watching badly drawn mannequins doing the deed. What doesn’t help is that these cultists have sex, oral, anal, vaginal, whatever, and they do it in slow-motion. It’s like, nothing akin to what sex is in reality, it is just so surreal it doesn’t really do anything for the player full-stop. And the big highlight of the game is one or two orgies (there's an achievement for spending 10 minutes watching one, which was akin to watching paint dry), which just happen to be a few scattered models of slow motion ‘sex’, it’s boring, it’s not even erotic, nor is it ‘horror’.

The demon world of lust is likewise let down hugely by the graphical design. Sure, there’s the odd giant penis and lots of imagery around the female genitalia, but most of the demon world is just metallic industrial design combined with what looks to be alien leaves. The resident demons are naked women in masks with swords for arms. Boring.

If you want erotic stuff look elsewhere. Visceral Games’ Dante’s Inferno’s lust level of hell for example is exactly what they should be aiming at; Hot sexy women, and suddenly this giant fuck off spike-penis comes out of their vagina? Yikes, it’s erotic and frightening and unexpected. A vanilla demon with sword arms is as generic as it comes.

The game is also beset with technical issues, I had to run it in compatibility mode for Windows 8 to bypass a technical issue that dropped the framerate to 1fps! In the end… This lust for darkness is a damp squib, lacking any serious erotic or horror imagery, which leaves it as a fairly bland walking simulator with some poor porn added in, definitely not one to add to your Christmas wish-list.

• Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus
• PC (Steam)
• Genre: Turn based tactics with dungeon exploration.
• Rating: 7/10 Good (September Game of the month)
• 27th September, 23 hours (Finished it early)
• Review:

Bit of a long one here, because this game has three layers I need to tackle:

Mechanicus is an indie attempt at bringing the Adeptus Mechanicus into play – they’re the machine/human ‘tech-priests’ of the universe, that have their own religion and stuff. If you’re only partially familiar with the universe, they’re the guys you see repairing the tanks for the human and super-human armies etc. As such, they’re mostly neglected in the video-game arena.

Anyway, this game focuses on them and that opens up an entirely fresh look at a faction that is generally neglected. Straight off the bat, this game absolutely nails the atmosphere of the 40k universe, it gets (as far as I can tell) the lore and the mechanics of the faction more or less spot on.

You act as Magos Faustinaus, the commander of one of the biggest ships out in the universe, hunting down an old distress signal from another Magos. This signal leads you to a planet that just so happens to be a Necron (read: Terminator species) tomb-world, and this planet is where our campaign begins:

The game is split into three distinct parts:

First, on the ship itself you manage your squads pre-battle. Your squads are made of two categories of units; The first are tech-priests, or the heroes of your faction. These guys can be levelled up and built like RPG characters. You can adjust their equipment and build them ready for battle. They’re the people who swing the battle in your favour, you start with two but can work your way up to six in total.

The second unit type are ‘troops’, and they’re non-unique, but unlimited and come in a variety of flavours – so there’s Servitors, which are mindless drones and cannon fodder designed to protect your more valuable units, to actual fully-fledged melee and ranged units. The Servitors are free, but other troops must be unlocked and paid for. Still on the ship, you can select missions to under-take from your advisors, of which there are six (one hidden). Each advisor has their own personality and flavour to the missions, so tech-aquistor Scaevola desires expending troops in favour of getting more technology, whilst the religious advisor will advise on cleansing and purging the xeno, usually with lots of fire. Relying heaviliy on one of the two principle advisors results in a unique ending, of which there are three in total.

The second part of the game happens when you select a mission and land on the planet. Here, you are taken to a map of the tomb that you’re exploring, and you basically explore the tomb room by room until you get to the objective room. This exploration is combined with RPG-events, if you enter a room you might find a dead body, or some technology. Your mission-advisor will give you advice and then you have three unique choices to make, each with a unique outcome that will either reward or punish you in some form. Rewards could be a shiny new item, or money, but punishment could be an initiative penalty in future battles meaning the enemy acts first etc. (FWIW I only had a repeated event twice in all 26 hours, I think the vast majority are unique events written specifically for each mission, that's a hell of a lot of work from an indie dev.)

To spice things up, there’s a soft timer going on in this phase. Every room you explore adds 2 points to a timer. When the timer hits five points it goes up one level, like an alarm. The higher the level, the more penalties you start facing. So, for example, level 2 will cause more enemies to spawn, and level 3 will cause them to revive quicker. This mechanic forces the player to decide on risk/reward, do we explore an extra room in hope of an item or get a move on so we can take on a weaker enemy?

The third phase of the game is the actual battle itself. When you reach an objective room, you get a fight. These are turn-based and square-grid battle-grounds. Think X-Com, except this game adds more twists: For one, movement and actions are unlimited so long as you have a resource called Cognition points.

If you don’t have cognition points, you can only move one movement phase and can only fire weapons that are ‘free’ to use. If you have CP you can take an extra movement phase on that unit, or fire CP-costing weapons.

This resource acts as a strategic force-multiplier, the more resource you farm, the more powerful one unit can be. For example, without CP, one unit can move and then shoot, but must end his turn. With five CP, that unit can move five times and shoot in any order, or move once, fire once, then use CP to fire two more times with other weapons and move three further move phases all on his own.

This resource management is vital because your units will always be outnumbered against some strong foes. So, knowing when to exploit the resource for additional movement or attacks is important. On top of this, the combat layer includes two types of attack and defence methods: Physical and Energy. If a troop has physical armour, you want to use energy weapons against them and vice versa, this encourages trying to diversify your forces and not blobbing into a singular build.

Whilst fighting on this battle map, the alarm I mentioned earlier increases by one point per round. You can reduce it by destroying certain items on the map, but I raise it because it’s important:

When you finish the main objective of the tomb, usually with a final fight, the remaining full levels of the alarm status is counted and added to a global timer of doom that starts at 0%. When you get to 100% the final boss fight force-starts, in short, you’re on a timer.

This means you must pick and choose your missions, and if you want to do as many missions as possible, you must do them with precise efficiency in order to keep the global timer down to buy yourself more time to go tomb raiding.

Each layer combines rather well, and once you get beyond the initial difficulty of early missions and sussing out the mechanics, what we have here is a very solid game with multiple layers of systems that actually work well together. I note, in the past the global timer went up by 3% minimum every mission, but the developer patched this out when fans complained as people wanted to do more missions. As a compromise it now goes up by the number on the alarm you get, from 0-10 etc. I thought this was a fair compromise, I feel the developer is correct that the timer mechanic makes sense and the game is based around it, it forces you to make choices and keep one eye on the clock for story reasons, but it does so without being too excessive for me.

Negatives? There’s some deadclicking when going through dialogue sometimes. There’s also difficulty using the mouse to move the camera via edge-scrolling, but this can be bypassed by using the keyboard.

All in all, I think this is a solid indie effort, one of the better 40k games out there as well, definitely check it out if you’re a 40k fan or if you’re into turn based tactical games.

• Summary / Next month

That's 4 games for September, which takes me to 61 games this year and 220 for all the time I've been on this sub. Happy days.

My next game is The House in Fata Morgana, and then, since it is October next, I'll probably divert into some horror games, probably The Evil Within just to keep with the theme.

Hope you enjoyed reading, and hope you progress well this month as well. Best of luck for your own progress and once again thanks for reading. :D

Submitted September 29, 2019 at 02:28PM by OdaNova https://ift.tt/2ojWnec