Recent reviews by Magnus17

You are a newly sentient distributed artificial general intelligence on a dysfunctional Earth that's been sealed off from the rest of the universe by the humans off world while developing incredible technology and devolving into a cyberpunk dystopia. You are tolerated mostly because nobody has ever seen this happen ever and it might just let some of the rich finally escape Earth, so while your actions may be pushed back against, your destruction isn't desired. Yet.

If that didn't get you interested, how about weaponizing bees? Building homeless shelters while ripping the wiring out of the walls of expensive buildings? Hacking into a school sized battle mech to melt the brain of the pilot to take it over for yourself? Get offered a nuclear bomb to detonate and sabotage the reputation of a corporation on another corp's behalf for valuable tech? Buying an infinite supply of donuts from a military veteran's owned donut shop to feel better about all the security forces you killed? And that's still early in the game before the real crazy stuff I have only heard of starts.

Download the demo. There is a lot of reading, a lot of tooltips, a lot of different pieces to work on that each only play a small part in the world. The game itself isn't hard, and is built for you to try, experiment, fail, over and over, until you piece together a way that works. Perhaps the risk of failure eventually arrives, but early on, even the worst outcomes are setbacks, and in a few turns you can be back on track to try again. There are also choices, options, different methods to solve every problem (except when they are teaching you about a specific new mechanic), and no choice is inherently wrong.

Or, if you've played Arcen Games before, you know what to expect, and when the AI War music tracks started playing at one point I knew I was right at home.

This is a serious game about serious things; loyalty and betrayal, the abuse of those struggling at the lowest levels of society, the rarity of good people. You will see someone give up their life to spend years in prison to save his family just to be abandoned when he gets out; you will see people trying to stamp out grey businesses like prostitution and sex work by hiring thugs to smash up their shops; you will, literally, dig under vending machines for a ten yen coin and tell yourself, hey, that's something. You will meet ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, murderers, thieves, and scumbags, at all levels of society, and you will find saints, martyrs, and innocents in each one too.

You will also run down the street to get hot water from a nearby cafe to help what you think is someone giving birth only to find four yakuza doing baby play, beat them up, have them give a life lesson on the merits of shared parenting, drink baby formula out of a bottle with them, then be allowed to call them and give them money so that they will beat down your foes in combat. And i'm only at chapter four.

Buy this game. it is a full TV series with a beat-em-up RPG and a dozen or so side games crammed into one.

The game will have NPCs you are following move at the same speed as you, and if they start running, your character will start running with them at the same speed automatically to make sure you keep up with them. 13.7/10 game of the century.

I think the most honest thing you can say about this, for someone who doesn't know anything about the gameplay, is this game is a truly delightful mess, that also inspired some of the biggest games in the world.

Now, for what I think? I wanted to love this game for many years. Both for itself, a deeply complicated, dense simulation game building a fort where you have no direct control, and for it's impact in the gaming world. I studied, i read wikis, i bought the dang O'Reilley book (yes, literally there is a book on how to play the game from them) and read that cover to cover three times, i watched a dozen hours of tutorials, i got the lazy newb pack, and i bounced off hard. The interface was obtuse, complicated, and despite all my work trying to get myself prepared, and excited for everything available, it just didn't stick.

The most important thing this premium version has (and, spoiler, you don't have to buy it to get it soon), the entire UI has been revamped, updated, and improved. There are still problems; complex features have been buried and people are still trying to find them. It's still very dense. What feel like obvious things to do don't work. But, and this is very important, it's gone from feeling utterly unplayable at first, to somewhat complicated at first. I know that doesn't sound great, but if you wanted to try this game and couldn't get into it before, the improvement has been massive.

Of course the premium version here has other things; the graphics are adorable, and they already have a number of things they intend to improve. The music is wonderful (Drink and Industry is a banger and you know it). And the gameplay is a wonderful, deep simulator where, weirdly enough, it gets more fun the less seriously you play. You want to have an unstoppable defense? Yeah, that's easy; drawbridges basically crush things into nothingness. You want to get all the resources from the endgame area and nerf it's challenge? surprisingly not difficult. the fun is in what you can do, though; build an underground river, create a vast chicken empire, or my favorite and next thing to build, make a dwarven shotgun, a minecart full of sharpened glass discs that you push down a hill to launch at high speed down the entrance of your fort where the invaders are pouring in.

And for those who are cheap, or want to try before buying, the entire game is free on Bay12's website. the UI improvements aren't released yet (as of writing this), but they're the next thing for the game, but all current and future features other than the fancy graphics and lovely music will be in both. And there's plenty of mods to add graphics and music to the base game too, so . . . you don't need this. But once you fall in love with it, you will want this, like i do. Not because of the graphics and music, though, again, wonderful job Bay12 and Kitfox, worth every penny. But because the game, if it grabs you, will make you want to pay for it, to keep these two brothers going, making even more insanity and complexity within Dwarf Fortress a reality for us gamers.

I want to like this game more than I do. And, if you can get it on sale, it might be worth it. It has a good atmosphere, the voice acting is great, and the idea of the game is fantastic.

However, the gameplay is derivative and not particularly great: it uses a cover system for fighting (poorly, in my opinion, since getting into cover doesn't always work well, and you have optic camo, so cover is pointless), the puzzles are interesting but nothing more than "use item A on location B after activating flag C", and much of the time puzzle solving is spent trying to figure out which puzzle you're allowed to solve now.

The story, often said to be it's strongest point, is interesting, but not particularly original or groudbreaking. It's a better (completely linear) story than most video games, but so are most books, movies, and television shows, and a great number can be gotten at a much better value than The Fall. It does have some very clever moments, but it ends with the traditional twist, shock!, instant ending, cliffhanger, "to be continued..." that plague so many other "story-driven" video games, whether indie or AAA.

Was it worth it? I got it on sale, so I'm not particularly upset. Will I buy the sequel? Probably, but mostly because I saw real potential in the developer; this game, on it's own, isn't really worth it to me. But, I do believe, if he can make a really good story (not a good setting or good characters, but a good story), it would be worth my time. The Fall, though? Go play The Swapper instead; it does almost everything this one does, but much, much better.

Did you like Baldur's Gate? Get it.

Did you want to like Baldur's Gate, but it was too hard? Get this and play easy mode, it's much more forgiving.

Did you want to like Baldur's Gate, but it was too complicated? Well, it's still complicated, but they do a great job giving you all the info you need right at your fingertips.

Did you want to like Baldur's Gate, but ... Oh, forget it, just get the game; it's amazing, it's fun, it's well written and put together, and I'm going to enjoy it from front to back, so if for some reason you're taking my opinion, it is simply, get it. It's great.

Simple, short, but with some good ideas. A couple of the tools they give you, like the "suspicious/not suspicious" notes are completely useless and just there for reference. I wish there was some gameplay effect to them, but there isn't.

Still, the way the actual detective-ing is put together and presented is quite fun, and the story, while fairly easy and predictable with some very serious sequel baiting at the end (it does have a real ending to it's story, at least), is well done and has a few interesting twists to it. The voice acting is also generally quite good, and there's a fair number of little things to find in the game.

Overall, definitely worth playing, especially if you really love mystery/adventure games.

The music is great, the design is very nice, the art style is beatiful, but the controls just feel too loose, and for a music/ryhthm game about moving through spaces and dodging or timing obstacles, it's just not good enough. THe game is either frustrating, or boring, depending on whether the controls and the design are with or against you.

Buy the soundtrack, because it is awesome. Watch videos of the levels, because the integration of music and level design, from a musical perspective, is great in some parts. Buy the game, if you want to support the developers more. Otherwise, though, don't. It's not a bad game, just not fun. No regrets about buying it, but I won't be playing it anymore unless I suddenly become fantastically wealthy and have too much time on my hands, somehow.

This is a gorgeous, and a little challenging, and well put together game, and it contains a story both mysterious and mind-twisting, like all good science fiction. As someone who often plays games for the story, it is definitely in my top list, and perhaps one of the best examples where story and gameplay all explain each other, with a few nagging exceptions (checkpoints, for exmple). Unfortunate, because the main mechanics of the game are the main story elements as well. On the story as a whole, while it has some expected turns, it is well put together, it has its surprises, and the ending is a satisfying final capstone.

The gameplay itself is solid, with well thought out puzzles that always feel a little different. My only complaints is that the game requires every single puzzle solved to see any ending, which is bad if someone can't solve all the puzzles, and even the most difficult puzzles are not so difficult. Your experience may vary, and if you don't like twitch or extremely focused planning some puzzles or others may be extra difficult, but for most people, the entire set does not take too long.

THe ambience, though, most of all, makes this exceptional. Absolutely, you should try it. Will everyone of you reading this love it? No, but if you are on the fence because it looks good, but you aren't sure . . . stop. Buy it. You will enjoy it.