Recent reviews by dachte

Outer Worlds 1 was a pretty good game; the sequel takes it up several notches. It still has that sense of humour and neat worldbuilding, but now the combat feels good, the depth in the skill trees gives your player a lot of customisation, and the level design doesn't involve much asset reuse - every plays feels distinct. What they call the soundtrack is pretty good, but there are a lot of great songs on the radio stations for 3 factions in the game (filk style). I had a great time with playthrough 1, looking forward to starting my second go at it.

This is one of those very rare masterpieces (like Nier) that just gets everything right. Unforgettable music, satisfying combat, the chance to really geek out over builds (or you can skip that), a lot of optional content, lovable characters, and a plot that will really make you think. It also doesn't have even the slightest scent of design-by-committee that you see from most of the established studios.

If I had to find anything at all bad to say about it, if you really look you may find some graphics glitches or places where you can jump into a place it's hard to get back out of, but those are so minor that you won't notice them.

The game systems show a lot of promise, but the game is very irritating in how zany it wants to be. The character animation is irritating, the creatures look like nasty pugs, the voice is blood-curdling, and the writing and in-game movies are a total fail. Best to skip this one unless you can stand the style.

It's a good if flawed game that despite some very modern faults is worth your time. Music's good, the fight system is mostly pretty interesting (although you can only swap conscious characters for some reason), and the overall plot is decent if a little cliche. Build depth for characters isn't particularly deep, but it rarely is for the genre. It feels like a short game (even though it's not that short), and there's reasonable variation in area designs. There's nothing particularly objectionable in activism shoved in either. The only major critiques I'd offer is that it's fairly linear, there are no random encounters (it's in fact hard to grind), and that it's a little too polished and fair in most places in terms of signposting upcoming challenges; you will always get a glowy circle free restore right before a major battle, and you will generally know how much time an upcoming event will take. It's very fair in that sense, which some people see as a good thing but means the game won't ever surprise you in certain ways. It can be fun not to know what's ahead so much. It's not as bad on this as an Ubisoft game; they haven't turned it into a walking simulator, but good intentions have stripped some magic out. There's still a lot of magic there though.

Don't go in expecting a masterpiece like FF4 or FF6 (even though Quartet has had plenty of time to learn from those games, its relative shortcomings are likely deliberate). You'll still have a pretty good time; Quartet's enjoyable.

The combat system, on first glance, looks pretty decent. Unfortunately, the voice acting is often irritating and the character designs make many characters look like their neck and/or back is broken, which is incredibly distracting, and some of the designs seem primarily designed to appeal to furries. The initial "something urgent is happening" thing seems oddly unfocused, and the characters can just wander off and have weirdly disjointed conversations in a variety of towns (where they talk to someone maybe 25 feet away like that's normal). The game needed the equivalent of a very good editor to insist on revisions, to turn this into something worth your time. It shows promise, but promise is not good enough.

I love civlikes, from the best-of-breed SMAC to the Civ series to Humankind and Old World. It's great to see new entries in the genre. I'm glad Ara was made, although unfortunately it's not very good; it's worse than any of the above. It fails in a few ways.

First: I was excited to hear about micromanaging; that's normally really my thing, but this game takes it too far; the micromanaging of production of specific tools to spend on boosts in certain districts is extremely fiddly and doesn't scale to more than one or two cities without becoming incredibly cumbersome. I didn't know that there was a level of micromanaging that's too much for me, but apparently there is and Ara gets there.

Second, the UI is terrible. Fonts and dialogue boxes are way too big and cover too much of the screen (at 4k); they're always in the way. It's normal to need to get used to the interface with games in the genre, but Ara's UI is just bad. They may be able to fix this in later game versions.

Third, they commit to this "moves during a turn just state intent, and things take effect at the end of the turn". That's just not fun; it feels detached.

Fourth, and this is fairly minor (for me - for others it may be more annoying), the list of leaders makes no sense; while about a third are actual national leaders, the rest are just random historical figures who didn't control a nation. A medical doctor, some student activist who died in her 20s, a nun, these choices are bizarre.

Did the game do anything remarkably well? Not really. The other games I mentioned up top all added some cool ideas to the genre. Humankind added a nomadic era and civ-changing, Old World added a lot of great narrative events. SMAC added tons of stuff. Ara? Nothing that I can think of.

The music is decent. No complaints there.

Even if you're into the genre, it makes sense to skip this one.

Cute art style, a funky main character, challenging boss fights, and occasional breaks to play an "old atari game" style hacking game. The gamefeel is as good as most Wayforward games, with this one borrowing more from the metroidvania genre than most of their past works. It's good, and while I haven't finished it yet I'm getting the feeling that it's not very long. Not every game needs to be long though.

Has a lot of cute ideas and a certain amount of charm, but it's also really buggy (severe UI issues when switching between separate savefiles for characters), has some confusing concepts (again, that multiple-savefiles-somehow-interact thing), weird gender politics, and it either gives you a sudden game over after a certain bandit-cave section without explanation or that's the game not being done yet (and not having gotten an update for over a year). The UI issues also include making it too easy to tap past a conversation decision when you're just trying to advance a slow conversation. The music is good in parts but way too repetitive, and there are a lot of menial quests (particularly at the start, although there's a water-level-puzzle that's really, really annoying a few hours in). Some of these things are fixable, some of them look like deliberate choices, and it's unclear if they're still working on the game. Probably best to avoid this one.

(note that if there were something middling between yes and no, I'd probably give it that, and also note that the developer Mottzy is being really fantastic in his reponses to reviews - if I were reviewing him, I would not hesitate to give him a thumbs up)

On first glance, this is a game with cartoony graphics and a dated feel, but if you give it a chance it'll pull you in. The building mechanics are fun and reward the clever, there are a lot of character builds, and the game avoids the trap of going deep in uninteresting mechanics (quests are only as complex as they need to be). There's an interesting story to find if you're interested but you can mostly ignore it if you want. I'm hooked.

It's not bad, it's just pretty meh. The game had a lot of promise, but they just didn't implement it well, from the unexciting tech tree that demands nonsensical tradeoffs to the ubisoft "you WILL find all the clues and we will give you map markers sufficient to make it a walk+fight simulator" to the poorly thought out map design. A pity too, because the voice actors and wordbuilding are pretty interesting.