Py
October is almost gone
So this month started with me keeping on playing turn based strategic/rpg games:
- Lore / Story : So sci fi in space again. A new alien species arrive and decimate almost all the humans in you quadrant. Your base is the only surviving one, fight the invaders, see what happens with your neighbors, yada yada.
- Game mechanics : So there are 4 parts of the gameplay.
- Ship fight: The meat of the game. Fight are up to 3 ships vs up to 3 ships. You make a combination of Officers/ship on your side against whatever the ia uses. There is a whole system of status that you have to exploit to make the most damage. Some skill apply a status, some skills do more damage and remove a status if the target is affected by said status. So you have to equip the proper skills for your ship/officer to match well with one another. It works pretty well.
The only real bad stuff is that for some reason a bunch of boss have a capped damage they can take per attack. As such using the status system feels useless because you'll be way over the cap. - Overall map gameplay: Not that much to do. Go from your base to another point for a quest/fight. Build all the resource node you can, automate them and that's about it. You'll be crawling under resource in no time.
- Base management: Excavate the base and build stuff to be allowed to get more powerful ships. It's a bit lackluster because there isn't much to do in term of improving your ships. There are 2 research by ship. And that's it.
You can build consumables at some point, but they take the place of a passive stat upgrade found on your opponent. So it's pretty hard to use them.
And you'll end up having plenty of officer that have nothing better to do than stand in the productions rooms, making you get even more ressource. - Ground fight: This one feels pretty useless. It's like the ship fights, but worse. There is no stuff for it, it'll sometimes be you officer + 2 green shirt (mostly useless fodder), no way to estimate the strength of your opponents beforehand. And they don't happen very often.
- Ship fight: The meat of the game. Fight are up to 3 ships vs up to 3 ships. You make a combination of Officers/ship on your side against whatever the ia uses. There is a whole system of status that you have to exploit to make the most damage. Some skill apply a status, some skills do more damage and remove a status if the target is affected by said status. So you have to equip the proper skills for your ship/officer to match well with one another. It works pretty well.
- Character progression : So as said before, you'll unlock ship tiers. In each tier 2 ships by base class exists, with different stats. There are 3 base class (how convenient with 3 spot in the fight) and they can fork into another at some point.
There is a whole skill tree with branch/nodes to unlock/improve special abilities and get some passives boosts. This also includes power for ground combat that you're going to use like 3 or 4 times in the whole game.
The character progression is nice in the early/mid game and becomes a bit stale at the end. - Difficulty / Length : Played the game in the 3rd difficulty (out of 8) because it was indicated to be the one for experienced players. Was pretty easy up until the last encounter that was a bit harder (multiple fight in a row with damage cap). It's the only one that made me reload.
Took me about 15 hours to finish the game. But the last 5 hours were pretty boring. The gameplay loop was figured out and nothing exciting to feel like you're making progress. Had to use the building made for speeding up the game and because of that (I suppose?) I didn't even get the Tier 5 ships. - Conclusion : The game has some solid base but it lacks a little bit in polish in some aspects (ground combat and the base management feels lacking).
The end game is very boring aside from the last fight (from a dev blog, lightspeed edition did remove 10 hours of grind compared to the base edition. I don't even want to try it).
- Lore / Story : It's sci fi in space. That's about it. The story is the classic steal super powered stuff and flee the authorities with different options along the way.
- Game mechanics : It's FTL meet XCOM on a budget. You travel on a space map from one point to another and do encounters XCOM style on said points.
The Map part is a bit bland. You get quests, but all the quests can be resumed to "go to given point, optional fight, reward". You can explore, but most explorations end up in an encounter.
You can go to stations to repair/sell/buy stuff/get quests. As for the tactical part, it's the classic XCOM approach. Advance, trigger pod, kill pod, repeat. There are different objectives, but they all feel the same.
The opponent also greatly lack in variety. There are ranged opponents, melee opponents and neither possess any real capacity (well there are a few healers but...), just different stats/skins.
Only some boss/story map had a little bit of variance. - Characters progression : So there are two part here. The "in a run" progression and the roguelike progression.
The "in a run" progression feels a bit underwhelming, there are 7 levels, you unlock some points to spend in perks, but it doesn't change much. For all the class I tested, you take like 2/3 points from the class and the rest in the passives attributes that everyone takes (like reloading not ending your turn to allow reload then fire is a perk).
The equipment is just getting bigger numbers. Equipment are (in theory) preferred by a class, but it's only a 5% accuracy bonus (and you're in general above 80% accuracy) so not much.
You can also make some stuff on your ship. Impact isn't really there because you've done it all really quickly.
The roguelike progression is a lot more enticing. You can unlock endgame equipment, new starting classes / ship and new game modes. You win enough to unlock one or two thing by run. - Difficulty / Length : A story run is quite short (less than 3 hours). And the difficulty (in the base mode) isn't really here.
Tested another mode and the difficulty was very uneven. Went from maps with 2 pods of 3 single target units to 1 pod of twelve with a lot of aoe. - Conclusion : While the game is decent, the melange just doesn't catch. On the roguelike part there isn't that feeling that you're going to end up short like in FTL or that you'll need to retry with a different approach. I just kinda steamrolled through the game in my first run and don't really see the point of trying again.
As for the XCOM part, It's always going to be the same kind of dull fights, with the same kind of character/ship progression. There isn't the tension that you'd get in an XCOM game from opponents with new capacity, special objectives that make you take another approach in fights and so.
One thing that bothers me a bit for the unlocks, is that you need to unlock game modes. You can't at the same time get a new game mode to try and either a new ship/class. So it's either a new game mode with classes you already know or a new class in a mode you already know.
But I got it for 1€, it was worth trying.
And then onto two completely different games
- Lore / Story : So you play a grim reaper with fancy dancing skills. And he solves puzzle to kill people. Also he's in love with a sort of angel.
- Game mechanics : You run through different screens for each of your kills. In each there are two type of interraction:
1/ you can move/interract with different objects on the scene.
2/ you can switch the sun direction (between two presets direction).
Because you can only move in the shadows, all the gameplay resolves around the different combinations you can do to change the shape of the shadows to accomplish your objective.
There are also time trials levels. They exacerbate all the things I don't like about the game (timing + unresponsive controls) - Difficulty / Length : It's taken me about 7 hours to do the main game. And 5 hours more to do the hardcore part + time trials. I ended up stuck only once or twice in all the levels.
There is a bit of added difficulty if you want all the achievements, because you'll have to do an almost perfect run in each "normal" level.
The hardcore versions of the levels seems a bit more fun to me because you don't have to optimize your every move for the achievements. Although you can end up in situation where you can't solve the level and have to restart it, so in that sense they're a bit harder :D . - Conclusion : It's a good puzzle game, but it lacks depth, there was the potential do to a lot more with either the sun/shadows or the dance.
I was a bit bothered by the fact that you had to optimize everything in the "normal" mode and as such it was less enjoyable than "hardcore" mode. And time trials sucks.
The fact that the hero dancing skills have no use besides animations is also a bit of a letdown.
- Lore / Story : Basically the same setting as in LiS season 1. But before. Because the story is everything in this game, I won't go into the details, but I'm still going to judge it a bit.
So it's a prequel in which they chose to go with the "we'll have a story that will just explain a bit but won't impact the original material". It's a bit detrimental, because you end up knowing that whatever you did for the big plot won't change the story in LiS.
But because it's supposed to be 0 impact, a lot of small decisions you make end up not being in line with what happens in LiS.
Also some background/story don't seem to match between the two games.
I don't know if it's better to play this one or LiS first. I guess this one first for the story, and LiS first for the interest you can have towards characters. - Game mechanics : It's a point and click. And it's a really easy one at that. There isn't the whole time manipulation thingy of the season 1.
The only real added mechanism is some sort of dialog fight (reminds me a bit of Monkey Island). - Difficulty / Length : It's not difficult and takes about 10/11 hours.
- Conclusion : It's an awesome game if you like good stories. It's one of those rare game where I felt emotionally invested in the main character. That's helped by the fact that I knew what would happen and how life (well the writers in facts) decided to throw everything and the kitchen sink at her.
Also it made me change my perceptions of some other characters in season 1, which I didn't think would happen at the start (especially because it made me change my perception of the main character of season 1. Ghosting your best friend is not really nice)
Interesting review for LiS: BtS. Your note about it giving more perspective on Max’s actions is interesting; she wasn’t a particularly dynamic lead but even in LiS you could see that some of her implied past actions weren’t ideal. It’s nice to see they fleshed those hints out into something more substantial.
I haven’t been able to decide if I want to give this prequel a try or not. Like a lot of people, I was disappointed with how the first game ended and a prequel just seemed destined to suffer the same problem of choices ultimately not mattering much. Also, I know that Chloe was a fan favorite but I never really liked the character much. With such a narrative driven story, feeling annoyed with the player character seems like it would take a lot of the enjoyment out of it. Guess I’m going to continue to dither about whether I want to try this game! =P
I kinda liked the way they did it for Max. Like it’s never shown directly in game, but if you check the SMS/story in the menu, you can see it a bit more.
They also added a “bonus” chapter that’s only available with the deluxe edition of the prequel that tells the story of the day max left (haven’t played it cause i only have the base edition).
Yeah I feel you for the story choice not mattering much in the grand scheme of things. Like only the last choice really matters and you’ll end up facing it whether you like it or not. The fact that there is no real branching seems like it’s a big pit for narrative driven game nowadays (be it telltale games or LiS).
The character of Chloe is a bit more nuanced in this one I feel (well because she’s the pc she has a bit more depth). But in the end she’s still a rebel teen, angry against (most of) the world.
Yeah, exactly! I know there are a lot of rumors that the studio just ran out of money before the 5th Episode of LiS (because of the reused assets and so forth) and that’s why it’s conclusion was so meh, but it’s really been a trend in a lot of narrative games. I can excuse railroading in most games because even the story-rich ones are trying to tell a cohesive story that takes players to a certain end point. But the entire point of a narrative experience game is that the players choices shape the world. Taking away that choice just makes the entire game feel pointless in a way that it doesn’t for other genres.
Thanks for the insight into Chloe, that helps alleviate some of my concerns. I didn’t mind that she was a rebellious teen; sure it’s been done to death in fiction but that’s because it’s happens so regularly in real life. But she seemed so cookie-cutter in the first game, just checking off all the “angsty, rebellious teen” tropes, that I was worried she couldn’t carry an entire game herself.
Yeah she’s definitely more than that in this one. They explore (a bit) the relation with David and her mom on one side but the crux of the story is based upon her relationship with Rachel (and we get to know a lot more about Rachel obviously).