Py
September/August clears
First a game I had started a while ago and that I needed to start anew. (with the director’s cut instead)
- Lore / Story : Post apocalypse in the western US. No big surprise in the lore, it falls within the clichée of the genre. Story is quite classic as well, with some twist here and there. You have different resolutions options for some of the big towns, so in this regard you can feel the impact of the player (mostly in the end game screens). You have 4 no name character and up to 3 companions that have some special interraction. They do react to some stuff you do, and are a nice addition in certain plot points.
- Game mechanics : The combat part of the game is classic turn based stuff. Each character acts by initiative order and has a certain number of action point to act. Nothing revolutionnary, but it does the job. Though the different weapons seems a bit unequals in term of combat efficiency. Out of combat, it's another story. There is either a hard cap to surpass (for conversation) or you have a percentage of chance based upon you skill/the obstacle difficulty. It's quite frustrating (like failing a 91% check) and leads to some save/load. You can even be tempted to save scum for low percent chance. Especially once you reach the max possible level on the skill and there are still check that are only 25% chance.
- Character progression : That part feels a bit lackluster. First during the creation, you chose your stats. They are wholy unequals. Intelligence brings you more skill points / level and as such is one of the best stats. On the other hand charisma doesn't do much and the combat stats can be a bit optimized (the skills are more important tho). You can chose some perks but they are pretty unequals in usefulness. And as the game progress, if you start with high int, you'll max your skill quickly enough (but you want that for the out of combat tests) that you'll have spare points to spend. But they are somehow usefull because you unlock perks (that are gated behind a skill level) and they are wholy unequals. Some of them are really usefull, others totally useless. Also the xp split is a bit weird. Combat XP is totally shared, but not out of combat XP. Because of the way some skill gives XP, one of my character had a 2 level advantages over some other by the end of the game. Equipment progression is so/so. You don't have much to do aside of "that weapons deals more dmg/action point, so i'll take it" or "that's more protection, i'll take it". You do have some finetuning to do with the mods on the weapons.
- Difficulty / Length : The difficulty 2 and 3 (out of 4) are difficult enough that you'll get some challenging fight, but you won't need to reload quite often. Only the final battle had me in a bit of pinch (because my usual strategy didn't work at all in this case). The game is quite long, took me about 50 hours to do almost every side quest + the main game.
- Conclusion : It's a decent game. The way the core of the game works, it's probably not worth a second playthrough to test all the other story options.
And after that, I had three win in SG to bring me back to “Overall, you’ve been neither lucky or unlucky,”
- Lore / Story : It's the warhammer 40K lore. And the story is close to non existent.
- Game mechanics : Classic turn based fighting with each team taking turns. Before each map of the campaign, you chose what unit you're taking out of the pool of available units for this specific map. The balance in this game makes the gameplay really weird. Some units are broken as fuck while others are barely useful. Like if I had the choice, I'd take way more than the 3 allowed land speeders. Each map is (in theory) based upon Victory point control. In the end you often end up killing every opponent before the end. There is some sort of cover mechanism, but you'll find yourself not using them, either because you have tanky as fuck unit or unit that can move a lot. And without DLC, you can only play the Empire campaign. As such the gameplay becomes quite repetitive.
- Unit progression : This is a bit lacking. Unit start level 1 and can only progress to level 4. You have to pick one out of two skills taht are taken out of a pool at every level up. As such units can get some godly upgrade or some totally useless upgrades. And because of the balance mentioned above, the better units reach level 4 quite quickly while the others lag behind, making the difference even worse.
- Difficulty / Length : I only made one campaign with the story maps in medium and the skirmish in the hard difficulty. Had to reload only once because a scripted ork spawn took a lot of my units away. So the game ain't that hard. Took me about 15 hours. I guess it could be longer if you buy the dlc or do another campaign but it doesn't seem worth it because you'll fall in the same pit as the current campaign.
- Conclusion : The balance makes the game a tad uninteresting. And having only one faction without buying DLCs doesn't really help.
- Lore / Story : You follow the story of a german resistance group during different time period in the third reich. I'm no history expert but the news/dialog interaction can provide some sort of insight in the everyday life of german people during this period.
- Game mechanics : Every cycle you send your team to do some stuff on the map of berlin (alone or as a team and with or without equipment), they'll have different chance of success/being caught depending on their stats. But as you have no real objectives outside of surviving (like there are big objectives for every chapter, but I don't even know if it's needed to do them) the gameplay loop becomes quickly repetitive (gather money/supporters/diminish heat). The interface is sorely lacking in indication about what you can do with certain items from your inventory. Like in the first chapter you can buy paint. But you don't need it before chapter 2. And you don't keep what you got from one chapter to another. Some items are used by missions, some are not. It's up to you to find which one. Sometime the mission will trigger a choice if you want to keep doing the mission, retreat or doing only a little bit. There are no real downside to choosing "keep doing it" every time, and it's way better for the rewards. You also have daily events and some events are totally RNG and can feel a bit unjust. Like in two days, a two events chain made one of my guy disappear. Had to reload to avoid it messing with an achievment and I ended up not having the same event.
- Character progression : Once again, the interface is sorely lacking. The characters gain XP. You have no idea how much or when they're going to level up. You just know when a level up happened. Then you increase one stat. They are totally uneven. Some stats are used for about half or more of the missions. Other barely makes an appearance.
- Difficulty / Length : It's a short game, the basic mode can be a bit though for the first two chapters, the time for you to understand how to make things work. And then it's a breeze.
- Conclusion : While it's interesting for the historical point of view (and to make some parallel with current events) the game interface and lack of solid gameplay makes for a rather bad game.
- Lore / Story : The story takes place in the Arthurian legends, but it's focused on his father (Uther) which we don't see that often. Story wise nothing really special happens. The story is linear and despite playing with 8 companions that have some personality (mostly seen in between levels), you end up not knowing much about what happens to them after which makes them feel a little bit emptier
- Game mechanics : There are a dozen level in which you explore/fight. The fighting system is a classic "your team acts within its capacity, then the opponent acts". The special capacity of your team make it quite dynamic and interesting. But there is one big flaw. You have 8 character to chose from and you can only bring 4 by level. There is only one character that can unlock loot chest for free. Only one that has a basic attack that is ranged. Only one that heal others. As such the party composition is very gimped. You're enticed to vary your team comp a bit with one bonus objective by level that is related to one character. But I found myself bringing the same base characters to almost every level. Another weird thing is that the game makes you loot a lot of consumable and you have a limited inventory. So you end up keeping a lot of them "just in case" (why would the game give them otherwise). And a lot of them are, in the end, totally useless (like there were some to cure a condition that I never even faced).
- Character progression : This one is also a bit lacking. You don't gain XP per character, you have a global xp pool that is shared among the team and that can be spent to unlock a skill for a character. There is no order, you can unlock whatever skill you want as long as you have enough xp. There are plenty of skill to chose from (about 8 actives and 3 passives per character), but you can only bring 4 per character. And as a consequence from the above point about the party composition, you quickly have a party that has optimal skills. The stuff doesn't change much because it's more often than not just a stat upgrade that you'll buy from the merchant.
- Difficulty / Length : It's a short game and the difficulty is alright. Some fight are a bit bothersome because an opponent can one-shot one of your guy with little to no counter-play and then you're missing the guy for the rest of the level. But the levels are still doable with only 3.
- Conclusion : Decent game, would have gained a bit by making you need to do some real character choice and changed the way the skill progression works to avoid you having your optimal skill build 4 or 5 mission in.
I’ve played Wasteland 2 DC a while ago and I agree with many points you raise. It was frustrating to max out a skill and still have such low success chances. And I ended up building up a team of characters that were extremely specialized, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do anything in the endgame…It was a bit frustrating that you basically have to stick to one predefined route of character progression or fail a lot in the later stages of the game…
Yeah, I remembered that from my first start (like 2 or 3 years ago). I had to save scum so many times because I hadn’t optimized my skills. I think taht’s one of the reason why I stopped.
This time around I made my starting characters with 8/8/10/10 in int, most of the game was really a walk in the park for out of combat test.