I didn’t think a game could have much less tactical options than the Shadowrun Returns games, but oh boy, did I get proven wrong quickly.

• Overfoil
  

  9 hours playtime

  7 of 50 achievements

This is a roguelike RPG. After being told the story’s basic premise, you’re thrown into the world with no direction. It seems aimless and confusing at first, but you’ll soon find out that there isn’t really that much to the game: there are various islands scattered around the map, and landing on one triggers a random sidequest based on the inhabitants and/or the terrain (so you can get the same sidequest on different playthroughs). Most of the time, this just results in a few dialogue trees that put you back on the map with whatever reward the sidequest offers in less than a minute, but if you do get into combat, you’ll find that it consists of little more than a basic hex grid, your units, and the enemy’s units. There’s no larger or smaller maps, and only rarely are certain tiles made inaccessible via walls or pits (there are no other tiles besides “ground” and “not ground”), so individually speaking, battles are never that challenging. The trick is that healing items are uncommon and can’t be used during battle, while healing spells only consist of slow regen (2 HP after 2 turns) on top of having cooldowns, and they can’t be used outside of battle. In other words, if you get into too many battles, you’ll die via attrition, and since this is a roguelike, losing just once sends you all the way back to the beginning. In other words, not only is combat dull and lacking in strategy, but you’re also encouraged to avoid as many fights as you can due to the permanent-death mechanic, meaning you’ll only really like this game if you’re okay with bare-bones exploration and simplistic dialogue choices (often, the only time the “correct” answer isn’t obvious is when all of the dialogue choices sound stupid).

As for the combat mechanics themselves, each character has a move phase, an ability phase, and an attack phase, in that order (so you can’t attack first and then move on the same turn). As is common in RPGs, attacks can have a percent chance to miss or deal critical damage, and some moves have a percent chance to apply status effects, but this game goes one step further with attributes. Basically, after a battle, your team members can get permanent (for that run) stat changes based on what happens, but this can be even more random. If a team member dies, you might get an attribute that lets you deal more damage against whatever type of enemy killed said member OR end up with an attribute that lowers your stats if another member dies! If one character happens to miss a bunch during one battle (which is already something that’s out of your control), the game could decide to give that character a permanent drop in accuracy! If you win a battle with low health, that character might get a permanent drop in movement range! Honestly, why do people like roguelikes? Is it purely for the thrill of randomness, of not knowing whether all of your skill and knowledge of past runs can be made irrelevant by the game randomly screwing you over?

However, I think what bothered me the most was the ending. The whole game, you’re trying to find the Everking, and when you finally get there, you’re stopped by an old man who lets you know that the Everking was the bad guy the whole time (which you’d already kinda know if you’d fought the Vorn King already). Does the game let you fight the final boss, who is literally standing right there in front of you at this point in the narrative? Nope, the game ends your current run and expects you to start all over again. Yeah, no thanks.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it, but at the same time, I kinda recognize that the game isn’t really made for me (but at the same time who IS it made for?). I wouldn’t have gotten the game if I realized it focused less on the actual tactics and more on roguelike-style retrying and world-building (which IMO doesn’t get much focus, either). At least I got it for free.