It’s a fact fairly well documented on this blog that I like Syndicate. Bullfrog’s little slice of unrestrained corporate mayhem is timeless in my eyes, and so when the Satellite Reign Kickstarter popped up a couple of years back it immediately caught my interest for being made by some ex-Bullfrog staff and for being marketed as a spiritual successor to Syndicate. We could certainly do with one, because while the Starbreeze Syndicate FPS had a few unexpected redeeming features it was at best extremely average and not at all what Syndicate was about. Satellite Reign at least preserves the series’ top-down isometric perspective and four-man (or woman) team of agents, so it’s already a better stab at recapturing the old magic than Starbreeze managed. That’s a very low bar to clear, however; they might be going about it the right way, but is this modern attempt to resurrect Syndicate any good?

I have a feeling that this review is going to descend into complaining and nitpicking pretty quickly. (Most of my reviews do, to be fair.) So I would like to get one thing out of the way before we start: Satellite Reign is a game with a *lot* of problems. Some of them are design problems. Some of them are thematic problems. Some of them are technical problems. Some of them are just plain bugs – this is another game that has come out of Early Access several months too early, presumably because the developers were running out of money. Despite all of these many annoyances, though, I’ve still put nearly fifteen hours into the thing over this bank holiday weekend. It’s increasingly rare that a game gets that kind of commitment out of me, and while you can chalk part of it up to the fact that I am a massive Syndicate fanboy it’s also impossible to deny that Satellite Reign gets at least as much right as it does wrong. And for game with as long a laundry list of problems as Satellite Reign, that is impressive.

So. It is the cyberpunk near-future, and the Dracogenics corporation has a vice-like grip on the unnamed City in which Satellite Reign is set thanks to its monopoly on resurrection technology (where dead people are simply downloaded into new bodies upon their demise – if you’ve ever read Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon series you’ll have a pretty good picture of how this works). You play the part of a shadowy competitor company who has inserted a group of four agents into the City with the objective of wresting control of the resurrection tech away from Dracogenics by any means necessary. To do this you need to acquire money, research new technology and weapons, and upgrade/skill up your agents to the point where they’re capable of making an assault on the Dracogenics HQ. To do all of those things you need to send your agents on various errands around the city to steal everything you need to progress, and because this is a game with Syndicate DNA these heists often involve violent shootouts with the teams of guards patrolling the compounds that you’re trying to infiltrate.

Only often, though. Much to its credit Satellite Reign isn’t interested in simply rebuilding Syndicate from the ground up, and does put a lot of effort in trying to evolve the idea while introducing new elements. In Syndicate combat was the only way forward; you could walk around with your weapons concealed for a little bit but sooner or later you’d be attacked by enemy agents and everything would start exploding. By contrast Satellite Reign does its best to offer you alternative methods to gain access to the secrets you’re supposed to steal – security systems you can hack to turn off or even convert to your side, power generators you can sabotage to cut power to automated defenses, and vents you can crawl through to shortcut a set of particularly nasty defenses. These alternative methods are often only available to a single member of your team, as each agent belongs to a particular class with a specific set of abilities that’ll take advantage of a specific subset of stuff, but if you use them effectively it’s sometimes possible to get your Infiltrator up to the vault without tripping any alarms or encountering any guards.

These non-combat routes are a welcome addition to the game, especially at the start when you don’t have any items or augmentations and fighting the guards is a dicey prospect because your agents are so fragile. Bypassing even one security checkpoint can make a given objective so much easier, and the alternate routes do play well with your agent classes. There’s the Soldier, who can carry heavy weapons towards the end of the game but whose main utility ability is Hardwiring doors and power generators to turn them on/off; the Hacker, who can hack security systems, deploy drones and Hijack a limited number of enemy personnel so that they’ll fight on your side (because no Syndicate game would be complete without a Persuadertron ability); the Infiltrator, who can cloak, access vents and use ziplines, and has a devastatingly powerful melee attack that is silent and can usually take out a guard in one hit; and finally the Support, who has access to a number of team buffing and healing abilities as well as the Scan view, which shows which systems are connected up to which power generators and gives you important clues as to what you can do with your environment.

I thought this class system worked really, really well. All of the agents have abilities that get used both in infiltration and in a fight, and all of these abilities are genuinely quite useful; everybody feels powerful and there’s nobody who gets stuck on the sidelines because their skillset is overbalanced towards one element or the other. On the other hand the system for unlocking skills is a bit janky, since your XP gain is never surfaced and so you can never figure out what precisely you are doing to level up, and skills are presented to you as a simple list where you can’t see the whole tree and only have visibility of what the next level will give you (which is why it’s taken me this long to unlock extra weapon slots for my agents – that’s a passive buried on level 3 of the Weapons skill branch and I wasn’t 100% on whether it was a skill or an upgrade that unlocked them). This makes it really, really difficult to plan the development of your agents because your brain is stuck in a short-term analysis of what you can immediately unlock instead of coming up with a long term build plan.

So the skill system is a little bit mixed, but mostly leans towards the “Great” end of the spectrum. Time to talk about something at the other end of the scale: the City environment, and the compounds you sneak/fight your way into. Satellite Reign isn’t broken up into a selection of discrete missions, but instead takes place in a (relatively) seamless open-world city inside which are placed all of the fortified encampments you must infiltrate. The City looks great. Seriously. I’m actually a little astounded an indie developer came up with a 3D environment that looks as good – and as varied – as Satellite Reign’s does. There’s animated billboards a la Blade Runner, loads of unique assets for shops, hotels and corporation logos, lashings and lashings of neon, and it’s all washed down with an omnipresent acid rain.

Unfortunately when it comes to the things the city contains – the people, the cars, the guards and the compounds — I have to be a lot more qualified with my praise. (Or rather, unqualified with my criticism.) The cars are an easy target; they’re non-interactive objects that exist so that there’s something to populate the roads – you can’t commandeer cars like you could in Syndicate and you (and your enemies) can’t be damaged by being hit by one either, and so they’re there entirely for the ambience. Which is why it’s puzzling that they’re animated so bloody terribly, going from 0 to 60 in about half a second, slowing down just as fast and cornering at full speed like they’re on rails. I don’t care if these are the magic self-driving cars of the future, they feel like placeholders the programmer threw in at the last moment with only the most rudimentary car-like behaviour – they don’t look or feel like cars should. The people I’m a little more forgiving on since Syndicate civilians have only ever existed to be gunned down in crossfire and so it’s sufficient for them to simply meander around randomly, but there’s these weird little interludes where they blunder into a secured area, the guards approach and apprehend them as they would with one of your agents — and then after five seconds the guard forgets they exist and they get up and walk off. It could have been a really nice atmospheric touch, but again it comes across as something half-baked that wasn’t integrated into the game properly.

Then you’ve got the guards and the compounds, which are the second-biggest thing wrong with Satellite Reign. In terms of abstract design, the guards are fine; there’s a pleasing variety of light guards, heavy guards, shielded guards, minigun guards etc. etc., packed in with sentry guns and security drones. Even when they’re not alerted, though, it’s clear there’s something not quite right with their behaviour as they do U-turns without actually turning (making it difficult if you’re trying to be stealthy and stay out of their vision cones) and often get stuck on pieces of scenery that happen to be blocking their patrol – a lot of the time this happens to be another guard, which is frustrating if they’ve gotten stuck right on your planned route into an enemy base. They can’t cope with doors, either, repeatedly running into and out of them ad infinitum until you take pity on them and shoot them to put them out of their misery.

It’s when the shooting starts that the guards really start to become erratic, though. There’s a rudimentary cover system in Satellite Reign that they’ll try to take advantage of, even if the nearest piece of cover happens to be the same one that your agents are sheltering behind. If there’s no nearby cover they’ll simply stop and unload their weapons in your general direction as soon as they’re in range and have line of sight, making it very easy to hit them with a grenade when they’re all clustered up. The only reason they’re any threat whatsoever is because even an individual unshielded unarmoured guard has buckets of hitpoints, and Satellite Reign isn’t shy about spawning dozens and dozens of them to ruin your day as soon as you make some noise. Most of the time there’s a fairly obvious cause-and-effect system going on here, as there are three types of events that will summon guards from the reinforcement closets scattered around the map: getting spotted by a camera (or shooting a camera), a guard or a drone that’s seen you calling in an alert, and setting off explosive items such as grenades and satchel charges.

I don’t have a problem with any of this. My problem is that there’s a random respawn system that works in tandem with this obvious noise = baddies system, and often it’ll spawn enemies behind you in an area you thought you’d already cleared, even though you made no noise whatsoever. Then when the firefight does actually start you end up getting attacked from two sides at once, which isn’t a good situation to be in even when you’re fully equipped; at the start of the game when you’re still finding your feet this often results in four dead agents. Satellite Reign’s adamant refusal to pretend that it isn’t just spawning guards out of nowhere to fight you is a serious issue that undoes much of the amazing work that’s been done on the visuals; the developers go to all this trouble of making a fantastic looking City and then populate it with this incredibly gamey respawn system that completely breaks any credibility it might have had as an actual, believable place.

Finally there’s the compounds. Every single one of Satellite Reign’s missions involves breaking into one of these compounds, which is a huge problem because every single one of these compounds is effectively the same. Oh, the game tries to change things up from time to time – each compound is littered with the alternative routes I mentioned earlier, and occasionally you’ll get a mission where you have to escort an NPC into/out of the compound, but ultimately it plays out identically: each compound is a restricted, walled-off, shoot-on-sight area with one or more ring of fortifications that are constantly patrolled by guards and drones. At the centre of the fortifications is a magic door. Your job is to get one of your agents (or the NPC) to the magic door. After they enter the magic door, they’ll steal some money and emerge with one or more technology prototypes in hand. Then you have to fight your way back out of the compound and back to a save point.

Satellite Reign tries to build flavour around the magic doors inside its compounds. This one is the main R&D facility for the Eternals, it says, and you’ll get some sweet shielding tech if you go inside! (The Eternals are purple guards who use lasers.) The Industrial district is the heart of Uzy Corp. (red guards, plasma guns) and if you hit their weapons manufacturing plant you’ll get prototype miniguns! The problem is this is all just words in the mission description. No matter what Satellite Reign says you’re doing, at the end of the day it will boil down to your agents shooting their way into a compound and entering a Magic Door to get some new tech for you to research. There is almost no variety; occasionally you get told to assassinate or bribe a random civilian but this is something you can accomplish in literally seconds, and so 90% of your time in Satellite Reign is spent skulking around compounds. Even robbing a bank is – you guessed it – blasting your way into a compound so that your Soldier can go through the Magic Door. It says they’re packing explosives to blast open the vault, but you don’t see any evidence of this when they go inside; they just go in and come back out again like they’re depositing a cheque. In Syndicate Wars you didn’t just blast open the vault, you demolished the entire bank with high explosives and picked the cash money out of the rubble.

This brings me on to possibly the thing I like least about Satellite Reign: its failure to attach an appropriate sense of scale and importance to your actions. Say what you like about Syndicate Wars, but that was a game that made you absolutely buy in to the idea that you had complete control over the resources of a futuristic global corporate entity. When you researched a new gun, you threw millions of dollars at it. When you fired that new gun, you could guarantee something suitably pyrotechnic would happen. When you installed augmentations on your agents, you got to see a nice CGI bionic limb go into their paper doll. If you replaced all their body parts with bionics their new metal skeleton would suddenly start breathing. And when you knocked over a bank, you sure as hell made sure everyone within a thirty block radius knew about it. It was a game that repeatedly reinforced that sense that you were chucking around weighty resources and that you were getting an appropriate payoff for using them.

Satellite Reign couldn’t be more different. Take your primary method of money acquisition, for example. Despite what I said earlier, it isn’t stealing money from banks and corporations via the Magic Door – this merely supplements your primary income, which is gained from money siphons your Hacker installs on ATMs dotted throughout the game. Let me say that again: your primary source of income in Satellite Reign is literally stealing money from cash machines. That’s something two guys with a pickup truck could do, and it’s not something that particularly makes me feel like I’m in control of a company with vast resources at my beck and call. Are they the cyberpunk equivalent of a tech startup that’s made up of a couple of guys “working” out of the local coffee shop? Have they ever heard of corporate finance? Seed capital? I guarantee you they’d get more money by walking in the front door of the bank and asking for a loan instead of hacking the sodding ATMs. Maybe then they could afford an actual R&D department that isn’t composed of seven random hobos you found on the street and slipped a couple of hundred bucks to to be part of your scrappy startup.

Research itself I don’t actually have that many complaints about (apart from the pathetic amounts of money involved); it takes place in real time as you carry out missions and is faster or slower based on the number of researchers/amount of cash you’re willing to invest. There’s no tech tree in Satellite Reign: instead, you can only research the weapon and equipment prototypes that you’ve pulled out of your compound assaults, which is your primary motivator for hitting them in the first place. At first glance it looks like there’s a decent range of weapons, but that’s just because they’re split out into three types: ballistic, lasers and plasma. Ballistic weapons are all-rounders, while plasma and lasers are particularly effective against armour and shields respectively. There’s plasma and laser versions of the standard assault rifle, plasma and laser miniguns, a plasma shotgun, plasma and laser pistols etc. etc., but what soon becomes apparent is that there are no explosive weapons in here. All of these guns fire bullets, or bullet equivalents. In fact the only moderately destructive item you’ll have access to for most of the game are the Fragmentation grenades you can unlock via the Soldier’s skill tree. This is staggeringly unimaginative. It’s not until about halfway through the game (later if you take a roundabout route like I did) that you get access to the Plasma Cannon, which is somewhat explodey, and satchel charges only unlock in the final area. I find this lack of decent toys tragically ironic for a game that’s named after a signature weapon in Syndicate Wars that involved using a targeting laser to drop hypervelocity tungsten rods from an orbiting satellite down onto your target’s head, which incidentally incinerated an extremely wide portion of the surrounding area.

(Satellite Reign misses another trick by having its bionic augmentations be simple stat/ability upgrades that fill in boxes on your agents’ stat sheets instead of being reflected visually in their appearance in any way. I’m not asking for them to do any expensive modification of 3D assets here, I just wanted something a little more significant than a tiny icon that the project artist knocked out in five minutes.)

I think the game’s reluctance to let you play with anything truly destructive is linked to two things. One is that the City is decidedly non-destructible; it looks great, but is 100% a collection of static, immutable objects. It’d be a bit dumb if you fired satellite weaponry at a building and it didn’t explode, and so I do sort of understand if they didn’t want to get as silly about it as Syndicate Wars did. That would be giving the developers the benefit of the doubt, however, as I suspect the real reason you’re not handed any explosives is because it would make combat absolutely trivial. Even the Soldier’s grenades – which only have a moderate radius and won’t kill anyone who isn’t a light guard unless you catch them right in the middle of the blast zone — are game-breakingly powerful because the guard AI loves to cluster up. Explosions knock guards prone, and when they’re prone they lose any cover bonuses they might have had, making it very easy to finish them off when they’re on the ground. Soldier grenades are at least limited; if you had anything more plentiful or with a wider blast radius you’d just blow everything up all the time.

Even now I’m not convinced that would be a bad thing, though, because as tough and numerous as they are the most difficult part of Satellite Reign’s combat isn’t fighting the guards, it’s fighting the bugs in the combat control and line-of-sight systems. As an example, when your agents are right next to guards they’ll hit them with a punchy melee attack instead of shooting them when you right click them. And when they are right next to guards this is fine. Unfortunately Satellite Reign has a very broad interpretation of the phrase “right next to” and chooses to believe this includes guards up to twenty feet away from the agent in question. If they’re not close enough to melee the guard they’ll leisurely jog out of cover to do it while the guard shoots them in the face.

I have a simple solution to this problem that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Satellite Reign developers: if, when the player right clicks on an enemy, the agent in question isn’t close enough to melee said enemy, just have them shoot the fucker instead. That’s probably what they want to do anyway. There’s also bugs where the game doesn’t register clicks on abilities, bugs where sometimes when you try and hide your squad behind a piece of cover it’ll decide to leave one facing in the opposite direction so that they can get shot in the back, bugs in the pathfinding when you use abilities such as the Infiltrator melee attack that result in the Infiltrator getting “lost” on the way to the guard you’ve targeted. Worse are the line-of-sight issues, where a guard will be behind cover shooting your agents while they unerringly guide their return fire into a lamppost that’s ten feet in front of them, or the poorly-communicated range of your weapons, which is sometimes shorter than those of the weapons the guards are using and which will result in them (again) gamely trotting out of cover to get into range, often weathering a storm of gunfire to do so. It’s insanely frustrating to see a guard sending out an alert, telling the squad to focus fire on him, and them being unable to bring him down in time despite their sheer firepower because of some quirk of the scenery or the agent behaviour.

Ugh. Despite appearances, the main reason Satellite Reign makes me so angry isn’t because it isn’t Syndicate. There are some fundamental philosophical differences between me and the game but I try not to be too harsh on it for that since that’s a completely subjective disagreement. What bothers me about it is that it actually does an awful lot that’s really, really good. Or could have been really, really good, given an additional few months of polishing and balancing. The agents are great. The City looks great. I think the combat, as painful as it is now, could really go somewhere if they ironed out the bugs. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of the compounds, they just need the time and resources to inject them with a little more variety and individuality and not have every single one finish with a Magic Door. Playing it now, though, it doesn’t quite come across as a mess, but it is disjointed and very much unfinished. And that is a real shame, because I have a haunting feeling this is the only swipe somebody will take at redoing Syndicate for a very long time; Satellite Reign doesn’t seem to be doing well enough to justify a sequel or anyone else getting in on the action, and so it’ll probably be left to languish in the annals of history. In a way, that’s the worst thing about Satellite Reign: even behind all of the bugs, limitations and hurried design choices, it proved the concept still worked well, and it could have been amazing. Hopefully the devs will patch out the worst of the issues and the game will do well in the Christmas sale; as it stands, though, Satellite Reign is a tragic missed opportunity.

The post Thoughts: Satellite Reign appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m coming to Dragonfall rather late. Originally a stretch goal for the original Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter campaign, Dragonfall was first released as an expansion back in February 2014.  I did play it at the time, and got about halfway through before burning out, something I’ll blame on it coming out a little too hot on the heels of Shadowrun Returns for my tastes. Even then, though, I could see that Dragonfall was a significant cut above the game it was supposed to be expanding on. Partly this was because Harebrained Schemes had had time to fix most of the bugs and technical limitations I complained about in my original review, but mostly it’s because they — gasp! — also took the opportunity to iterate and expand on the structure and mechanics on their second go around. Harebrained obviously knew they had a winner on their hands because they took the additional time to polish Dragonfall up, overhaul the interface and bulk out the weaker areas of the expansion so that they could release it as a standalone game. And the resulting Director’s Cut is very good indeed.

Dragonfall improves on Shadowrun Returns in just about every single area I can think of. SR did a lot right in terms of theme and flavour, but it fell down badly more than once during the execution; it fell back on combat to resolve situations far too often, not to mention suffering from a barely-camouflaged linear nature that was resolved in a decidedly weak fashion by the denouement of the bug spirit plot. Dragonfall solves all of these problems, and while it’s not without issues of its own it comes off as a much more well-rounded experience that makes far better use of the Shadowrun universe as a foundation to build an outstanding RPG upon.

As an example: it’s been a little while since I played Shadowrun Returns, but from what I remember you just sort of blundered from one job to the next, running with a characterless team of generic NPCs and being spoonfed leads by narrative convenience as and when you needed something new to be getting on with. Dragonfall on the other hand hits the ground running by having you be part of an established team of Berlin shadowrunners who stumble upon something far larger than them during the very first mission of the game. It’s painfully obvious that you’re out of your depth, and after the team’s leader gets killed you get promoted to the position and start attempting to untangle Dragonfall’s many plot threads.

The setup that goes on during this tutorial mission is excellent from both a narrative and a mechanical point of view:

• On the narrative side it hooks the player’s attention: they’ve scratched the surface of a far-reaching conspiracy and they want to see where it leads. This isn’t exactly novel – just about every single RPG ever starts with the same sort of plot hook — but it’s a damn sight better than Shadowrun Returns’ random dead guy.  I’ve nothing against a slow-burning plotline, but SR waited far too long to make it personal. In Dragonfall, the shadowy paramilitary organisation you’ve uncovered wants to kill you, not your friend, which makes the stakes far more immediate.
• Aside from the threat to themselves, the NPC team members also have the excellent motivation of wanting revenge for their dead teammate as a plausible explanation for why this bunch of otherwise amoral mercenaries would stick together to get to the bottom of the conspiracy. You stick with the same group of companions throughout the game this time around, which gives them far more opportunity to build character and come off as actual people
• Finally, inheriting the team leader position gives you control of what contracts you take to fund the team’s investigation. Each contract is a meaty “side”-mission taking up to an hour that’s unrelated to the main plotline, and even though you end up doing pretty much all of them by the time the game is done (hence the quotation marks) they’re much better at projecting the illusion that you’re a team of shadowrunners working for cold hard cash.

Dragonfall is split into two acts. The first act is basically Baldur’s Gate 2 redux, as you take on those side missions to raise 50,000 nuyen that’ll fund an information broker’s attempts to find out what the hell is going on. You can do them in pretty much any order, as well as missions for your companions and odd jobs for the various inhabitants of the game’s hub area, the Kreuzbasar.  Now, as it turns out the amount of money you need to scrape together is curiously identical to the amount of money you get from doing all the side missions so it’s not quite the unstructured dream a Shadowrun game really should be, but I appreciate the thought, and it does give you a bit of leeway by letting you contribute money from your personal account if you want to speed things along a little bit.

Not that you’d want to. Dragonfall’s various contract missions are the best part of the game, written with more confidence than those found in Shadowrun Returns and put together in such a way that you can use your character’s inherent skills (or those of your teammates) to improve your odds and quickly bypass blockers that’d otherwise slow you down. Take the cyberzombie mission, for example, in which you’re tasked with breaking into the R&D facility of a minor corporation to steal their new weapons platform. Once you’ve found it you have to tow it back out with you slaved into Follow mode – that is, unless you happen to have a decent level of Drone Control, in which case you can use the cyberzombie to shoot up the hordes of of Knight Errant security goons that try to block your escape. Dragonfall is full of small, interesting ways to use skills or information, whether it be to use your Decking skill to quickly hack a door panel or your Biotech skill to decipher some lab notes, and there’s enough of them that it feels like you completed a mission in a manner that was tailored to your character. It partially addresses my complaint that Shadowrun Returns was too reliant on combat; you’ll probably still end up shooting your way out of a lot of situations in Dragonfall, but at least here you get a lot of opportunities to even the odds up beforehand by cutting the power, releasing some nerve gas or dropping the roof on somebody’s head.

While they may be comparatively small details, these noncombat flourishes go a long way towards making Dragonfall feel like it has something to offer beyond its XCOM-lite combat system.  It helps that — like everything else — the dialogue is a definite step up from the original game, with less purple prose and far more character-building moments for you and your team members. The contract missions also have a lot of range, from the humorous interlude with the insane researcher who has become obsessed with a low-budget fantasy TV series to the horrors lurking in the sublevel of an Aztechnology research facility. Their outcomes are rarely black and white, either; there’s usually a “good” option available to finish them, but since that’s probably not what you’ve been hired to do taking it will usually end up pissing off your employer. You are a team of amoral shadowrunners, after all, and your activities regularly involve things like sabotaging a rival corporation’s research by blowing up the building (and everyone inside). Dragonfall’s pretty good at making you feel that, even though your team members are, on the whole, fairly decent people.

Speaking of the team members, I was very impressed at how Dragonfall refused to conform to the usual stereotypes. I know I just said they were decent people, but they all have murky pasts that you have to work to find out about — and in some cases just getting them to talk to you at all can be a challenge.  Take Eiger. Eiger is an ex-special forces ork who is used to a rigid command structure and who resents your taking over the team after the original team leader bites it. She won’t respect you if you try to be nice to her; instead you have to call her out on her attitude and remind her who is in charge. Then there’s Glory, an emotionally distant cyborg with razor hands who won’t open up to you unless you’re pretty direct about it; giving her space just doesn’t work. Everyone’s hiding something, and the resulting companion missions are some of the best in the game. My only complaint about them is that they don’t have particularly satisfying resolutions because they tend to tie into events in the wider Shadowrun universe that you have to have some knowledge of to fully appreciate. Shit, I’ve read a lot of Shadowrun sourcebooks, and even I have no idea why Winternight was important or why the game left that particular plot thread hanging.

Anyway, once you’ve gotten the contract missions out of the way the game moves on to act two, which is a strictly linear romp towards the finale. I felt it lost a little steam here — I was enjoying exploring Dragonfall’s world so much that it almost seemed like a shame to cut it short by actually resolving the plot. At least it’s done so in a far more satisfying fashion than Shadowrun Returns — as the name implies it involves a seemingly-dead dragon, which blows SR’s irritating bug spirits out of the water — and even gives you a nice little coda that implies you and your team carry on working after the final mission. Life doesn’t stop just because you happened to bring down a decades-old conspiracy, after all.

I’ve mentioned combat several times in this review, and the good news is that it’s been significantly streamlined since the original game, with a much-improved interface that makes it clear what your options are and what you have to do to take down a specific bad guy. Dragonfall makes a lot more out of armour- and AP-reducing skills, as well as skills that increase the party’s chance to hit a given target, giving you something to do that’s more than flank-and-shoot. It can still be a little tedious to murder your way through the umpteenth group of security goons, but Dragonfall shows a tad more restraint and at least tries to ensure combat fatigue doesn’t set in that often. Most importantly, manual saving is now in and you’re only in combat when there’s bad guys to fight, rather than it being a default state for the entire mission. The segments that take place in the matrix are still utterly awful, however, and I can only assume Harebrained couldn’t figure out how to fix these without completely redoing that part of the game¹.

What else is bad about Dragonfall? Well, aside from the game’s annoying tendency to assume foreshadowing of events in the wider Shadowrun universe counts as a plot resolution there’s a couple of things that niggle. I feel like a lot more could have been made out of the various cybernetic augments you can have implanted rather than having them act as simple stat boosters – at one point you get an option to blind somebody with your cyber-eye (that I didn’t have installed at the time), and after that I was wondering why that sort of option didn’t come up in conversation more often. And while you’re sometimes given the option for your better-equipped teammates to do something like hack a terminal or smash down a wall, there are other times where the player character has to do everything while your party members trail mutely behind you. It’s only because the game is usually so good at employing player skills and attributes that these things jump out at me, but it’s a jarring contrast nonetheless.

(Then there’s the engine, which isn’t any prettier two years on. And interface improvements aside it’s also a little clunky to control.)

These are comparatively minor niggles; after all, if the worst criticism I can make of Dragonfall is that it misses some opportunities to make your adventure feel more organic there can’t really be a lot wrong with it. This Director’s Cut is such a dramatic improvement over both Shadowrun Returns and the first iteration of the Dragonfall expansion that the only way I could see somebody having a problem with it is if they seriously disliked cyberpunk RPGs, or just RPGs in general. It’s better-plotted, better-written, better-structured and just generally better, and I think is a large part of why — unlike most developers who have made a second trip to the well — Harebrained were able to still bring in a significant amount of money when they went back to Kickstarter for Shadowrun Hong Kong. Shadowrun Returns was a decent Shadowrun RPG, but Dragonfall is a great RPG period, one that’s able to go toe to toe with the best of the genre and which arguably comes out on top.

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Pillars of Eternity is a game that’s trying to be too many things to too many people.

To Obsidian, it’s a chance to prove themselves; after years of putting out bugged/incomplete titles because of publisher interference, they can finally show what they can do when developing a game with their own funding on their own schedule. To the gaming world at large it has some sizeable shoes to fill as a spiritual successor to the old Infinity Engine games, a Baldur’s Gate 3 in all but name.  And to the people who backed it on Kickstarter, and who have been waiting the best part of three years for the game to be finished, there were a lot of promises made. Strongholds! Cities! A 15-level mega-dungeon! All things that would require a lot of time and effort in order to do properly, and since Pillars of Eternity is also the most successful game Kickstarter that’s actually going to be released it’s fair to say that Obsidian must have been feeling the weight of expectation a little bit.

Given that, is it really any wonder that they’ve ended up playing it safe?

Pillars of Eternity is a good game that doesn’t take the risks it needed to in order to be outstanding. It chooses the road-more-travelled at almost every turn in terms of its structure and themes, with only a little bit of Obsidian’s trademark choice-and-consequence to liven things up. Now, a “good” Obsidian RPG is automatically going to be better than 90% of other RPGs released this year since they’ve been at this a while and they know what they’re doing, so perhaps this was the right thing to do. Pillars has a lot it needs to accomplish; in addition to ticking all of the above boxes it had to establish, from scratch, a brand new world with its own rules and foibles, and so playing it safe might have been the wiser option.

My problem here — and Obsidian’s problem, in my opinion — is that they’ve previously excelled at taking somebody else’s established intellectual property and driving it into new and interesting territory. Knights of the Old Republic 2, Neverwinter Nights 2, Fallout: New Vegas — this sort of restructuring is basically their entire resume for the past decade, Alpha Protocol excepted.  Now that they’re playing with their own IP and their own universe they seem to be a lot more reluctant to go off-piste. Pillars of Eternity could just as easily have been a Baldur’s Gate game had it been released ten years ago, and while that’s precisely what a lot of people who backed it will have been looking for it’s also not entirely a good thing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the game’s main plot. Set in the virgin swords-and-sorcery world of Eora,  Pillars has you playing the part of a Bhaalspawn Spectre Grey Warden Watcher, which is something that caused an eye-roll of epic proportions once I realised I was going to spend yet another game being referred to as a capitalised noun that gave me magic powers. Pillars’ big conceit is that the reincarnation of souls into new bodies after they die is both proven and commonplace, and thanks to being caught in a magical storm during the game’s tutorial sequence you’ve gained the ability to see other people’s past lives — and your own. Said magic storm was kicked off by the game’s main villain, Thaos, and so you spend the rest of the game hunting him down so that you can get some sort of explanation, or at least deliver a strongly-worded note telling him not to do it again.

If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s the plot to Baldur’s Gate 2 with some of the words changed – except Pillars’ take on it is far weaker. The player’s motivations for hunting Thaos are never explained convincingly; one of your past lives is connected with him in some way, but there’s nothing else particularly driving the Watcher to travel halfway across the planet in search of the man. Unlike BG 2’s baddie wizard Jon Irenicus, Thaos hasn’t taken anything from you, he has no cure for your condition, and he’s not voiced by David Warner, making it spectacularly hard to care his nefarious plots. The Watcher thing itself is treated in a very fuzzy way; the game says it’s basically a terminal illness where you slowly lose control and become unable to tell the difference between your past lives and your current one, but it only ever says it. It never surfaces this descent into madness to you in any tangible way; you experience many visions of the past but they’re always relevant to the plot or sidequest you’re currently on, which made me wonder why I’d be so anxious to get rid of something so useful. BG 2 at least had the player character experience some pretty hardcore nightmares that gave them some impetus to find Irenicus and fix their problem. Pillars on the other hand seems to think it’s enough to assume you’ll be happy spending thirty hours finding Thaos just because that’s what the main quest tells you to do.

There’s no getting around the fact that Pillars’ main plotline is a pale shadow of what you’d expect from a game of its heritage, and that’s its a largely self-inflicted wound caused  by the conservative need to stick to the general story structure of the Baldur’s Gate series. The story does get interesting towards the end, but that’s due to reasons and revelations that have absolutely sod all to do with the first twenty hours of the game — and even then I couldn’t help but think that Mask of the Betrayer explored many of the same themes in a far more effective way. Some of the individual story events are fun enough, but because it’s so unusually clumsy in tying those events together into a coherent narrative there’s no single moment in Pillars that even comes close to the punch-to-the-gut conversation with Myrkul in MotB. Perhaps that’s a high bar for the game to clear, but it’s one Obsidian themselves set back in 2007 and one that I was hoping they’d at least equal with a game set in their own universe. As it is Pillars not only falls short, it also only narrowly avoids sprawling in the dirt thanks to Obsidian’s innate talent for choice and consequence.

These elements are less emphasised than they were in something like Alpha Protocol, but they are present and they’re very welcome – in fact I think they might be improved by being less obvious, as that makes for a more organic-seeming game where the player likely to respond naturally to the situation at hand instead of trying to game it. Instead of having you make obviously-signposted binary decisions (as you would in a Bioware game) Pillars chooses to deal with the choices you make through reputation and disposition scores. Reputation is exactly what you’d think; you have a reputation score with each major faction/town in the game, and certain plot events and quests will appear or be closed off to you based on how your previous actions have affected your standings with these groups. Then you’ve got Disposition, which is more to do with the manner in which your character has interacted with the world in general. If you’re true to your word you’ll pick up levels in the Honest disposition. If you threaten people a lot you’ll acquire an Aggressive disposition. The stronger your disposition is, the more likely you’ll be able to rely on it in conversation in the future, trading on your Honest reputation to get people to trust you or using the evidence of your Aggressive nature as a warning to others. The conversation options opened up by your dispositions won’t necessarily lead to better outcomes, but they at least give you more choices and encourage you to stick to a coherent character rather than — again — trying to game the system.

This ability to subtly mould events according to your character’s nature is very welcome in a game with such a thin main plotline, as it at least provides the sense that your involvement is having some effect on the outcome, even if it’s an illusory one. Better news is that the various companions you pick up on your travels are written with the confidence and sophistication that you’d expect from a developer of Obsidian’s calibre – Durance in particular is the first RPG cleric-type I’ve encountered who has made me buy into his spells being powered by his religious zeal rather than just being a particularly heavily-armoured mage whose speciality is healing people — and the vast majority of the side-quests are similarly excellent, with very few of them falling into the Fedex trap. Since that main plotline is so anaemic the side quests are what you spend probably 70-80% of your time on in Pillars, and so despite its weaknesses it still ends up being a pretty strong game in terms of content. It tapers off a little towards the end, as I think the second city was added more to tick some Kickstarter boxes than it was because the designers had anything particularly interesting in mind for the player to do there, but fortunately this is where the main plot starts to take up some of the slack and things remain on a somewhat even keel all the way up to the end boss.

One area where the conscious decision to ape Baldur’s Gate has helped rather than harmed Pillars is its appearance. I don’t know how it’ll look to someone who didn’t play the BG saga at the time and whose nostalgia glands won’t be firing at full throttle, but Pillars of Eternity is a really pretty game. The characters are 3D models and they look a bit basic when viewed side on in the level up screen; however when you switch to the isometric viewpoint the Infinity Engine is known for they look very nice indeed when paired with the painted/rendered backdrops; fifteen years of progress in how these things are drawn has done wonders for their appearance and detail, and about the only complaint I can make is that the maps themselves seem a fair bit smaller than the ones from the Baldur’s Gate series. Maybe that’s just because I spent most of the game with things zoomed out as far as they would go, though. While the UI is a carbon copy of BG’s in some places — everything from the movement and inventory icons to the faux-90s renders of environments in the loading screens to the layout of the innkeeper screen is designed to evoke fond memories of those games — there’s also a few incredibly welcome interface improvements, chief of which is the Fast Mode button that doubles the speed of the game and makes trudging from one map edge to another far less painful. I’m not so sure about the player stash, which is essentially a bottomless Bag of Holding you can access at any time and which allows you to loot literally everything you come across; it doesn’t matter that a merchant only pays 5 gold pieces for a Xaurip spear when you’re selling him two hundred of the things, and pretty soon money becomes totally meaningless. RPG economies usually break towards the endgame if the player is doing all of the content, but I wasn’t expecting Pillars to take the mechanical equivalent of a claw hammer to its own economy with such enthusiasm.

Still, it’d be selling the game short to say it doesn’t make some significant improvements over the Infinity Engine games. The combat system is outstanding, taking more than a few pointers from classic Microprose RPG Darklands. It’s built around the concept of fatigue and damage reduction; unlike D&D, wearing heavier armour won’t do anything to stop you from getting hit, but it will apply a flat reduction to the amount of damage you take. If the armour you’re wearing is thick enough you’ll only take a point or two of HP damage per attack, meaning your fighter in plate armour has suddenly become very difficult to kill in a melee and can tank multiple opponents for a long, long time. They won’t do all that much damage, mind — heavier armour does slow the wearer down so that they can’t attack as often, but this is why you have a backline of mages, rangers and other classes armed with missile weapons. Muskets and pistols are available in the Pillars universe and these weapons have armour piercing properties that make them very good against tougher enemies (who have damage reduction just like you do), meaning your backline often becomes a gunline when you’re fighting a boss.

The other thing Pillars lifts from Darklands is the separation of fatigue from regular hitpoint damage. In practice most characters have enough HP that they’ll never run out during a single fight, but what they have to watch out for is fatigue damage. Most attacks do fatigue damage to a character’s Endurance pool along with regular damage to their HP pool — getting hit in the face by multiple assailants is going to knacker you out even if you’re inside otherwise impregnable plate armour — and a character’s Endurance limit is much smaller than their HP pool.  Letting your Endurance reach zero means that character will be knocked out and won’t get back up again until after the fight is done, so it’s just as dangerous as running out of HP. Fighters get big Endurance pools and skills that boost their recovery of Endurance points during a fight, which is another reason to stick them on the frontline and let them handle the skull-bashing while the rest of the party retires to a safe distance.

Fortunately Endurance damage completely regenerates once you exit combat, so it’s not something you have to worry about long-term; however any HP damage that’s bled through your armour cannot be healed except by resting up. This used to be something you did practically after every fight in Baldur’s Gate as there was very little downside to it, but Pillars puts the kibosh on that by making every rest stop consume one set of camping supplies — and you can only carry four of those at any one time. The decision of whether or not to rest therefore becomes a matter of how far you want to push your luck. Your party might be half-knackered, or you might have fired off all your good spells in the last fight, but you have to balance that against your dwindling count of camping supplies; can you get through one or two more combats without having to rest up? This is something of an artificial choice as enemies don’t respawn and you can always exit whatever dungeon you’re in to go and buy some more camping supplies from an ever-obliging innkeeper, but that’s enough of a faff that you still don’t want to rest unless you absolutely have to.

I like the things Pillars does with combat. Every class has something unique they bring to the table, and nobody is gear-locked by an absurd “can’t use spells unless I’m in my pyjamas” requirement. This gives Pillars a flexibility in how you put together your party that’s rather missing from modern RPGs; I’ve seen the Chanter NPC you pick up three hours in built with at least three different gear configurations, all of which are perfectly valid for what he does. It also makes the choice of sword and shield versus big two-handed weapon versus missile weapon a much more interesting one, as there are scenarios in which you might want to switch between all three on the fly depending on where you’re positioned and what opponent you’re fighting. It does have the problem that once you’re max level on Normal difficulty you can roll over just about any opposition that isn’t the end boss of Od Nua without breaking a sweat, but I think this is one of those rare RPGs where I’d actually be interested in playing it through on a harder difficulty level for the extra challenge, as the combat system is good enough to justify it.

And now, because I want to fit it in somewhere and we’re getting close to the end of the review, it’s time for the Kickstarter rant: because this is a Kickstarter game, there’s rather a lot of “features” that are in the game because they were promised as one of the Kickstarter stretch goals/backer rewards, not because they were in any way a good idea. Top of the list here is the player stronghold, added when the Kickstarter reached $3 million but never removed once Obsidian realised that they didn’t have the time or resources to make it work. When you first get it you’re bombarded with a list of about twenty-odd improvements such as new fortifications or renovating the buildings inside the stronghold’s bailey that take both money and in-game time to construct. Finishing them all takes most of the length of the game, but the problem is that none of these improvements actually do anything interesting. Most of them increase your stronghold’s Prestige and Security ratings, each of which amounts to a generic number since it’s never adequately explained what they do, and they never seem to have any effect in game. Bandits will still steal your taxes and attack your keep even with max security. Prestige boosts said tax rate, except by the point you get the stronghold you’re already the Eoran equivalent of Nicholas Cage from Lord of War thanks to the industrial quantities of only slightly bloodstained second-hand weapons and armour you’ve been flogging to innkeepers across the continent, and so you don’t need an extra seven hundred gold every hour. Occasionally a quest will come up in the stronghold which you can assign one of your inactive NPC companions to — a nice idea that I thought Dragon Age Inquisition should have taken advantage of — but once again the rewards from these quests are so pathetic and inconsequential you wonder why Obsidian even bothered including them in the first place. It’s a running theme in this review, but Obsidian executed the same concept much more effectively in one of their previous games (in this case Neverwinter Nights 2¹), so why is this version of it such a pale imitation of their past success?

(Other things on that list: the 15-level mega-dungeon, which you can tell Obsidian were regretting committing to once you get down to level 9 or 10 and the level maps have shrunk to something roughly the size of a broom closet containing a few angry mushrooms and nothing else, and the backer characters and gravestones, which only confirms my thesis that letting your most rabid and obsessive fans author even a tiny amount of content in your game is a terrible fucking idea any way you look at it. )

Finally, this is an Obsidian game. That’s a name that’s become synonymous with deep, well-written RPGs, but sadly also with bugs. Previously a lot of people excused them on the basis that they kept getting screwed over by publishers, couldn’t work to their own schedule and had to rush games out the door in an unfinished state. This is exactly the situation that the Kickstarter funding was supposed to avoid, which is why I’m more than a little surprised to find that Pillars of Eternity is still riddled with bugs. In my thirty hours I’ve experienced the following:

• Characters repeatedly getting stuck in the prone position after a fight, necessitating a reload.
• A scripted trigger un-firing and resetting an area to its initial peaceful state after a bunch of monsters had been let loose in the level. After killing the monsters while the various bystanders looked on in disinterest, I was immediately attacked on the next level by the guards after (I assume) the game deemed my actions to be hostile somehow.
• The Swarm of Insects spell having an indefinite duration. Since this is a damage over time debuff spell it makes any fight involving enemies that use it practically impossible unless you cheese it.
• Bounty targets not spawning in the very small area where the quest said they could be found.
• A repeatable, unavoidable hard crash to desktop in Raedric’s Hold that wasn’t solved by reloading. I was just lucky I had a save from just before I went there that I could go back to; otherwise this would have been a game-ending bug.
• Bloating save/load times that got longer and longer the further I got into the game. Loading screens were taking thirty seconds plus towards the end – since you have to endure a loading screen every time you enter a building or change floors this quickly became extremely obnoxious².

Yes, Pillars of Eternity is a big, complex RPG, and the worst of these bugs have since been squashed in the game’s first patch, but while it wasn’t Total War levels of broken Pillars’ release state is still enough to make me think that maybe the publishers weren’t entirely to blame for Obsidian’s previous failures in this regard.

So Pillars of Eternity isn’t quite the unqualified success that everyone was hoping for. There is one area in which it does excel: it may be a decade too late, but this is as close to Baldur’s Gate 3 as we’re ever going to get. If you were expecting more than that you’re probably going to go away disappointed, however, since I don’t think it matches the quality of Obsidian’s previous output. The work that’s gone into establishing the world, the engine and the combat mechanics is by no means wasted, but nearly everything else in Pillars has been done before in a far more effective manner in a previous Obsidian title. Perhaps it’s a little unfair to ask that much of the game, though; it does its job competently, if a little unimaginatively, and expecting more of it just because it’s Obsidian making it seems a little churlish in hindsight. If nothing else, Pillars of Eternity does successfully set the stage for a sequel or expansion that’ll do the really interesting things with the universe that Pillars shies away from. And that will be a project more suited to Obsidian’s strengths, I think.

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My overriding thought during the first few hours of Wasteland was that somewhere — etched into a stone tablet carried down from a mountaintop, written into human DNA, inscribed in the basic atomic structure of the universe, I don’t care — the following message needs to be preserved for posterity:

THOU SHALT NOT FILL THE STARTING DUNGEON OF YOUR RPGS WITH ANNOYING GIANT RAT/ANT/FLY ENEMIES. (delete as appropriate)

It should be a fundamental law that you don’t do this. Ever. Shooting rats isn’t satisfying. Poking giant ants with a spear for an hour at the start of Fallout 2 is what puts me off replaying Fallout 2. When I play an RPG I want to feel like I’m doing something meaningful, not like I’m a pest exterminator for hire. Say what you like about modern RPGs but they’ve successfully moved beyond what I shall term Daikatana Syndrome¹; Wasteland 2, on the other hand, proves to remain firmly entrenched in the past by having you spend your first hours with the game shooting giant flies and maggots

This conscious rejection of modern design principles and ideas is something I’ve seen before several times now in other Kickstarted games. When you Kickstart something based on nostalgia for – in this case – Fallout, which most people have played, and Wasteland, which most people haven’t, and you get three million dollars to do it, the temptation to just copy what worked in the past must be overwhelmingly strong. and inXile have caved to that pressure with everything good and bad that that implies. Wasteland 2 plays like I imagine the infamous Van Buren prototype² of Fallout 3 would have before Black Isle got shut down. Had Wasteland 2 been released instead of Van Buren, I imagine everyone would have gone away quite happy that they’d gotten a worthy followup to the first two games – but that was ten years ago. That Wasteland ignores everything that’s happened in RPGs in the last decade ensures it feels like it’s stepped right out of a time capsule from 2003, and while the Fallout style has aged far better than the previous games I slated for doing the same thing I still think this attitude hinders Wasteland 2 far more than it helps it.

Take skills, for example. The above screenshot shows the character creation screen when you start the game; you have to make a party of four characters, so you have to navigate this overwhelming array of skills and abilities four times without any idea of how useful each individual skill is going to be. If they’d followed through on making each of them genuinely worthwhile I wouldn’t complain about it, but having gone through the whole thing now my assessment is that fully half of those skills are either useless, not used anywhere near enough to justify the skill point investment, or are just flat out redundant skills that have been split in order to promote the illusion of choice. For example, there’s the Lockpicking skill, which is used to open locks, and the Safecracking skill, which is used to open combination safes. As you can imagine you come across locked doors far more often than you do locked safes, so one is very useful while the other just gives you a little more loot. There’s absolutely no reason those two skills couldn’t have been rolled into one, and yet Wasteland 2′s stubborn refusal to streamline itself in any way whatsoever means that the arbitrary split remains and the player ends up getting confused. Alarm Disarming is another good example, this time of a skill that is just flat out useless. There are never any negative penalties for having an alarm go off; most of the time anyone who would have been alerted by it is already dead by the time the alarm is tripped, and so the skill simply functions as a trap during character creation for unwary players who think it’s going to be more useful than it actually is.

Speaking of traps during character creation, I was absolutely dumbfounded at how awful Wasteland 2′s attribute system is. In most RPGs a characters intrinsic attributes (Strength, Dexterity and so on) are very important and affect almost everything they do in the game world, with individual skills granting specific abilities and bonuses on top of the innate stats provided by their attributes. That’s how Baldur’s Gate did it, that’s how Fallout did it, but it’s most definitely not how Wasteland does it. In Wasteland skills are everything. Take a brawler archetype, for example. In most games you’d pump their Strength and Constitution and leave them with low Intelligence in the expectation that a character who exists solely to punch things in the face isn’t going to have to do any heavy thinking on the way. If you do this in Wasteland, though, you end up getting screwed since Strength has minimal impact on melee damage, while you get the skill points you’ll need to level the Brawling skill from your Intelligence stat. More Intelligence equals more skill points per level, and more skill points equals high Brawling – and so the ideal brawler character in Wasteland maxes their Intelligence first and their Constitution second, with Strength a distant third in consideration. If you made a brawler character with low Int I’m not even sure you could max the Brawling skill by the end of the game, which would make them decidedly useless.

This is the story of Wasteland 2′s attributes: Intelligence trumps everything. I spent the entire game lamenting the fact that I’d given only two out of my four characters high Intelligence scores, since only they could learn combat and utility skills quickly enough to be useful. The other two were largely relegated to carrying around huge piles of loot, since this was all their high Strength values made them good for. Other attributes are similarly awful — each point in Coordination gives you +1% chance to hit an enemy (exciting, I know), while a single level in a weapons skill will raise you chance to hit with that weapon by five or six percent. Speed and Awareness affect combat movement and initiative, but while always taking my turn second was annoying it absolutely wouldn’t have been worth taking points out of Intelligence to make it up. Because so much is invested in the skill system, it renders the attributes almost entirely one-dimensional, and counter-intuitively so.

Then you’ve got the weapons themselves, which are very inconsistent. Melee weapons are (again) split into two types, Blunt and Sharp, but both are equally useless. The power of Brawling scales exponentially with skill and character level from awful at the start of the game to downright overpowered at the end of it. Heavy Weapons are terrible since all of the guns you’ll find up until the Minigun fire large bursts of expensive assault rifle ammo and have underpowered armour penetration. Shotguns hit all enemies in a cone, which is a nice idea, but the enemies in Wasteland 2 get special cheat moves that let them run across as many squares as it’ll take — even halfway across the encounter map, if necessary — to close to melee range with your party, meaning that nine times out of ten you’ll hit your own party with friendly fire if you try to take advantage of shotgun spread.  Handguns start out decently, but are so underpowered by the end of the game that you might as well be throwing the bullets at your enemies for all the good they do. Once again, the problem here is that there was apparently an overwhelming desire to have as many skills in the game as possible, and so each weapon type has its own skillset, except half of them are crap and function as point traps for players unwilling to abandon the skill because they don’t have the Intelligence to properly retrain.

This skillset design is just plain dated. It’s exactly what I’d expect to see from a game released in the 90s – the designers had all these cool ideas, either didn’t have the time or couldn’t figure out how to properly make use of them, but left them in rather than cutting or streamlining things back to a more sensible state. All this false quantity does is present the player with the illusion of choice – and not even a particularly meaningful one when all most skills do is increase the chance of success when doing something by five percent. When you have to wait two or three levels to scrounge up enough skill points to raise skills by a single level, this is an incredibly underwhelming and unexciting way of doing business.  I’d probably point to the skill system as the single weakest part of Wasteland; because it’s so poorly thought-out, and because it’s so easy to cripple characters in ways that aren’t easily recoverable, level ups are more useful for the full heal that they bring your characters than they are for actually improving their stats.

Still, now that we’ve got that out of the way I can talk about the part of the game where Wasteland’s refusal to streamline is actually something of an asset: its quests and locations. You start the game as a squad of rookieDesert Rangers, sent out into the post-apocalyptic wastes of Arizona to investigate the death of another Ranger, and from the word go the game branches out without quite sprawling out. The first choice you get is forced down your throat a little bit; you’re told that both a water station that supplies the Rangers and an agricultural centre that grows their food are having difficulties and that you should attend to them at your earliest convenience, but what you’re not told is that whichever one you pick, the other one succumbs to the thing that’s attacking it while you’re dealing with the first problem. In my case I ran across the agricultural centre first and ended up shooting flies for several hours, but what I found interesting about this artificial choice was that once you’re done with the first location you still get to visit the second one after it’s been destroyed, to pick through its smoking ruins and wonder about what could have been. Wasteland is pretty big on showing you the consequences of your actions — not just tying things up neatly in a cutscene, but actively having you explore a location after something horrible has happened to it, which is a far more effective way of communicating cause and effect. And while this first demonstration of its willingness to do this was a little hamhanded, I admit I did end up accidentally destroying a couple more communities before the game was over, and this time it was entirely my fault. I’d gone in expecting the usual no-strings-attached Paragon resolutions to quests, but it’s very rare that Wasteland’s solutions to its quests are neat enough that nobody gets hurt.

It’s also pretty open about the order in which you tackle stuff, and in how you tackle stuff. You move from location to location via a world map, and while radiation blocks the route to anywhere you’re not supposed to go yet because of plot reasons you can do pretty much anything else as long as you have the map location for it and can get there without dying. As for methods, well, during the second half of the game I came across a town that had been taken over by a bandit gang. There was a non-lethal option for gaining entry to the town, and it was chock full of named NPCs who hinted at an intricate questline for getting the bandits to vamoose. If there’s one weakness with Wasteland’s quests, however, it’s that too many of them involve repeatedly running back and forth across a map shuttling items and weapons between NPCs, and I wasn’t really in the mood for dealing with that at the time. So instead I just started killing. Killed the bandits at the gate. Killed the bandits roaming the streets. Killed the bandits and bandit NPCs inside the casino, the bar, the distillery. I didn’t stop killing until I ran out of bandits, and the game still accepted this as a valid resolution to the quest: the objective was to remove the bandits from the town, and I’d definitely achieved that in a very comprehensive fashion even though I’d sidestepped what was probably a couple of hours of subquests in doing so.

Structurally the game is split into two halves. The first, Arizona, is by far the best part of the game. You’re unravelling the mystery of who killed the Ranger, you’re exploring a map that, while visually uninteresting, at least has some topographical features like mountains on it, and you have the Ranger Citadel to retreat to as an HQ, which provides a whole lot of attention-grabbing backstory for people who didn’t play the first game (i.e. nearly everyone). The locations are, on the whole, interesting and varied, with the high point being the mountain pass guarded by the sect of crazy monks with nuclear grenades who threaten to detonate an ancient Titan II missile if anyone breaches the peace. The way Arizona is put together — the way the quests are designed and the options it gives you to resolve them — definitely made me think of Wasteland 2 as a first-class RPG despite the horrible skill system; after all, it’s what you do that makes up the essence of role-playing game. It’s the choices you make and the consequences of those choices, not the numbers attached to your characters, and Arizona is excellent at demonstrating both.

Unfortunately once you’re done with Arizona you then get shipped off to the ruins of Los Angeles, and its here that the game falls over massively. Where Arizona comes off as a well-designed, complete and satisfying experience, LA feels like content that should have been cut from the game but wasn’t because of the developers’ mistaken belief that more == better. It’s far more simplistic than Arizona, with even more fedex quests and encounters that simply consist of “Go to location, kill thing”. It didn’t help that finishing up in Arizona takes around 18-20 hours, and I thought that after that I was leaving for the finale, not to experience another ten hours of substandard content. At one point I got so fatigued that I murdered the population of yet another town just because I couldn’t be bothered to figure out who to talk to start the quest chain to get some plot-sensitive items that were needed to finish the game. LA doesn’t substantially add to the Wasteland experience; it just prolongs the game with tedious make-work, seemingly in the belief that people are expecting a 30 hour RPG so dammit, they’re going to get one even if the last third of it is a dull, dull grind.

Like Wasteland 2 itself, then, this review has ended up being very uneven. It’s a decidedly old-school RPG with some fantastic content built on top of a very shaky system and with an unnecessary second world map bolted on to the end of it. Its a very wordy game, and the writing doesn’t usually dip below the level of “competent”, but I didn’t come away from it feeling any particular attachment to the world or the characters in it.  It’s done a lot with a budget that, while large in Kickstarter terms, is still a relatively small amount to fund the development of a game, but it ironically may have tried to do too much. And I think that’s Wasteland’s cardinal sin; if it had been more focused, if the designers had had the courage to cut content that wasn’t working and not spread everything out for the sake of it, it would probably be my RPG of the year and a true modern update of the classic Fallout series. As it is, not only did it overstay its welcome by about ten hours, but it made me spend the first three hours of the game shooting flies and maggots, which I’m having a really hard time forgiving it for. I hate games that do that.

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And so we come to Planetary Annihilation, one of the more financially successful Kickstarter projects from the craze of 2012. As the name (and the Kickstarter trailer, which is a knowing homage to the intro) suggests, Planetary Annihilation’s aim is to be a modern incarnation of 1997 RTS classic Total Annihilation, with the twist that the war is now raging over multiple planets in a solar system. Supreme Commander already took a swing at updating Total Annihilation back in 2007, and so Planetary Annihilation was going to have to do a little more than just redo the whole thing in shinier graphics in order to justify its existence. It knew it, too – the first Kickstarter trailer promised a host of interesting gameplay elements such as the ability to send your robot soldiers to asteroids to mine them for resources, being able to fire troops down onto a planet from an orbiting moonbase, and building rocket engines on your asteroid bases to deorbit and launch them at whatever faction is currently pissing you off the most, turning their base into a smoking planet-sized crater. That trailer alone is probably responsible for getting Planetary Annihilation 90% of its funding, but there does tend to be a yawning gulf between what a development trailer promises and what the final product eventually delivers, especially when said trailer’s sole purpose is to part people from their money. Has Planetary Annihilation succeeded in achieving its goals? Let’s find out together.

The premise of Planetary Annihilation, as with Total Annihlation and Supreme Commander before it, is that when a game starts you’re placed in control of a single powerful unit called a Commander. The Commander has basic build capabilities – in Total Annihilation this was explained with some convincing-sounding technobabble about spraying nanobots around that assembled themselves into buildings, and while I have no idea what Planetary Annihilation’s in-universe take on the concept is it uses exactly the same mechanic in game: the Commander stands there spraying magic dust into the air, and fifteen seconds later you’ve got a robot factory. The robot factory can build both construction robots and a variety of tier one battle robots, and so the first thing you do is crank out a few construction robots to build additional base facilities. While this is happening the Commander goes on to build metal extractors and energy generators to keep the supply of raw resources going, the construction robots use these robots to build additional factories, and in a very short period of time you have a fully functioning base. You can then automate your factories to churn out a steady stream of battlebots while your construction units build more advanced base structures, and when you find an enemy base you don’t bother micromanaging your troops to preserve their robot non-lives, you just set the factory rally point to somewhere inside the enemy base and let the battle continue on autopilot while you concentrate on finding a more permanent solution to this infestation of differently-coloured robots – after all, when you’re cranking out a battlebot every second it doesn’t matter so much when an enemy bombing run takes out fifteen of them in one fell swoop.

This, to me, has always been the appeal of Total Annihilation: it captures the nature of robot warfare like nothing else. Robots are expendable by their very nature, and because your factories will continue to build as long as your resources coming in are greater than your resources going out any losses you take are almost immaterial. It leads to warfare on a vast scale, with factory upon factory contributing a steady stream of cannon fodder to a battle that cannot be won by destroying an army – they’ll likely have just built two more while your battlebots were slugging it out. No, in order to win a significant victory you have to cut the supply of enemy troops off at the source; blowing up resource generators works just so long as you can stop the enemy from simply rebuilding them,. but the significant victories are won by destroying enemy factories. They can rebuild those, too, but while they’re doing that you have a breathing space in which you can entrench the ground you’ve taken with a dizzying array of static defences. You get stronger, the enemy gets weaker, and eventually they’ll become so weak they won’t be able to stop you punching through their front lines and blowing up their Commander, which wins you the game.

Now, I wouldn’t have spent two paragraphs outlining the mechanics of a seventeen year old game if it wasn’t relevant to the one I’m reviewing in some way, and the good news — at least as far as Planetary Annihilation is concerned — is that it nails that feeling of total warfare pretty effectively by replicating the Total Annihilation approach wholesale. After about ten minutes into a game there is always something exploding somewhere on the map as two armies clash or a probing force runs into static defences or a bombing raid manages to smash a cluster of metal extractors. It certainly gets closer than Supreme Commander managed – SC invented strategic zoom, which is so integral to most modern RTSes I wonder how we ever did without it, but the combination of the zoom-out with the huge maps rendered its battles too remote to really mean anything to me.  Planetary Annihilation’s unique perspective whereby the battles are waged on spherical planets rather than flat maps acts as something of an antidote to that malady; there’s no point zooming out all the way because you’ll only ever be able to see one side of the planet anyway, and this restriction ensures that you always remain at least somewhat close to the action.

Fortunately that’s not all the planet mechanic does for PA. It’s much more than a gimmicky way of looking at the maps – one of the buildings the tier one construction bots can build is an orbital launch station, which essentially acts as a factory for orbital units. Orbital units are launched up to the orbital layer above the planet, where you can build orbital platforms to rain laser fire down onto any enemy units unlucky enough to be caught directly below them, but they’re not restricted to the orbit of the planet they were launched from; they can travel to the orbit of any other planet or moon in the system along pseudo-accurate gravitational slingshot trajectories. There’s an orbital construction bot for building the aforementioned orbital platforms, and a space fighter for wresting control of orbital space away from an enemy player, but the key unit here is the orbital lander. This can transport a single unit from one planetary surface to another, and if you have any sense at all you’ll make it a construction bot since they can construct one end of a teleporter which can then be linked to a second teleporter inside your base, allowing instantaneous transportation from one planet to another. This is how you colonise — and if necessary, assault — other planets.

Planetary Annihilation does a great job of making each system’s collection of planets feel like a coherent whole rather than a disconnected series of separate maps. For example, if you’ve launched an expedition up to the small moon orbiting the primary planet, then when you’re building your initial base structures up there you’ll be able to see the primary – along with structures on the surface and any orbiting satellites — whizzing along in the background. While strategic zoom now goes all the way out to the solar system level, it’s possible to focus in on a single planetary system and still get a sense of the detail. The planets themselves are reasonably varied, ranging from barren planetoids to lava planets to Earth-like paradise planets, and while using the quick navigation options to jump to a particular planet can often result in “Where the sod am I now?” syndrome if there’s more than one type of planet in the system you soon get over it.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, though, I feel Planetary Annihilation falls down a little in what it does with its marquee feature. You don’t need to capture other planets for their resources; one planet’s worth is more than enough. It would be very unwise to attempt assaulting a planet from space, too; as far as I can tell loading units into orbital landers is incredibly fiddly (there might be an easier way of doing it than loading individual units one at a time, but I haven’t figured it out yet) and whatever you managed to land would get blown up within seconds by ground-based defences if there was any significant enemy presence whatsoever. That robot cannon for firing units from one planet to another? That didn’t make it into the finished product. You could send over a hundred orbital fighters, take over the planet’s orbital space and build orbital platforms to gradually destroy everything on the surface, but there’s a very effective ground-to-space ion cannon base defence that would make this approach impractical for anything more than establishing a beachhead. How, then, do you go about taking a planet held by entrenched enemy forces? Planetary Annihilation’s answer to this conundrum is simple: you don’t. You just blow the entire planet up instead.

Multi-planet games of Planetary Annihilation end in one of two ways. The first is to strap rocket boosters to a convenient planetoid and drop it on the enemy Commander’s head, but while this is both amusing and satisfying it’s also fraught with risk. First you have to find out where the Commander is, and then you have to hope he stays there long enough for the planet you’ve just thrown at him to hit him. Since it takes several minutes for the planet to get there and there’s a big system-wide warning that says “HOLY SHIT SOMEBODY JUST LAUNCHED A PLANET BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES”¹ this is almost certainly not going to happen unless the Commander belongs to the AI. Planetoid impacts don’t destroy the target planet, they just leave an implausibly small (although very large in game terms) crater wherever they impact. This makes it great for destroying things that will stay still, like bases, but less good for hitting moving targets like Commanders. And if it misses you’ve essentially just deprived yourself of a perfectly good planet you had complete control over – if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been able to build the rocket boosters in the first place.

No, if you absolutely, positively want to finish a game of Planetary Annihilation you have to take and hold the metal planet. There isn’t a metal planet in every system (and where there isn’t you’ll have to rely on hurling planetoids) but if there is, you should make getting an early foothold there your number one priority. This is because if you get control over the planet’s north pole and build five very expensive Catalyst structures there, you can turn it into a Death Star laser that’s capable of vaporising every other planet in the system in under a minute. I can’t help but feel this is somewhat unimaginative compared to the planetoids, but it’s undeniably efficient; once you’ve finished the last Catalyst you’ve won the game, period. It’s basically an incredibly fitting Wonder victory condition for games that drag on for too long.

And my god, can they drag on. If it doesn’t glitch out (which is unfortunately fairly often) the AI is incredibly good at the game, seizing ground early and constantly probing your base defences from different angles. It knows how to mix units so as to overwhelm a lightly defended base and will constantly overfly fighters and bombers just in case you happened to leave any gaps in your AA coverage. I enjoyed building intricate networks of laser turrets, cannon emplacements and dragon’s teeth in Total Annihilation, but PA takes it to another level; you need to build all of that stuff intelligently because the AI is a robot playing a game about robot warfare and it is better at producing units than you will ever be. The only chance you have is to either snipe the Commander early (difficult considering how powerful they are) or else construct a multi-layered defence system that can absorb its constant attacks. In one game it even managed to push me off my starting planet despite a two-line base defence augmented by minefields; once the second line started to fold I evacuated everything that could move through a teleporter and left it to its fate. Once you achieve equilibrium it’s pretty easy to exploit the AI’s curiously lethargic attitude to orbital space – it’ll send units to other planets, but won’t fortify orbit beyond building a lot of fighters — and just drop lasers on its head until it’s hemmed into its own base, but getting to that point is difficult when it’s not giving you any room to breathe.

Because it’s so aggressive putting down just the one AI on your starting planet can take forty or fifty minutes. Eliminating an entire system’s worth can take up to ninety, and it’s here that certain very strange decisions in Planetary Annihilation’s development process start to sabotage all of the good work that the game has done up until this point. First, Planetary Annihilation is an online only game. I’ve only played skirmishes against the AI (I tried the Galactic War campaign mode, but it was utterly terrible) but I had to be connected to PA’s game network even to do that. There aren’t even any feeble excuses this time around, a la Simcity; it’s not doing anything interesting server side, it’s just making you jump through this hoop because it can. Second is that — unbelievably and bafflingly for a strategy game released in 2014 — there is currently no way to save a game in  progress. Let that sink in for a moment: if you want to play a game against eight AI opponents — which could easily take two hours — not only do you have to be connected to the internet to do so, but you had better be prepared to complete it in a single sitting. I sure as hell don’t have that kind of time (not to mention mental willpower) any more, so I’m not sure who this game is targeted at. People who have absolutely no outside commitments to impinge on their Planetary Annihilation playing, perhaps, but there can’t be that many of them in the world.

Even if that were the sole extent of PA’s flaws the lack of save would be an unforgivable omission, but PA sadly doesn’t stop there. It’s more stable than I’d been led to believe from forum reports — chugs a bit when it’s changing view from one planet to another, or when it’s trying to draw 1,000 units on screen at once, but otherwise does quite well — but certain elements, most notably the UI, are bugged to high heaven. There are tanks which don’t fire along ballistic trajectories and which will happily plough round after round into the ground as they try to hit a target hidden by the curvature of the world. Once I tried to launch a planet at somebody and it crashed into a gas giant en route, which I’m fairly sure was not supposed to happen. There’s the aforementioned AI glitches, where it’ll occasionally just build three metal extractors and then suffer a brainwipe and go completely inert. And then there’s the UI bug where if you’re unwise enough to click on one of Planetary Annihilation’s many, many notifcations, the entire screen will go blue and you won’t be able to see a goddamn thing. There is no way to recover from this short of restarting the game, and because there’s no save functionality this will often kill forty to fifty minutes of gameplay stone cold dead. I’m told it’s a graphics driver issue, but mine are bang up to date so I’m going to assume it’s the game’s fault, not mine.

This is a real shame, because I actually like Planetary Annihilation. I feel like if it had been handled a little differently it could definitely have been a worthy successor to Total Annihilation; it channels much of the same feeling while streamlining and improving much that had become dated or clunky in the intervening two decades, while I felt like the planet mechanic did genuinely add to the game, even if it ultimately ended up being underutilised.  Sadly the lack of save and the bugs prevent it from being any more than an unusual curio right now; after losing three out of ten games to the UI bug I’m just not interested in starting another game until I can play it all the way through without the damn thing suffering the videogame equivalent of a stroke. A save system may or may not be on the way, but I find it absolutely astonishing that Planetary Annihilation launched without a basic function that was taken for granted in strategy games released twenty-five years ago. You don’t get to do that after your game spends a year in Early Access; you can’t just draw an arbitrary line and say “Okay, the game is finished!” when it’s missing such a fundamental feature. Learn from my experience and do not buy this game until the developers have had at least two or three months to iron out these bugs and add in saves. When they do I’ll play it again, and I’ll likely enjoy it. Right now, though, it just isn’t worth it.

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When you start your first game of Shadowgate, it’s likely you’ll do exactly the same thing I did. You’ll sit through the tutorial that walks you through the first and second rooms of the game, picking up keys and torches while an evil wizard does his Guardian-From-Ultima You’ll-Never-Defeat-Me schtick, and then when you get to the third room the game cuts you loose and leaves you to sort things out on your own. There’s a collection of verbs along the top of the screen that represent the ways you can interact with the room you’re in, which contains a statue of a hooded figure holding a book, flanked by a couple of candles. Now, if you’re anything like me you’ll immediately start experimenting by doing the usual adventure game thing of using VERB on OBJECT. LOOK at the statue. OPEN the book. LOOK at the book. LOOK at the candles. TAKE the can-

And then the floor opens up beneath you and crushes you under ten tons of stone. You have spent less than two minutes in game, and you’re already staring at the Grim Reaper’s death screen. Welcome to Shadowgate. Fuck you.

Shadowgate can best be described as Knightmare: The Game. If you fall into the age bracket to whom that sentence will mean anything at all, Knightmare: The Game might sound like an awesome idea, except for one tiny flaw: there’s a big difference between watching a bunch of inept kids flail around inside a punishingly-difficult dungeon, and flailing around inside said punishingly-difficult dungeon yourself. When it’s you that has to deal with figuring out the solution to an instant-death puzzle the prospect suddenly becomes far less entertaining, and it shows in Shadowgate, a game that is by turns frustrating, tiresome and rage-inducing in almost equal measure.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Shadowgate bears passing similarities to Legend of Grimrock, but where Grimrock did an admirable job of updating the concept for the 21^st century Shadowgate feels so dated it’s damn near ossified – it’s supposed to be an “update” of a game that was released back in 1987, except it updates precious little except the visuals and music. All of the tiresome game mechanics you’d expect to find in a game from 1987 are present and correct in this remake, except where the 1987 version has the excuse that it was made in 1987 and therefore had to be that way out of necessity, Shadowgate 2014 has made a conscious choice to make my life difficult purely in the name of remaining true to the original.

Take navigation, for example. You move from room to room inside the eponymous castle, with each room being a mostly static piece of painted art that might have a little bit of animation in it like a waterfall or a swaying bridge or something. The castle is mostly a featureless grey sprawl and has an awful lot of unnecessary rooms that serve only to waste your time. Navigating it feels clumsy and time consuming; you GO to an entrance to explore the room beyond and there’s a back button that’ll take you back to the room you just came from, but while Shadowgate includes a decent map that notes the locations of every single room it doesn’t include a fast travel system. The amount of back-and-forthing necessary to complete some of the harder puzzles often requires you to retrace your steps by ten or twelve rooms, which is nothing but tedious make-work. Fast travel would have made these puzzles a lot less painful to solve, but Shadowgate spurns such modern conveniences in its shortsighted belief that old = good.

And this is an attitude that prevails throughout the game. Shadowgate shows an almost pathological disdain for any mechanical improvements that might make the player’s life easier. If you want to use an item on an object in the game world, this is the process you have to go through.

• Click the satchel in the bottom left of the screen.
• Click USE at the top of the screen.
• Click the item you want to use.
• Close the inventory because otherwise it blocks the entire screen.
• Click on the object you want to use the item on.

This takes about four or five seconds. It might not seem like much, but given that many of the puzzles in Shadowgate require a trial and error system of using everything on everything to even begin figuring out how to solve them it rapidly becomes yet another instance of Shadowgate’s annoying make-work. What makes it even worse is that there’s next to no nuance in the verb system. If there’s a lever that you want to pull, you cannot USE the lever. USE is strictly for using items on things. Instead, you have to HIT the lever. Attempting to GO through a closed door will result in you running into the door; you have to OPEN the door first despite this being implicit in your desire to GO through it in the first place. It never makes it easy for you, and the idea of maybe moving away from this fossilised method of interaction with the game world to something more modern – a context-sensitive right-click menu, say – never even seems to have occurred to Shadowgate.

Then you’ve got the puzzles. I am somewhat more tolerant of Shadowgate taking a retro approach to its puzzles; as it happened I was in the mood for a game where I’d have to engage in copious note-taking to decipher what I had to do, and this is the one place where Shadowgate absolutely delivered on my expectations. Still, at first the puzzles seemed almost absurd in their obtuseness – I got stuck about fifteen minutes into the game, and while a quick trip to Google told me what I’d have to do to progress I didn’t understand why. It made no logical sense, with the puzzles revolving around use of spells that were never explained and items that were supposed to go in tiny niches that I thought were just part of the ambient scenery. The art style hindered me greatly, too; the rooms are all drawn in a very painterly fashion that blends everything into everything, making it really, really difficult to discern which items are part of the background and which are the ones you can pick up/interact with. Never mind figuring out what to do, just figuring out what you can do in a room is half of the challenge of Shadowgate.

As far as the actual puzzle design goes, though, it made a lot more sense once I realised that you are not supposed to play this game on Medium or Hard on your first time through. The puzzles in these difficulty modes are more complex and don’t fit together in any logical way if you try them first, but if you approach them having already gone through the game on Easy (and thus having acquired a basic working knowledge of Shadowgate’s structure) it’s just a matter of figuring out the extra details. “Easy” here is a bit of a misnomer because it’s still really, really difficult, but it’s a little more forgiving (rooms that instantly kill you for not having the correct item in the other two modes will usually give you at least a chance to escape), cuts out a lot of the nonsensical bullshit and is more forthcoming with clues and background that point you in the right direction. Easy mode is probably closest to a classic adventure game experience; all the harder difficulty modes add is more Myst-style bollocks and a lot more instadeath encounters that I don’t feel particularly adds to the game.

The issue with the weird puzzle design isn’t so much a problem with the puzzles themselves as it is the way the game is presented to the player, then. Veterans of adventure games will probably plump for a harder difficulty mode and run slap bang into a brick wall that can’t be bypassed without prior knowledge or an awful lot of trial and error, when what they should be doing is starting on Easy no matter what. I’d even go so far as to say the latter two difficulty levels should be locked until the player has finished the game on Easy and familiarised themselves with the castle. Unfortunately as things stand precisely none of this is advertised to prospective dungeon-crawlers, and so it functions as the first – and largest – pitfall for an unwary player to fall into, before they’ve even gotten to the candle deathtrap two screens into the game. And even if it’s avoided the puzzle design is still extremely questionable in places. In Grimrock when you solved a puzzle you felt like the smartest person in the universe. In Shadowgate you simply think “That was the answer? For crying out loud!”

Still, I don’t quite hate Shadowgate. This is strange, because aside from some lovely music it’s fundamentally not a very well-made game. I think it’s because despite its slavish devotion to old school gameplay meaning there’s very little that’s actually modern in this modern update, it still scratched the itch I had for a game that was like Shadowgate. I would have taken a much better game if it were available — and ideally I would have taken Grimrock 2 — but in the absence of either Shadowgate just about cleared the very low bar I’d set for it. That’s not even close to being a recommendation, but it is a justification. A Shadowgate remake isn’t a bad idea – handled more competently, and in a way that played to its strengths rather than letting its obsession with the old school of game design accentuate its weaknesses, it probably could have been quite good. Unfortunately this Shadowgate isn’t.

The post Thoughts: Shadowgate appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The Banner Saga is proof that fantastic art and atmospheric music do not a decent game make.

Looking back at the original Kickstarter pledge I’m not sure I particularly have the right to be disappointed in this game. Stoic hit nearly all of their design goals, for all that the Banner Saga is very, very late: the best way I can describe it is as the choose your own adventure segments of King of Dragon Pass (if you haven’t yet played this game go and get it off of GoG and thank me later) mixed with the interesting tactical battle system they trialled in their Factions multiplayer offshoot. The premise of the game is that you’re in charge of a caravan of refugees fleeing from a unstoppable destructive force encroaching on your lands from the north, and that you have to manage supplies, keep morale up, defend the caravan and make key decisions that (in theory) have far-reaching consequences. The supplies are either acquired through events or by buying them whenever you reach a settlement and morale is improved by stopping the caravan and resting; neither of these are particularly deep systems but they do lend your progress (or lack of it) an air of desperation when you run out of food with no idea when you’ll be able to get more and people start dying from starvation. The primary mechanics of the game are the multiple-choice decisions that pop up every now and again and the turn-based tactical combat, but the sad catch is that the combat doesn’t even come close to living up the promising system demonstrated in Factions.

How this happened is a little bit of a puzzler when it’s using exactly the same ruleset (see the preview linked above if you want to know the detail), but I don’t think it works anywhere near as well when applied to a single-player game with repeated battles against an AI opponent. One problem is the extremely limited number of enemy types, which can be boiled down to “big baddies”, “big baddies with shields”, “small baddies” and “archer baddies”. There’s very little progression as you eke your way through the wilderness; you fight the same enemies in the thirtieth battle as you do in the third, and by that point you’ve mastered the tactics required to beat them down a long time ago so that you’re just going through the motions. Battles become unwelcome speedbumps to your progress in the caravan and plot side of things rather than a fun challenge, to be rushed through as quickly as possible with no real thought given to tactics or abilities beyond Swarm Enemy -> Break Armor -> Cripple (second step optional).  Because of the weird initiative system that determines turn order – where each side moves a single unit at a time and turns always alternate between players, meaning that if you have two units and they have ten units you get to move each of your guys five times in the time it takes them to cycle through theirs once – it’s always far better to cripple an enemy so that they can do almost no damage instead of finishing them and taking them out of the turn order entirely. What seemed like a unique tactical quirk in multiplayer quickly becomes tedious and rote in single-player, and this is exacerbated by the half-baked War system.

Many of the fights in Banner Saga are scripted affairs involving your named heroes only, but occasionally the entire caravan is called upon to fight – this is ostensibly why it’s important to keep the “Fighters” and “Varl” segments of the caravan population high, although I never had a battle where I didn’t at least equal the enemy force in terms of numbers. Every time your caravan fights you get a multiple-choice popup where you can choose tactics, but whatever you do it always seems best to follow it up by charging in with your best and bravest to personally cleave some skulls in twain, which is done via — *sigh* — an autogenerated combat with exactly the same enemies you fought in the last ten War encounters. There’s not even any thought given to the War combats; the game just dumps you in an arena with some baddies and expects you to have fun.

As you may have gathered, I did not have fun. I had the opposite of fun, to the point where I actively tried to avoid combat if possible, but during the first three hours of the game it’s nothing but combat. Stoic have taken the staggeringly dumb decision to split their narrative into two¹, and so the first half of the Banner Saga lurches back and forth between the tales of Rook and Hakon, both of whom end up leading large groups through the frozen wastes. Rook is in charge of the aforementioned caravan of refugees, and his story is interesting and engaging. I have very few complaints about Rook’s share of the plot. Unfortunately the start of the game is weighted far more towards the exploits of Hakon, who is leading an army of varl (read “horned giant”) back to the varl capital city. Because he’s part of an army Hakon’s tale involves far, far more War combats than Rook’s, and Hakon gets almost none of the interesting survival decisions to boot.

I’ll be honest, I nearly gave up on the Banner Saga after hour two, when it seemed like there’d be very few multiple choice events and that the game would just consist of combat after combat after combat. Fortunately it soon came to its senses and solely focused on Rook for the latter half of the game, at which point I started to enjoy myself far more than I had previously, but I still can’t get over the decision to start things off in such a ham-handedly awkward way. The weird thing is that Hakon’s story has almost no effect on Rook’s; some characters appear in both, but aside from some scene setting they’re almost totally independent of one another, and so apart from boring the crap out of me with War combats the only real effect this narrative split had was to prevent me from getting comfortable with one group or the other. When I finally switched back to Rook for the last time I actually had some difficulty remembering who was even in his party and how they’d gotten there, and so I think that breaking up the story like this is a hell of a self-inflicted wound. Maybe they couldn’t find a way to make the combat good in single-player, but the story split was absolutely not necessary; I would have much preferred a six hour game about Rook rather than an eight hour game about Rook and Hakon, and if that’s what I’d gotten I think I’d be a lot more positive about the Banner Saga than I currently am.

That narrative, anyway. Just how much of it is genuinely multiple-choice, and how much of it is a cleverly camouflaged railroad? Past experience has taught me that it can be very difficult to tell without playing through a game more than once. Alpha Protocol is the only one that’s really held up under prolonged scrutiny, and even though the Banner Saga’s low tech interface means that it’s somewhat easier to do branching narrative than it would be for something with full 3D art and animation I suspect it tends more towards the Mass Effect side of the spectrum; you can change how certain non-critical plot points unfold but not where they ultimately go. The choice you do get is very welcome and very good at making it feel like your decisions do matter, and I think in the end that’s what counts. By the end of the game I felt like I’d twisted things enough that it was just as much my story as it was the writers’, largely because I’d screwed up quite badly several times and everyone was dead. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that a lot of those failure points were hardcoded to happen one way or another and that I was supposed to end the game feeling that way. Is that what the game actually does? Maybe not, but the only way to be sure is to play through it a second time, and given how badly the Banner Saga starts that is the last thing that I want to be doing.

For all the bone-headed design decisions that have been made there are some compensations, however. The music isn’t tremendous since it tends towards atmospheric mood stuff rather than distinct melodies that you can follow, but I’ll never call it anything less than appropriate for what the Banner Saga is trying to do, which is portray the flight of refugees from an unstoppable force pursuing them across a frozen hinterland. That art, though. Usually I wouldn’t use a screenshot that isn’t representative of the actual in-game experience to head up a review, but for the Banner Saga I’ll make an exception because the vast majority of the art is utterly gorgeous. I’m not talking so much about the character portraits and talking heads, since while these are pretty good they also get reused a hell of a lot with palette swaps to represent different characters; however, the parts where your caravan is trekking through a stylised representation of the northern wilderness are nothing short of incredible.  The caravan animations suck, but you’re not looking at that, you’re looking at the backgrounds. You can spend a lot of time looking at the backgrounds. And when you reach a point of interest the view will zoom in to a close-up where you can ogle the scenery in fine detail.  I’d almost say the Banner Saga is worth buying for its art alone², since I can guarantee you that you will never see a properly commercial title employing 2D art assets anywhere near as well as they have been here³

That’s only almost, though. The final question, and one that I’m having some trouble coming up with an answer to, is: is the Banner Saga worth buying, period? It’s intensely frustrating at points when it didn’t have to be, and while the setting and story are great the quality of the actual writing is unexpectedly pedestrian. In so far as capturing that King of Dragon Pass feeling of not having absolute control, of only being a leader who can influence people and has to keep them happy, I’d say the Banner Saga does nail that successfully. It’s less than the sum of its parts, though: it has a good combat ruleset that it fails to take advantage of, and a compelling narrative that it’s split into two, and neither element really manages to synergise with the other at any point. I can’t help feeling that if you cut the combat and Hakon’s story from the game entirely you’d end up with a smaller game, but a much higher-quality one. As it is the Banner Saga feels tragically flawed in a way that the games it drew its inspiration from did not; there’s a lot in its that’s good, but because it couldn’t keep its focus the good elements are surrounded by a lot of useless mush. A lot of it may come down to personal taste – I know other people who are playing it and loving it, so my disappointment is by no means universal — but I can’t really recommend it unless you’re really in love with the art or happen to be in the market for an unusual story-driven RPG. Otherwise there’s enough to dislike about it that it falls squarely into “wait for sale” territory; I’m glad the Banner Saga exists but I’m not going to pretend the end result was anywhere near an ideal outcome.

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Kickstarter is an arena I’ve been watching with increasing levels of horror over the last couple of months. After the continued success of projects like Wasteland, Shadowrun and Eternity proved there was a lot of money to be extracted from gamers’ nostalgia glands there was always going to be a group of “me too!” Kickstarters trying to jump on the bandwagon before it drives over a cliff. Even so, it’s been depressing to see Kickstarters like Hero-U, which inexplicably looks worse than the twenty year-old Quest for Glory games, or the Old School RPG disaster.  The quantites of money being asked for get ever larger (I actually have trouble remembering that Doublefine only asked for $400,000, and that Wasteland was considered so unlikely to get to $1 million that Brian Fargo put up $100,000 of his own money) and the details behind the actual product that money is going to create get ever sketchier — a trend that has culminated in the recent appearance of the Kickstarter for Elite: Dangerous.

Oh, it’s dangerous alright. For one thing, it’s dangerous to expect people to give you £1,250,000 based on nothing but the word “Elite”, because that is precisely what David Braben’s company is doing here. For another, I’d consider it a very dangerous place to put your money if you want any kind of return on your investment, and the reasons for this should become obvious if you look at the non-history of Elite 4. I remember first reading rumblings about this in gaming magazines back when I still read gaming magazines circa 1999. It’s come up again and again over the years, being namedropped by Braben whenever he feels Frontier Developments needs some press/investment, but despite a near-decade of work having been done on various incarnations of the game they still have virtually nothing to show for it, save a few pieces of concept art that were belatedly scattered throughout the Kickstarter page after more than a few people pointed out that asking for a million quid based on a name and the vaguest possible outline of what the final game would be like was possibly asking a little bit too much.

In fact if Elite 4 exists at all it fits the classic description of a vapourware title; if and when something concrete is released it will follow the trail blazed by such former vapourware luminaries as Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever. Both games fell victim to the technology trap; they wasted so much time rewriting their code to be up-to-date that by the time they’d finished and gotten back on track with developing actual content the technology had slipped again. Other vapourware titles have promised the moon in terms of concept and then run into significant problems when the time came to actually implement their ambitious ideas in the code, often being quietly cancelled a few years down the line when it became obvious there was no way to make the game work¹.  The original Kickstarter pledge didn’t exactly do a great deal to assuage my concerns over the nature of the game, containing as it did precisely zero evidence of any preliminary work having been done on the game. There wasn’t even a video outlining just what their plans were for the Kickstarter, which I consider to be the absolute minimum for any company that wants to get their hands on what is essentially a donation from me. Just a big block of text saying “I’m one of the guys who made Elite, and with the magic of procedural generation I can do it again!” This is not the sort of thing that makes me confident in the prospects of seeing an actual finished product, especially when you consider Frontier Developments’ previous track record in game development.

Something else that makes me a bit leery are the price points for the Kickstarter rewards. This has always been a bit of a thorny issue where games are concerned, as the most popular donation level is invariably the lowest one that’ll get you a copy of the game when it’s finally done. It’s essentially treated as a more entitled form of pre-ordering by a lot of people, even though that’s not really what’s going on here at all. Others have compared it to patronising the arts; the implication being that seeing a decent product at the end of it would be a happy bonus to supporting somebody in an ambitious endeavour that wouldn’t happen otherwise and doesn’t have a 100% chance of panning out. This is closer to the truth – and is largely what Kickstarter exists to do – but when somebody comes along and asks for a million pounds I think we’ve moved beyond a couple of struggling creators being supported by hundreds of bedroom Medicis. Now we’re into the realm of an actual business investment, and I think offering a copy of the game for what is essentially a discounted price in exchange for my – and thousands of other people’s – early support making the game possible in the first place is a perfectly reasonable return for the risk inherent in that investment. Most Kickstarters I’ve pledged to have seen it the same way, with the lowest game tier being set at a price point that is, if not exactly discounted, at least agreeably cheap.

Elite: Dangerous disagrees with this point of view, however. If I want a copy of the game on release, I have to pledge a minimum of £20 (or $31), and once the early-adopter slots run out in a week or so I’ll have to up my game and fork over £30 (or $47).  What they’re doing here is asking for all of the money you’d normally pay up-front for a multi-million dollar AAA title you’d buy in a shop. The only bonuses you get for supporting the game this early are a minimum of an 18 month wait time for the finished product and a not-insignificant quantity of risk.  Now, I should state once again that this is more-or-less how Kickstarter was originally intended to work, so on the face of it Elite: Dangerous isn’t doing anything particularly skeevy; the truth of the matter is that every Kickstarter pledge is a donation, not a pre-order, and they can ask for whatever they want if they think it’ll get them the cash they need to make the game. They’re simply using the system as intended.

Or are they? Personally I don’t think they are. I think they’re taking advantage of it, and the reason I think this is because there’s been a lot of discussion in the gaming media about how crowdsourced games on Kickstarter represent a new paradigm where game developers go directly to the consumers to seek funding for the games both groups want to see made, with none of those pesky additional costs like the publisher rake-off or physical distribution ever getting a look-in. Elite: Dangerous does not appear to have noticed this, though. Elite: Dangerous is asking for money using the rules of the old publisher-dominated paradigm, and in that context £30 doesn’t seem so unreasonable. It’s only when you remember the absence of all these hidden costs making crowdsourced games considerably cheaper to develop that you realise those pledge tiers are actually a little bit of a con. Either Frontier Developments are being incredibly cynical here (very possible) or else they simply haven’t thought their Kickstarter through (also very possible). Setting what is (I think) the largest target total of any video game Kickstarter to date is simply the wonky icing on a very uncertainly-balanced cake. Can you really argue that there’s any element of charitable donation remaining when you’re a 235-person company asking for two million dollars? I don’t think so.

My last point would be one about trust. Kickstarter is built around trust. The people/companies posting their projects on Kickstarter have to make a strong argument not only for their idea, but for their ability to deliver that idea. All they have is the length of their Kickstarter page² to convince me that they’re competent enough for me to trust them with some of my money based on nothing more than an idea and a promise. This is why most Kickstarters treat what they’re doing as a kind of business pitch: the fundamentals are very similar even if the target audiences couldn’t be more different. Looking at a couple of examples there’s this guy, who is writing a book about the history of Sensible Software, and this lady who wants some money to outfit a first-rate London tea van. These are projects aimed at very limited audiences and each of the people behind them have realised that their success is not guaranteed, which is why both project pages go to great lengths to persuade anyone who stumbles across them that they know what they’re talking about and actually have a chance of seeing this through. The book one has an animated video done in the style of old Sensible games, for crying out loud; it knows exactly the sort of people who are going to spend thirty-eight dollars on a book and targets them mercilessly. Each of these Kickstarters expended approximately several million times more effort getting a few hundred people to donate money to seeing their dreams become a reality than Frontier Developments has in attempting to crowdsource its latest commercial venture via an audience of thousands. I didn’t pledge to the tea Kickstarter because I don’t drink tea – I know nothing about tea – but the project outline generated enough trust and goodwill with me that I genuinely do hope it will eventually be a success.  That’s how Kickstarter works: it is not enough to plonk a Kickstarter down and hope there’s a large enough target audience that you’ll eventually reach your funding total. You have to build trust with that audience as well, and this is something that the Elite 4 Kickstarter has singularly failed to do for over a week now.

I should know. I’m exactly the kind of person the Elite 4 Kickstarter is aimed at. I have fond memories of playing Elite on our Acorn Archimedes, to the point that when I was asked a couple of years back which games were responsible for shaping me as a gamer I unhesitatingly pointed to Elite as one of the key influences. Other space trading games just haven’t measured up; Freelancer was too shallow, X3 too complex.  I should be chomping at the bit to fund the resurrection of a beloved genre that’s been dead ever since the swansong of Freespace 2. Instead I’m annoyed. Annoyed that Braben is asking for so much on the strength of so little. Annoyed that Kickstarter is obviously seen by some developers as a source of free money they’re entitled to based on nothing more than past glories. It’s too much to hope that Elite: Dangerous will fail; while the pledge rate has slowed right down after the initial rush Kicktraq still projects it as just making its goal even in the most pessimistic of scenarios, largely thanks to the Kickstarter running time being an unprecedented two months. Perhaps Frontier Developments will use that time to come up with a little more detail on what exactly they’re going to use the £1,250,000 for, but I’m not hopeful, and I am not pledging. They need to work harder to get my money.

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FTL: Faster Than Light (was the subtitle really necessary?) is the first tangible return on my numerous Kickstarter investments, and it’s a very promising trailblazer for the concept of crowdsourced games in general.

The best way to describe FTL is as a sort of limited space-based roguelike. This is probably doing it something of a disservice since it does an awful lot of things that I have either never seen before period, or else last saw in obscure Acorn/Atari/Amiga games twenty-odd years ago, but it’s the closest I can get to summing the game up in one sentence. You start the game with a ship, some guns and a few crewmen, and your task is to make your way across a collection of randomly generated sectors towards the one where the big boss lives so that you can defeat him in single combat. That’s pretty roguelike-y, even if the mechanics of ship-to-ship combat in FTL are drastically different from hitting a goblin with a club.

Each sector is made up of a collection of jump beacons placed next to points of interest. You can travel to any jump beacon in range, and each jump you make uses up one fuel. What you find at your destination could be just about anything from a friendly store to a space station that’s on fire to a pirate attack. Some of these random encounters are good, giving you lump sums of scrap (the game’s currency), missiles and fuel. Some require you to make a choice which could involve fighting another ship; choosing correctly can lead to big rewards like extra weapons systems and crew members (you can never have enough crew members). And some just throw you into combat straight away, at which point you have two options: either destroy the attacking ship, or else hold them off long enough for you to charge your jump engines and escape.

Ship combat is what you spend most of your time in FTL doing, and it’s by far the most comprehensive part of the game. Ships are divided into critical systems and subsystems such as shields, weapons, engines and so on, each of which is located in a specific room in the ship that can be targeted by both you and the enemy. Each system requires power from the main reactor to run and the chances are you’ll only have so much to go around, and so you might temporarily turn off the power to your medbay and your engines in favour of boosting the shields. The most crucial systems can be manned by crew members, increasing their efficiency so that weapons reload faster and shields recharge quicker. You can have anywhere between one to four layers of shields protecting your ship (although four layers of shields are monstrously power-hungry), and each shield layer will absorb one laser blast and block one point of damage from a beam weapon before needing to recharge. Often the recharge time of an enemy’s shields is faster than the reload time of your weapons, so combat mainly hinges around the following conundrum: how do you keep their shields down so that you can hit their hull with the next salvo of weapons fire?

To its credit FTL gives you an awful lot of ways to do this. The somewhat-overpowered ion weapons can disable whichever ship system they hit for a lengthy period of time, including the shields. Missiles are shield penetrating weapons, and a single missile targeted on the enemy shield room can be enough to take out a ship’s shields entirely. You can launch battle drones at an enemy ship while will punch through the hull (incidentally creating an atmosphere-sapping hull breach) and then trundle around smashing up any ship systems that they encounter. Or you can go for the more direct approach and teleport a brace of ravening Mantis warriors right through their shields – this isn’t Star Trek – so that they can murder literally everyone on the enemy ship. (Which incidentally counts as a ship kill even if the rest of the ship is structurally intact.)

The shields are a primary target, but you also want to compromise an enemy’s ability to fight back, which means hitting their weapons room as well. If they have drones you don’t want them firing those at you throughout the battle so the drone control room becomes a target, and if they try to jump away then destroying the engine room or the bridge will put a stop to that. Unfortunately focusing fire on the O2 pumps to expose their ship to vacuum and kill the entire crew through asphyxiation takes too long to really be effective, but that’s okay because it’d be a rather overpowered tactic otherwise. There are just two small problems facing each of the other approaches:

1)      Enemy crew will be running around the enemy ship attempting to fix any damage you manage to inflict; even if you take out an enemy’s shield room entirely it won’t be that long before they get it back up on its feet.

2)      While you are trying to take the enemy ship to pieces they’ll be trying to do the same to you, using any or all of the methods described above.

So you have to fire on the enemy ship while sending your own crew members scrambling through the corridors of your own vessel to patch up hull breaches, put out fires and repair busted systems. Thankfully you can pause the game to issue orders if you need a bit of time to think so it never gets overwhelming, but it’s still a pleasingly frenetic bit of risk management: do you tackle that fire in the engine room first, or do you fix the weapons so that you can shoot back? If you have lots of crew members then you can do both at once, but I was usually struggling along with just three or four and so never had enough people to man the weapons and fly the ship and fix the hull. Things get even more complex when you get boarded as this usually necessitates dropping everything to repel boarders; otherwise they’ll run around your ship taking out vital systems like your O2 supply.

Emergency solutions to problems come from an unusual source in this game: automated door controls. There’s a reason doors merit their own special subsystem; being able to open and close doors at will means that if you absolutely can’t spare crewmembers to deal with a potentially devastating fire (fires spread, so they can easily take out multiple systems) you can vent the affected compartments into space, effectively squelching the fire at the cost of dumping some of your O2 supply. This replenishes slowly but it’s not a decision to be taken lightly when one hit to your oxygen systems could lead to the remainder slowly bleeding away into the void. Trying to space intruders is less effective as they can cut through locked doors faster than the ambient O2 levels drop when exposed to vacuum, although it’s still worth trying as a desperate last resort.

This constant pressure and the wealth of solutions available to you can often lead to some comic mishaps, such as the time I accidentally turned off the power to the oxygen pumps during a particularly frantic battle and half my crew suffocated before I figured out what was going on, or the time I oh-so-cleverly tried to flush some intruders into space only for them to trash the door controls before they snuffed it, meaning I couldn’t actually shut the airlocks again to repair everything. (Most accidental game overs in FTL involve the oxygen room, come to think of it.) Even if you win a battle you’ll likely come out of it with some hull damage that can only be patched up at randomly-positioned merchant systems, and this is where the unpleasant side of FTL starts to rear its ugly head: the random number generator FTL relies on for so much of its variety will eventually end up screwing you over sooner or later.

This is the one thing I don’t like about FTL – it’s far too willing to throw you into a no-win situation that seems drastically unfair. Some would say that’s the mark of a good roguelike. Perhaps it is. However, I take the view that roguelikes shouldn’t actively kill the player, they should let the player kill themselves through overconfidence as in the examples above. Here, with the random way the game is set up and the random items available at shops, it’s entirely possible to run into an enemy you have no way of hurting. Case in point: I just ragequit my latest game after encountering an automated drone. It had four shields and a high evasion value, meaning I couldn’t bring its shields down quickly enough to do any damage because both my ion blaster and my three-shot hull laser kept missing despite having a Master weapons officer at the controls. I had a crack team of Mantis assault troops I could have teleported on board to smash the shield room, except because it was an AI ship all of its compartments were open to vacuum and they would have suffocated. And I couldn’t jump away to avoid it because it was sat on top of the sector exit node. I basically lost that playthrough because I hadn’t had the good fortune to encounter a merchant that sold missile weapons, which would have gone right through the shield to destroy the shield controls.

(Although with that ship’s high evasion value doing enough damage with missiles would have been a pain in and of itself.)

Then there’s the ship unlocks. I’ve unlocked a massive one extra ship type in eight hours of playing FTL. I know there’s more – lots more – in the game because I see people talking about them, but I have no idea how to unlock them because the game doesn’t seem to want to tell me how. This means I’m mostly stuck with the basic Kestrel ship layout and equipment, which all but ensures I have to play the game the same way every time. I honestly don’t know why the developers thought it would be a good idea to hide all of the ship variants behind an unlock system instead of giving the player a starting choice of three or four that they could choose from depending on how they want to approach a certain playthrough; as it is FTL’s miserliness with ship types has hugely compromised its replay value for me, as I’m sick and tired of nursing the Kestrel to the final sector only to be destroyed by the end boss because I hadn’t managed to pick up enough crew members or good enough weapons to kill it.

So I think I’ve come to the end of my time with FTL. Everyone else seems to be having a whale of a time with it and I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ve just been incredibly unlucky in not unlocking any extra ship variants to prolong the game’s lifespan. That FTL can do that to me in the first place isn’t something I can perceive as anything other than a fundamental structural flaw, though. I think the game relies on randomly generated scenarios a little too much for its own good, and while it’s far from being the most offensive abuser of procedural generation it does diminish it in my eyes somewhat. Otherwise, this is exactly the sort of game that Kickstarter is meant for: a great new idea that wouldn’t have gotten any traction in the existing game development system that is nevertheless tremendous fun to play and which is on the whole rather well realised in terms of the combat that makes up 90% of the game. I’m sure I’ll go back to it at some point. Just not, you know, now.

The post Thoughts: FTL. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I was having an argument with a friend over the recent rash of Kickstarter-funded games. He thought that the business model sucked; instead of making the game, selling the game, and then making a second game on the profit from the first game, Kickstarter games are sucking up the profit on the first game to make the first game. Worse,all of the money donated to a Kickstarter game has to be used to develop that game, and that game only. If the game makes several times more than the developer’s original estimate they have to plough the extra cash back into the game instead of keeping some back to see them through the lean times in between releases. His argument was that this just wasn’t a sustainable business model, and that this current fad for Kickstarter funding will burn itself out once people see that it only gets you that one game.

My counterpoint was that not everyone who is going to buy the game is going to donate to the Kickstarter. Donations are going to come from people who are really invested in that kind of game or that game’s pedigree since it’s not even like preordering a game from Amazon; you have no guarantee that the product will be made, that it will turn out anything like the developers say it will, or even that they’ll hit even their most optimistic release deadline of nine months to a year away. Those factors are going to put a lot of people off, and so the potential market for these games are much larger than the pool of Kickstarter donors, especially once you add in factors like Steam Daily Deals. I’m no expert on the economics of videogame retail, but I definitely think that they can make at least as much money as they get in funding from additional sales after release, especially if the game is good and word of mouth gets around.

Anyway, I’m interested in getting some additional opinions on this one. What do you think is the likely future of the crowdfunded development trend?

The post A Question About Kickstarter. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.