18 people found this review helpful
2 people found this review funny
Not Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 0.2 hrs on record (0.2 hrs at review time)
Posted: 7 Dec, 2016 @ 11:08am

Early Access Review
TL;DR: Foul-mouthed, buggy tactics game with a slow progression curve, deliberately confusing mechanics and aspirations to be a console port.

It's got potential... But it's crude, in every sense of the word. The dialogue reads like a 14 year old's fanfiction (Which may or may not be caused by the dev having a European language barrier, it's not that clear) and the menus are awkward and seem to be designed exclusively for console controllers... Considering that this is a turn-based RPG, you'll be spending most of your time in these menus too, so it rather quickly moves from a minor annoyance to a major issue.

There is a large variety of tactical options and elements available, but it's often unclear which elements apply to which skillsets. Lightning is attached to Lightning, for instance, which is a mixture of Special and Physical, whereas Wind is attached to Agile, and is primarily Special... It gets confusing quickly, and discovering after generating a fire-mage main character with massive levels of Special that it's best move deals Physical damage is fairly disheartening.

Progression is an issue too. Those of us that play tactical RPGs in this sort of vein tend to enjoy the sense of achievement as units grow from single-ability rookies into perfectly-statted murderhobos... But in Street Posse, units barely grow at all. The first multi-fight dungeon of the game offers 10xp per fight... And fights are a serious time investment. With your units requiring 100xp+ to grow (Or more if you picked the 'slow learner' drawback), things can feel a little slow... And as far as I can tell, there are no random encounters in the early part of the game, if at all.

The final issue I came across was a fairly significant game-breaking bug. One of my units died, and the game hung without presenting a menu. Now yes, this is Early Access, so it's sort of expected... But there's no visible save menu, and when I booted up the game again, I discovered that there's no autosave feature either. By examining the keyboard-layout image presented to the player before the menu, I discovered that the save menu is attached to the ALT key, but by then, I'd sort of had enough.

Now the above may not seem like a huge issue for an early-access game... But the developer released an Alpha version of Street Posse on a website (You can find the link in the Discussion forums at the time of writing) and the exact same bug was present. This is a demo that is over a year old, and is vastly different to the finished product... With the exact same game-breaking bug that I ran up against multiple times in the demo.

I hope I'm wrong, but that's a huge red flag to me, that perhaps the developer isn't all that serious about finishing Street Posse... I'll be back on release to see if things have improved, but right now, Posse isn't worth it's price.
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