Recent reviews by ebonweaver

This game makes no sense at all and suffers from a ton of mechanic issues. Important information being spewn at you while you're in heavy combat so you can't pay attention and miss critical things. Nearly every opponent is as strong or stronger than you. And there are multiples of them. You can't win. Ever. So the whole mechanic of infinite clones is because all you do is die constantly. Some times within 30 seconds of entering an area because you're immediately swarmed. It's just stupid. Crafting is mentioned but not explained. Once you find the magic key, you quickly figure out you can never craft things anyway. Why? Because resources are lost when you're killed, and you can never get enough of them to make anything because you're killed, and certain things are super rare. You also have to get right on top of things to collect them, the radar is really poor at highlighting things and indicating direction, it's just so badly executed. And it's a shame really because the graphics are good, the voice overs are entertaining, the random areas are decent, and the controls are reasonable. It's just the gameplay is so terrible that you get weary of getting nowhere fast very quick. I kept trying to push forward to see if I could figure out tricks, get lucky, something.... but at this point it's just pointless and frustrating and basically boring at the same time which is an amazing level of fail.

I bought this years ago and it was unplayable as it clearly wasn't a finished game. As I recall it wasn't even possible to dock your ship without an advanced piloting degree or something. I just pulled it out of the ashes to see what has been going on the last several years, because it's now DOUBLE the size on disk. Well first thing, it said I had to make a Frontier account. Funny, didn't need that before or it would have already been done. Then it took about 10 min to do who knows what the first launch (successive launches are very fast). But the game isn't actually playable. There is no ability to play locally apparently, you have to connect to a server? For a single player game? This makes no sense. But the servers apparently... don't exist? But they do? I see indication the game shut down 2 years ago but didn't at the same time. The launcher says the server status is good but then it can't reach them so you can't play the game. It's just a dead stick. But there is a website. But if you try to log in there it wants you to give authorization to Factions to have like all your information. What is that? Nothing explains this, seems very fishy, and why are there so many dang accounts?? I bought this on Steam, I should be able to play it on Steam, not have to make multiple other accounts with other services. All the more reason I stopped buying stuff here, the platform is a sham. Regardless, you give permission and it fails to log in due to a "general error". So again, seems like they've shut down but not fully shut down, so this game should be pulled from Steam.

I mean, it's pretty but, where is the rest of the game? After half an hour wandering around a lovely wooded boxed in valley, I quit. Nothing happened that whole time as I roamed around trying to find any sign of something to do or some place to go. If it's that hard to FIND the game in the game, well maybe it's just not for me, or there is a serious bug that makes it a non starter.

Real letdown for an old mechwarrior. While it does a lot of things right, it also strangely does a lot of things wrong. The notion of hardpoints makes mech customization nearly pointless, there was no such limitation back in the tabletop days. Your options are change weapon size and armor amount. Want to take out that PPC and put in 5 med lasers? Not allowed. Heat never dissipates, once you heat up you never cool down which makes no sense. 3 turns of doing noting, still the same heat level. You don't go higher unless a new round total exceeds an old round total. Nonsense system. And then there are the bugs... targeting failures, action failures, you just can't do things for no obvious reason. Total lack of range display and indirect targeting makes tactics limited and frustrating at best. A mech missing a leg should not be able to walk. A mech missing an arm that contains a weapon most certainly should not be able to fire that weapon. More nonsense. Performance is sketchy, install footprint is massive (seemingly for a lot of flashy extras... all the 3-d people could be 2-d and save a lot of resources). Effort was put into things that hardly matter (oh I'll randomly show follow cam as this mech moves this time for no reason or interest). UI is clunky and lacks a LOT of interaction capabilities to get info between actions. Between mission dialogue choices that have no impact are a waste of time. Unclear popup incidents that do have an impact are just silly. It just suffers from so many design and gameplay issues it's a huge disappointment.

Visually the game is great, except for the fact that antialiasing doesn't actually work at all. Unfortunately it's unplayable as it crashed right out of the gate. Literally you can't start playing it unless you manage to get it to speed over the crash point where you blitz past some scrambled video with garbled audio, then you can play. But the next time you hit one of these corrupt transitions, it just crashes again. Apparently this has been an issue since release and never fixed, but also unclear why it doesn't affect everyone. In addition, there are several aspects of gameplay that are poorly or wrongly explained. Indication you should look at icons that don't exist. Lack of clarity why you can sometimes block and sometimes not, tutorial that explains mechanics after they were important to know to avoid massive damage, unclear character management, etc. I'd ask for a refund if I could, but I was a Kickstarter backer. We were fleeced in the campaign, and in the end the game is unplayable. Avoid this at all costs.

It may play ok on consoles, but on PC it suffers from serious control and sound issues. You're limited in how you can customize the controls, and personally I couldn't find an arrangement that made sense. You have so many abilities that need to be used in so many ways, and not enough options because more than 3 mouse buttons aren't recognized by the game. The other horrid issue is the sound problems. There will suddenly be ambient sound BLASTING at you, and nothing you can do about it other that quit, which means you lose progress as there isn't a save function only waypoints. I wanted to love it because of the ideas and powers, but it's so awkward and annoying it just killed the experience.

What the hell did I just play... I mean I get a kick out of unusual and trippy, but this is an acid induced disaster. The menu controls are beyond abysmal, worst console port ever. The play controls have serious issues. Game balance is non existant as you go from no challenge minions to cripling boss fight. Special moves routinely fail to work. The art style is fantastic. The story is utter nonsense. The dialogue makes it even worse. The annoying useless sidekick girl is baffling. You constantly are muttering WTF is going on... It's like a bad anime gone wrong. And it's 50% cutscene. Unintelligable, mind bendingly nonsensical cutscene, so it's no fun to watch. It's like they handed a great art style/ engine to a mental patient to write and skin.

THIS IS NOT A GAME.
Apparently Steam needs to add a category for Books, under which this can be under Animated. Listing this as a game, refering to it as a game, is in all ways false, and needs to be corrected in the listing, info, and reviews. THIS IS NOT A GAME. It's just a crudely written and translated net story presented with some pictures and you have to constantly hit enter to progress, often past ... again and again. So really, the presentation is terrible. I get this is a style and there is clearly a market for it, but call it what it is and get it the hell out of the Games section of Steam. There are no choices, no interactions, no movement, NOTHING that you could even remotely try to call this a game (compare to Dear Esther). It's flagrant misrepresentation.

With a few relatively minor fixes it could have been a decent time kill. Unfortunately, those minor isssues aren't all that minor. The single biggest problem is the camera. You can scroll out to an arial view that isn't quite wide enough and is obstructed by rather large UI elements, or you can scroll in to a 3rd person view as might be typical in a lot of games. But, you can't CHANGE the angle, it's fixed, and does not adjust for environment in any way. The result is unplayable, because you're not looking horizontal enough to be able to look around at anything, light hills result in just looking at a wall of grass where you can't see or target anything, it's just abysmal and baffling how they thought this could be released. Simple thing to fix, and yet ruins the playability entirely. Past that, the AI is mindnumblingly erratic such that mobs just randomly run around with no sense at all like they're lost. There is ZERO tutorial explaining anything about the mechanics. Said mechanics are not vanilla, which is nice because it's something new and interesting from most games, but with no info at all, stats that aren't explained in the popups or help, you have no idea what is going on, how things work, what effects increases actually have, etc. Spending 10 minutes building a tutorial and putting a few more notes in popups and help to actually explain the game would have fixed that. Heck, you don't even really have any idea what the character build choices mean. So yeah, couple minor things, that are just totally crippling to the game. Junked.

So Devil May Cry and Assassins Creed have a bastard child on top of the Skyrim engine and bathe it in whale oil. I legitimately want to love this game. The graphics, mood, atmosphere, abilities, all so very engaging. And yet half the things I love are also the things I hate. This great beautiful setting constantly has me saying where even am I, what kind of world is this, nothing about this make sense... In AC when you jump 500 feet into a hay bale you go haha that's bull but whatever I'ma go kill dudes now. In this game, you can teleport, see through walls, do crazy magic things that has you all yeah I'm badass, and then jump down 3 stories and die. There is no consistency or sense to the movement and mechanics. It's klunky and unpredictable which makes it frustrating. Easy setting still gets you killed easily in a hand to hand fight, which invariably happens because some guard appears out of nowhere. Hard must mean a rat sneezes on you and you die. And the rats... at first it's a creepy cool thing, and then you're topside stalking a guard in a patroled area and suddenly a swarm of rats appears and kills you with no warning or reason. Huh? You're swimming and start taking random damage from nothing. You buy a bunch of stuff, and lose it for no reason going into the next scene, so now you're broke and unarmed. Fantastic foundation, engaging if confusing setting, and half broken gameplay with a healthy side of bugs. I want to love it, but I can't.