Recent reviews by SJkr8

The game has three scenarios in the base game: Crash Landing, where you start with four survivors and aim towards building Orbital Radio to leave the planet; Trading Outpost, where you start with three traders who are aiming towards making enough Galacticoins to purchase the planet; and Military Outpost, where six persons aim towards building the Ansible Relay to establish interstellar communication. There are three maps/planets/biomes: temperate (Sobrius), tropical (Saltu) and dessert (Desertum). On top of that, you choose the moon of the planet that affects the difficulty somewhat like the way the storyteller works in RimWorld.

I played the first game with the default options: Crash Landing scenario in Sobrius in Medium difficulty; then second Trading Outpost on Saltu in Hard difficulty, and finally Military Outpost in Desertum in Insane difficulty with Chaos moon (for achievement purposes). And because I could not risk being so adventurous in my first playthroughs in each region, I played another game with one survivor for the solo achievement, which I did in Saltu (less extreme weather and year-round farming) and Trading Outpost scenario (because both the Orbital Radio and Ansible Relay are very power hungry and require late-game techs to build and defend).

• You can reconstruct any structure with different materials in late game without much hassle, but the game doesn’t allow you to fine tune to select just walls or roofs, etc like in Going Medieval.
  
• Fields have the option to limit harvest up to a certain number of produce, making it easy to control overharvesting, but most plants don’t yield any harvest until reaching 100% growth.
  
• During blights, clicking on the notification selects all the affected plants, making issuing batch cut orders very easy.
  
• The work orders are usually handled very efficiently; I have never seen anyone getting stuck while constructing a building, which is a common issue in other games in the genre.
  
• The delivery drone is a must have addition to spare your survivors long hauling trips, but it still has pathing issues.
  
• Storages have “one stack per item” checkbox to make sure that one overproduced items doesn’t clog the entire storage, but otherwise there is no priority system, so you cannot create a general purpose low priority storage and later move items to higher priority storages near various workstations. While there is a “store here first” checkbox in storages, survivors only check it while moving items, so you have to deny every other storage to enforce it.
  
• While equipping new items, survivors put the old items in correct spots instead of throwing them around, but this also means this order gets priority over and cancels all other orders. Also, there is no rule system to set equipment for each survivor.
  
• Most survivors have favorite meals, drinks and pastimes, making it easier to manage their moods, but again, there is no way of setting up a rule other than disabling certain foods for certain survivors (no way to make them use certain things at certain mood threshold, etc).
  
• The game supports Steam Workshop, so mods are easy to install, but most popular mods are either abandoned or not being updated.

• Zones can only be set with flags and in square shapes, and you have to put those in open space. That means there is no easy way to order survivors to stay in the middle of your base during attacks. Moreover, when I was trying to test the zone system, most of the workstations stopped working saying "no suitable worker" until I deleted the flag.
  
• Researching most tech require you to find the items first: CPUs, powercells, mech cores. You are mostly restricted to finding these items while salvaging fallen spaceship pieces, but if you get unlucky (once it took me three years to find the first CPU), you may experience potential softlock. However, in such cases, your survivors will eventually “remember” certain things to rescue you.
  
• It is also the same for each resource: you have to observe plants, animals, rocks, etc to harvest resources. You even have to research construction to place build orders. I understand this from a “roleplaying crash-landing on an alien planet” perspective, but it makes management a nightmare as you cannot preemptively disable certain things and set up rules about which survivors are allowed to eat or drink what until late in the game when you discover said item, and have to go back every time a new resource comes in.
  
• You also cannot restrict certain medicine types, so your survivors may exhaust medkits on superficial injuries that heal by themselves.
  
• No auto-slaughter for tamed animals. No roping animals interaction, instead, you have to select each animal and select where you want to lead them.
  
• There is no way to discard most items in the storage, which had forced me to activate mods early on.
  
• Trading is non-existent except for the Trading Outpost scenario as there is no other humanoids. While you can contact merchant ships in crash-landing scenario, they just offer you some random items for free. You also cannot usually construct mechs outside of the Military Outpost scenario unless you’re very lucky.
  
• The game seeds often decide which breakthrough techs you’ll get and also your max survivor count (I had to struggle to get the 8th member in the first playthrough, while in the second, I had 13). The devs should really make a game mode where you can decide which scenario to play after starting the game and surveying your options.

• You cannot create your own survivors. I was disappointed about it initially, but now think that it is a good way of circumventing being stuck in the character generator in the hopes of creating a super survivor.
  
• The game mostly handles priorities smartly despite not giving you much options, like the survivors will focus on resetting traps and repairing defenses after each attack. However, it can cause issues with them going into danger.
  
• The survivors are also not smart enough to use food they are hauling to tame or even eat without storing them first. Survivors with gas mask still suffer from shortness of breath in expeditions if they get into a smoky room.
  
• The flora doesn’t replenish each season naturally even if you leave some plants in the hopes they will help in re-growth. So, plants that you don’t farm gets farther and farther as you harvest/cut them. Falling space wrecks make soil around your base infertile, but manure left by animals just rot away instead of enriching the soil naturally.
  
• Survivors with -23֯C clothes often catch cold, even pneumonia, repeatedly in winter.
  
• When hungry pests attack one by one, the game constantly slows down every time you speed it up, making it a nuisance.

Now, let me shed some light on why I called the game "How many times can thunder strike in one place?" simulator. I learned it in the hard way that among all the threats in the game, being struck by lightning repeatedly is the biggest as thunderstorm can strike as soon as you start a game and can cause permanent damages to your survivors. And yes, if you have survivors outside of lightning rod range (which needs a short research, of course) during thunderstorm, lightning will hit them and possibly repeatedly. It is funny, but irritating.

For some reason, whenever I try to play a big RPG game like KCD or The Witcher 3, either my PC or the graphics card breaks down… making me wary of even installing big games. However, after watching some gameplay videos of KCD 2, I felt the urge to finally finish KCD. When I initially played the game several years back, I was aware that there are timed quests and many buggy quests, which, combined with the game’s save system, made it very difficult to play the game naturally, and instead, I put the main quests on hold while I levelled up Henry and finished as many side quests as I could. If you are still unaware, you can only save the game by using an alcoholic potion, which you usually need to buy or brew and which can sometimes affect gameplay by making you drunk. While playing the main quests early on, it didn’t bother me too much because the game usually auto-saves frequently during those and also saves at the start of most side quests, which you can use as extra save points. I also focused on alchemy early on to make money, so didn’t lack Saviour Schnapps much. However, once you start focusing on side quests and some lengthy main quests, you may find the need to install a mod to alter the save system.

The game also has a unique combat system which is better suited for duels, rather than battling against crowds of enemies like in many other games. Early on, any fight can be fatal, and even at higher levels, you can easily lose to a well-armored group depending merely on luck. Nevertheless, I like the combat very much, although I had to grind several levels in training before feeling comfortable going into the open world… and even then I usually fast travelled often trying to avoid any random encounter. However, when I fired up the game recently, I tried to avoid fast travel and highly recommend going to places by horse or on foot to truly appreciate the vast open world of the game. The one thing that I hate about the combat in this game is the combo system: each weapon in the game has several combos of three-four consecutive attacks from different sides, but enemies can easily break/block combos. So, completing any combo, especially when you are surrounded by enemies, is quite a task and entirely unnecessary. As a proof, I completed the whole game, dispatching about three hundred enemies, with just 10 combos performed, and even that during training sessions. Instead, the Master Strike is much easier to perform and is a sureshot way of winning battles.

While the save and the combat systems make the game more difficult, the fact that you can grind combat XP through training and gain a bunch of other perks through various other skills, make the game easier. You can easily avoid many combat encounters through Speech or Charisma checks, which in turn can easily be boosted with potions, clothes or a visit to the bathhouse… As a result, you can play the game in many different ways, and although you cannot avoid fights even if you dislike the combat system, you’ll have backup for most main quest missions and you can also use your dog (DLC) to distract enemies. However, one thing I dislike about choice in the game is that despite often having more than one solution to most questlines, the game tends to push you towards Stealth and thievery very unabashedly. You have to steal and sneak out in one of the earliest main missions, while the miller questlines about thieving are the earliest unlocked side quests. From my experience with D:OS2, where you need to buy/steal/pickpocket skill books, I know that once you start robbing the merchants, it breaks the whole economy of the game. As such, I tried to avoid that as much as I could, but I’m sorry to report that while you can avoid Pickpocketing to some extent, you cannot avoid Lockpicking or Stealth (by the way, I always used Keyboard and Mouse for Lockpicking and archery even while playing with a controller). What’s worse is one main quest in the Monastery forces you to Sneak and Steal, while also punishes you severely for doing so. During this mission, a pre-set cutscene puts Henry in a place he was not supposed to be, and before I could get him out of there, Henry was imprisoned by the Circators for neglecting duties (that is the only area where I didn't bother completing side quests). However, having witnessed how guards in KCD 2 repeatedly apprehend the players for the same "crime", I’d say this game is still mild, LOL. Ironically, the game also chastises you for killing/stealing, and while you can potentially avoid killing (Merciful run), you cannot avoid stealing.

Even after playing the game so many years later, I did face a few quest-breaking bugs forcing me to reload previous saves and the game also crushed a couple times, especially after fast travelling to a crowded location. Repeated dialogues, quest notifications about completed quests were also common. Some quests need to be done in a specific order, forcing you to consult wikis… Finding indoor NPCs in the game is an invitation to commit crime. The game randomly threw "wanted for crime" at my Henry a couple times without any valid reasons, and sometimes the guards also had no clue and didn't ask him to stop... A few times, guards attacking bandits accused Henry of crime for attacking/looting bandits... Finding bird nests/bodies in tall grass is nearly impossible... Henry seems to be left-handed while wielding a dagger as he always holds knife in his left hand even if the sleeping enemy’s heart is on his right side and he has to cross his arms… I wanted to complain about repeated use of NPC faces in the game, but at least most of the unique people are distinct from one another in KCD, which is unfortunately not the case for KCD 2 where the Legate looks identical to common thugs. Finally, for a game so focused on immersion, nothing breaks it more than when a well-known NPC calls out Henry for visiting and then flatly addresses him when you interact (from “I’m glad you came Henry” to “What can I do good knight?”)…

Edit: A brief note about achievements: the game includes many exclusive achievements that require separate playthroughs, including achievements introduced in DLCs. I know you can download save files for achievements, but considering how good the game is, I might consider getting those the right way at some time later. It also has a couple achievements about Hardcore mode, but I am not a hardcore gamer and prefer dividing my time among different games/genres, so not bothered about 100% personally.

Following a poor experience in the third part of the game, due to poorly executed Winds of Time mechanic, the loss of the legendary sword bug, and difficulty finding the last (air) serpent, I had finally lost interest in checking everything in the game and just wanted to make sure that I could still finish the game with my unintentional “NBAS” save from the previous game. Thankfully, the fourth part of the game, much like the first part, didn’t allow the player to get stuck much (which was the case in both the second and third parts of the game).
But unfortunately, the fourth game takes away your ability to rewind after a certain point. I eventually decided to tweak the game files to re-enable rewinding inside the castle and was able to smoothly rush to the Throben Doors, where I had a bit of difficulty especially because of the wording – the game pretends you failed (with its wording) even when you successfully break the locks (lol), so just go with it… Overall, despite a few hiccups in the second and particularly the third parts of the game, I very much enjoyed my time with the series and think it is a good digital adaptation.

After a smooth experience on the first part of the game, followed by getting stuck a couple times on the second part, I once again started to explore part three normally and realized how vast the world of the third game was. With little pointers towards what to do and limited resources, I managed to progress through some of the seven serpents, before getting stuck. After I realized how the beacons distorted time and how various events happen/change based on the time of the day, I decided to follow a guide to make sure I don’t miss any of the serpents. Incidentally, the only guide on Steam was an “NBAS” guide, the meaning of which I didn’t know at the time (lol).
Even so, the guide was not very detailed, so I just used it to determine which regions needs to be visited to encounter and beat all the serpents. However, I again got stuck due to the way the Winds of Time mechanic works in the game. I eventually got it working by editing game files and passed to Lake Ilklala, but I couldn’t get the whistle to call the Ferryman. I eventually had to try and retry several times to swim through the lake and kill all the other serpents before blowing the whistle on the shore near the Earth Serpent (blowing it before defeating the Earth Serpent or from the first island didn’t do anything and rather took away the option to blow the whistle later). Moreover, during part three, I also lost the legendary sword as after the scripted theft, you can only recover one sword if you had multiple, and I never got to choose (got back the default one).
Considering how many problems I had to run into – poorly executed winds of time mechanic, the loss of the legendary sword bug, and difficulty finding the last (air) serpent – even after following guides – it was an overall bad experience for the otherwise wonderful series I was enjoying playing.

I have been waiting to get the whole series before starting the playthrough, although it may not be strictly necessary. Also, the game usually doesn’t recognize local save files, but works fine with their version of “cloud save spells” (not to be confused with Steam cloud saves, which, like most Steam features, is not supported).
Although I have not read the original books, I felt that the digital adaptation was pretty good, making it easier to manage inventory and survey the map. The game, for the most part, allows you to rewind your progress to try out different options, not very much unlike going back to a previous page in the book to check other options. The fights are also somewhat intuitive, although fighting early on with limited stamina can be problematic. Thankfully, the game doesn’t punish you during fights and allows you to retry the fights as many times as you want to better understand enemies and minimize stamina loss.
During the first part of the game, I was very much interested in checking out all the different routes and choices to see how I could maximize my gains through various events and was pleasantly surprised to know that there were almost no wrong routes/answers as I never felt stuck. I tried the same approach during the second part of the game, but as the game grew more complex, it was easier to miss stuff, resulting in me getting stuck at the end of part two, from where the game sends you back to the earlier parts if you missed something important. I also didn’t find the Sun Jewel, due to which I couldn’t properly complete the necropolis and was stuck again.
At this stage, I had to turn to a guide to make sure I got everything I needed to pass the checks and complete part two. I’d say that my experience with part one was better than part two because even though I missed a lot of things during my first playthrough, I was never stuck, whereas I had to check a guide for part two just to finish it. Nevertheless, I understand that as the game progressed and got more complex, such issues would be inevitable.

At a time when big game developers shy away from putting missable content in their games, Foretales is designed in a way that you would only experience about half of the game in your best playthrough. It means you have to play the game multiple times to learn which missions are essential to achieve that “good ending” and which can be skipped. After a tutorial mission, you are put in the missions map from where you are given a few mission choices that you must make to progress through the branching narrative that changes depending on your choices. There are three different endings depending on how you play the game, and yet there are missions that you wouldn’t experience after finishing all three endings.

The game also has a high production value with all the characters properly responding to your decisions and there’s even enjoyable banter among your companions. The card game is quite intuitive – your skills, resources, characters are all represented by cards and hovering on a card usually highlights possible interactions and even lets you know of the outcome beforehand. The randomness of card draw is also minimized with the use of food, which allows you to redraw any chosen card from your deck. The card art, animations, narration, little voice-acted snippets are all done very well, and I’ve never seen the game getting stuck if you do things out of order (I’m sure all of us have experienced such bugged quests in some bigger games), in fact, I was pleasantly surprised when I acquired all required cards before the mission popped up and the game immediately recognized the available resources and moved the narrative forward accordingly. There are various factions like guards, bandits, pirates, etc. that need to be dealt with differently, but in most cases it is possible to deal with them without fights as long as you farm the respective resources beforehand, which only becomes difficult in some late-game missions. However, most of your collected resources in one mission do not carry forward to the next, forcing you to farm again.

As you can imagine, being able to undo your actions and replay certain missions is important for a game designed in such a way. From within a mission, you can abort to the menu and restart the mission as many times as required without time penalty. Each mission is further broken into three or four sections that have different main (and potentially side) objectives. If you save the game and exit mid-mission, you’d come back to the beginning of the section you were in, potentially losing a bit of progress, but the two options to restart the whole mission and the specific section is welcome (you restart the last section if a key character dies). However, you do NOT unlock the option to undo your last mission(s) (in case you made a bad choice of mission) until finishing the game for the first time. While one full playthrough is usually ten missions long, the game can end much sooner if you go for the bad ending. Moreover, you cannot reach the good ending without experiencing some missions from the not so good endings; meaning that you cannot experience the good ending in your first playthrough (in fact, a minimum of three playthroughs are needed to finish the game, more if you want all the achievements). So, you can potentially do a bad ending to unlock the mission undo option and then try out different missions to unlock various paths to finally be able to finish the good ending in your third playthrough (you’d definitely need to follow a guide unless you want to spend a ridiculous amount of time in trial and error).

Now, coming to the tricky part: although the gameplay is fun, the game is a nightmare from a usability point-of-view because you cannot speed up or skip through dialogues and other pop-ups to quicken your game in repeated playthroughs. When the characters talk and dialogues pop up, even hitting Space or Escape or Enter buttons do not progress the story like in most visual novels – you are required to keep clicking to move the story forward (controller not supported), and then there are certain narrated lines in black border in the bottom of the screen that cannot be skipped even by clicking, same goes for new skill or health/attack increase pop-ups. So, even though individual missions usually should take 15-60 minutes at most, with 3-4 sections in each mission, there is no way you can speed up time in repeated playthorughs. You are bound to be bored to death by unskippable repeated content by the time you make it to a good playthrough. This makes me think that the devs either didn’t play their own game long enough to feel the need for some usability tweaks or they were too enamored with their own creation to feel the drudgery of the experience. For some silly reason, you also cannot replay missions from a completed game save.

This game is different from the Commandos/Desperados games in that it is more of a puzzle game than a strategy/tactics one, and only requires you to complete the objectives as optimally as you can to save time. There are not many variations to the puzzles as the shortest route is usually the best (unless you’re collecting the gold watches). The characters also have only one or two situational skills like fight, distract, bribe, pickpocket, etc., all of which are operated by a single interaction key, making things easier. Uniquely, this game allows you to manage all the actions of all the characters on a timeline, which you can alter as much as you want by going back and forth. You are basically organizing all the characters’ actions on the timeline to look like a perfectly orchestrated heist.

I think this is wonderful as this makes the game markedly distinct from the more popular real-time tactics games where you are expected to save and reload frequently to optimize your actions. However, this also exposes one big shortcoming of the game as it doesn’t have a replay option where you can view the heist play out (perhaps with cutscenes), which is a huge missed opportunity in my opinion, especially considering that games like Door Kickers offer that option. Despite its simplicity, I applaud the game for trying different things, although it doesn’t matter anymore as the game has been delisted.

That time of the year when you find old games to review, esp if you don't play many recent games...

As for this game, it is a casual "forever" game that you can play as much as you want and I come back to it every few months, with the devs making it easier by holding regular events, although, in recent times, some events are specific to newly added DLCs. As for the comparison between Euro and American Truck Simulator, I feel that ETS2 is better due to its larger starting map spanning most of Europe, but the American version is newer and may look better overall, at least until the devs update all the older maps in ETS2, which they are doing for a while now.

Oh, and you get Geralt to tell you to "drop the load and go" or taunt you when you disregard speed limits, lol...

I got the game because I wanted to try out an FMV style game and I’m glad this was my first one as it was a good experience playing as different characters to see what options open up. In this game, you play as a detective who can shape-shift into people after meeting them for the first time. Most people you meet are suspects and you can dig deeper into their secrets by shape-shifting into someone they trust to make them divulge more information. Or, you can create confusion among them as well. The story is good with supernatural/sci-fi elements and the characters were believable.

Although the culprit rotates on each playthrough, there is not a lot of replayability as most of the story remains the same. However, there can be several outcomes for you and the other characters depending on how well you do your job. I believe two playthroughs are enough to see everything, but one outcome is very specific and would probably require some set-up.

The main problem with the game mechanics is that you cannot skip scenes during your first playthrough, even the scenes you’ve already seen. This becomes very relevant during chapter ends as the game plays the next chapter intro once the most important tasks of a chapter is done, and if you want to go back to the chapter, you have to re-watch the cut scene again, and they can be lengthy. I think a better option would be enabling skipping scenes once you watch them for the first time, because currently you can skip scenes you haven’t seen before in your second playthrough. Moreover, there are a few unnecessary filler clips that play here and there that could have been removed as well.

Overall, I enjoyed the game very much and after learning that there are more games in the same universe/series, I am interested in checking them out and other FMV games as well. However, I also worry that the opportunity to play as different characters in this game might ruin enjoyment of other such games for me.

As some have mentioned, it is a good introductory JRPG game because there are limited options, a linear story and a single character to handle. It is not a very in-depth game, but I’d still recommend it considering the game is pretty short and enjoyable despite its lack of depth. However, I must also mention, rather warn, that the game is pretty easy until the end-boss who not only shape-shifts into all the other previous bosses, but also becomes pretty much invulnerable to all but one random attack type for a fair bit of the fight, unnecessarily lengthening the encounter so much so that you may even need to reload a few times unless you’ve enough HP to tank repeated double blows from the boss – including ultimate attacks about every four turns – and/or have brought a huge stockpile of health/data boosters.

There is a ‘software’ that allows you to see vulnerabilities, but you have limited RAM slots – and must take three ‘elemental’ attacks for a well-rounded deck – and have only space for one extra buff, etc., making it a difficult choice. You are expected to install-uninstall software during the final fight to keep rotating what is useful at the moment, but I read about a game-breaking bug about that and decided not to risk it (not sure if the bug has been fixed).

There are many side quests which you discover by talking to NPCs, but the handy icon to distinguish between which NPCs you’ve already talked to resets after every major plot point, forcing you to talk to everyone again and again or put off the side quests until the point of no return, which is clearly mentioned in-game. The side-quest rewards are also largely useless and won't make you stronger. Also, you'd have more money than you can spend in the end, so don't worry about wasting money on an upgrade to test out. You can grind in this game and are expected to do so to some extent, as you are warned about being under-leveled if you turn off random encounters, but they are very annoying when you are trying to explore. I’d advise you to turn it off when you feel uncomfortable and turn it back on when you are ready to grind. You are expected to be around level 25 for the final boss fight and keeping the recommended encounter difficulty on, I had reached level 23-24 before the final fight.