jeff 最近的评测

it's early access, so incomplete, but what's here is good and the team is solid and responsive.

Tight and smooth strategy RPG game, in the vein of classic Fire Emblem. The gritty low fantasy setting and plot aren't particularly groundbreaking, but are executed with quality and anchored by believable and interesting characters. Almost all of the lore outside of the main story comes through support conversations, which benefit from a sense that each character has a great amount of thought put into their writing and backstory even if we only see parts of it.

Mechanics are a bit less convoluted than some similar games in the genre - no cavalry, no magic, ranged combat is pretty simplistic - but the twin mechanics of 'block' (temporary HP based on shields) and maneuvering/unit-facing on a hex-tile map form a robust basis for satisfying tactical combat that's incredibly punishing of over-extending and other foolish mistakes. There are also a sprinkling of status effects which can be situationally deeply impactful, but require a lot of investment to get proper builds going.

I'd say there are three main 'flaws' in the game that might frustrate a potential player:

The first is that the game lacks some of the 'difficulty as accessibility' type features some of the more modern entries in the genre have, such as mid-battle checkpoints and 'rewind' type effects. You CAN turn perma-death off, but if you're one of those sickos who wants to play with perma-death and also never let anyone die (like me) you'll be doing a lot of chapter restarts. There also isn't any 'exp share' or level scaling for benched units.

The second is that, especially in the midgame, party/inventory management can be kind of a pain. The roster is a generous size, with new units appearing up until the last few chapters, but if you aren't taking regular casualties, the extra heads just sit on your bench. Units have a weight-based inventory system that's very restrictive in the early game, and pinned around some very fun and powerful 'trinket' type items, but once you have a bunch of them, it's a pain trying to scroll through them all and swap them out from character to character to craft new builds.

The third 'flaw' isn't really a 'flaw' so much as a result of the game being almost entirely a one-man project (impressive!) which is that the game is very limited in scope - no optional missions, no sidequests (aside from optional objectives within existing missions, which are fun) - and if your favorite characters aren't the ones that matter to the plot, you probably aren't going to hear more than a single support conversation or two from them. I think this was the right choice by the dev - giving players a narrower experience that's well-polished and deliberate rather than going all over the place - but I can't help but wish for MORE, which of course speaks to the high quality of the content that we do see.

Oh also there is one secret fourth flaw, which is that the primary protagonist's name is 'Slyker.' You have a cast of pretty believable mishmash of low-fantasy names from different cultures (Marcus, Finn, Shiva, Sven, Phoebe, Abigail) and then you have 'Slyker.' That's his name, he's Slyker, and that's what everyone calls him. Maybe his parents thought he was going to do a lot of 'slyking' in his life, whatever that means. (Maybe I'm just ignorant as to the origin of the name but it made me giggle every time I imagined someone saying it)

Overall, it's a satisfying and well-tuned strategy RPG that knows what its own limitations are and excels within them. And by a (basically) solo dev! What's not to love?

good

good

is good

Played it for 4 hours, thought "this is a slow start but I can see it getting good soon," played for another 2 hours, "wait it's not getting better, maybe there's some twist towards the end?" played for another 2 hours "oh it's over. That was mid." 2/5

Fun art style but gets old fast. Game basically plays itself on normal, and I didn't see an option to play a 'hard mode' - if it gets unlocked after beating the game, I'll pass; there's basically no replayability as there are only 10 missions total (12 or 13 if you count the tutorial, which you shouldn't), and nothing like a 'skirmish' mode that I could see. Maybe replaying a mission lets you skip the cutscenes/dialogue but I didn't care enough to see. I only lost a mission twice, once because I misunderstood the win condition (my fault, but not exactly an intentional challenge) and once because I deliberately picked the worst starting location I could find to see what would happen (the answer: nothing really, and then you lose)

I could be ok with mediocre gameplay if there was a strong narrative, but the game doesn't seem to have much to say besides "haha aren't people stupid and/or evil?" I get that the 'pulp' style typically has pretty flat characters and kind of nonsense plots, but it got boring quickly since it didn't have really meaty gameplay to fall back on - see Tropico for a game with a similar narrative style but (more) complex gameplay. There are hints of some more interesting stuff with the Zeppelin and Mae Ludd, but most of the narrative is just terrible people making quips at each other and then a page or two of a classic-style comic book.

The aesthetic is fun, and there are hints of interesting mechanics in the game - you just don't need to bother exploring them because there's so little difficulty. It feels like an overlong demo for a full game (I expected the "real story" to come after the three provided campaigns finished) but there is no full game.

Also, while the game is very unsubtle in its critiques of reactionary social movements (it lampoons evangelists and anti-immigrant nationalists), the first campaign being "An Evil Pharmaceutical Scientist Fakes A Worldwide Pandemic to Get Famous" is either just comically tone-deaf or deliberately playing into the same kind of reactionary politics the other campaigns make fun of. I think the former is actually more likely, because the campaign ALSO rips into anti-vax movements, but it's just an eyebrow-raising framing.

Also none of the critique (for any cause or ideology) is particularly funny or interesting; as I said at the top, the only thing the game seems interested in saying is "haha aren't people stupid and/or evil?"

Honestly I think that if this game took a pivot into being a roguelike or at least rogue-lite, it'd be a lot more interesting. Some of the design feels like that was part of the original intention (agent stats, 'Somber Place' location modifiers, cut+paste legends, 'rival' dialogue that's incredibly generic), but for whatever reason that's not what we ended up with.

pls devs let me open my inventory and check my loadout during missions.

The narrative structure of this game is utter garbage with side quests and content being locked off without warning or the ability to go back if you progress too far in the story (at multiple random points, not like some "Point of No Return" at the very end, no, THAT has a warning). On top of it all, the ending sequence is one of the worst I've ever seen in ANY game, period. Meaningless difficulty spike (I was playing on nightmare mode all game, able to take out bandit camps and entire rooms of infected, then I got to the final section and started dying in 3 or 4 hits to a bunch of enemies with absurd levels of health), and EVERY story thread gets pretty much dropped. I won't go into spoilers, but NONE of the characters' plans make ANY sense. TWO of the FOUR endings are essentially COMPLETELY IDENTICAL (down to the same scenes with red banners swapped for blue ones), despite those two endings being for choosing between two individuals with diametrically opposed ideologies. The fascist ending is the fascist ending, but the hedonist/anarchist ending? actually also a fascist ending. Maybe the devs were trying to make some point about "power" and "authoritarianism" and "two sides of the same coin," but it was done so sloppily and lazily, especially because that means basically only TWO of the choices you make throughout the game actually matter- the one right at the very end, and who you give the radio transmission too (despite that being the least dramatic choice).

To top it off, massive story points are ignored until the ending powerpoint, where they get a line of text, IF that. Including the surprise reveal that two characters that are supposed to be VERY DEAD are actually fine! Surprise!

The game is a great parkour and combat sandbox, but it advertised itself as a story driven RPG with meaningful narrative and consequential choices, and it totally fails to deliver. The game stumbles through it's first two acts with some awkward but promising concepts, then trips, sprawls onto the concrete, and takes a dump on its own face in the final segment.

And the final boss- God, what a terrible final boss. As I said, I played through the entire game on nightmare, but I switched to easy for this fight because it was so obnoxious. Pretty much NONE of your parkour or combat kit are useable in this fight, which has 4 - FOUR!! - segments, each only barely different from the last, including a final segment where you chase the boss for 40 seconds and then mash attack until he falls over. The best thing to do is just go in with a boatload of molotovs or arrows, but I didn't come prepared for that - oh, and also if you die, the game restarts the stage of the boss fight WITHOUT returning any of the consumeables you used - so I had to just go in and beat my (max level and max modded) weapons into his face while constantly getting hit with knockback attacks that are incredible difficult to dodge - and often, even if you do dodge, you fall off the very tiny platform you are fighting him on and have to climb back up! ANY narrative suspense or immersion remaining was destroyed by this segment. It was tedious, it didn't make use of any skills or mechanisms the game encourages you to use in other segments, and it had FOUR. STAGES. You have to drain his health bar FOUR!!!!! TIMES!!!!! WHY?? His abilities and attacks barely even change!

This game can be a phenomenal city-running and zombie-kicking experience, and if that's all it tried to be, I'd be happy, even with a poorly designed final boss. (After all, Dying Light 1's final boss was a QTE). But it says it isn't. It says it has story and characters that matter, and it doesn't. None of it makes sense. The antagonists' reasonings are nonsense. Everyone is a terrible ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

and Honestly? The first section of the game has some interesting story concepts! Consistent NPCs fill out the world - a character in the background of one side quest will recognize you when you meet them in another side quest. Dialogue changes reasonably dynamically with changes to the game world. But once you get out of Old Villedor, it all disappears.

It's a 5/10. When they fix locking you out of content without warning at various stages of progression, It could be a 6/10. If you go in for just the parkour, there's a lot for you - after you grind through the skill tree, anyway - but elsewise, avoid unless significantly on sale.

Best narrative/characters/writing in the series, hands down.

A circus performer begged me to find a used spindle to trade for a human heart and it was probably one of the least interesting things to happen.